How Patricia Lockwood Wrote “Will There Ever Be Another You”

The writer’s new novel, “Will There Ever Be Another You,” is a singular account of losing her mind, body, and art to COVID—and of trying to get them back.

The Culture Industry: A Centenary Issue Subscribers get full access. Read the issue » When a waitress stopped by, Kendall ordered cauliflower tacos with no sauce; Lockwood asked for fish ones without tortillas. “It’s very embarrassing, because it became a podcast diet,” she said of her keto regimen, in a tone that suggested that embarrassment, for her, is more of a theoretical than a felt phenomenon. Lockwood, who is forty-three, has close-cropped hair, expressive hands, and the rapid-fire, matter-of-fact confidence of someone who speaks even faster than she thinks. The playwright Heidi Schreck, who helped to adapt Lockwood’s life story for television, told me, “The first thing that always comes to mind, when I think of Tricia, is that self-portrait of Hildegard von Bingen”—the twelfth-century German abbess and mystic, who, in a book devoted to her divine revelations, depicted herself with a writing tablet on her lap and flames shooting out of her habit. Lockwood’s lack of inhibition can lead to trouble. At a panel in New York hosted by the Women’s Prize earlier in the spring, she suddenly slid off her stool mid-gesticulation. She no longer allows herself to do karaoke. Lockwood began her writing life quietly, as a poet. She found her first major audience on Twitter, posting self-proclaimed “absurdities”—such as a series of Dadaistic sexts that made florid metaphorical use of rock slides, dewdrops, and plot holes in the novels of Dan Brown—that quickly came to define the medium’s zany, waggish ethos. When she returned to the page, it was with a memoir, “Priestdaddy” (2017), which chronicled her improbable childhood as the daughter of a guitar-shredding, action-movie-obsessed Midwestern Catholic priest. Lockwood has since added fiction and criticism to her literary arsenal. Across genres, her calling card is her unmistakable voice, which sasses and seduces with quick wit and cheerful perversity, pressing the reader close to her comic, confiding “I.” “Due to certain quirks in my upbringing, I love men easily, which is either Christly or some slut thing” is classic Lockwood. So is the fact that this confession appears not in a personal essay but in a review of the works of John Updike. When she got sick, her first instinct was to make a joke. “My story will be that John Harvard gave it to me” is how she started an essay published in the London Review of Books in July, 2020. The last thing she had done, before the pandemic hit, was give a lecture at Harvard about the nature of life online; on the plane back home, a man had coughed and coughed. A few days later, she was flattened with a fever. Even after her temperature dropped, things stayed wrong. Her hands would burn or go numb; her skin glittered with pain. She noticed that her body had become attuned to Savannah’s weather, as if its pressure systems affected some mysterious one within. A prickling at the base of her neck, a twinge in her thumb: here comes the storm. The worst problem, though, was with her mind. In the L.R.B. essay—“Insane After Coronavirus?” is the title—Lockwood described “stumbling in my speech, transposing syllables, choosing the wrong nouns entirely.” Her memory had crumbled; she could barely read. Still, she thought that she saw a faint glimmering beyond the fog. “I know I used to be able to do this, I will be able to do it again,” she wrote. That oasis turned out to be a mirage—the beginning, not the end, of her ordeal. “That was the last time I felt that I sounded like myself,” Lockwood said, at dinner. For a writer like Lockwood, the voice on the page is the whole game; the prospect of losing it is terrifying, the equivalent of a pianist’s crippling arthritis. But it was also uncannily familiar. When she fell ill, Lockwood had just finished writing her first novel, “No One Is Talking About This” (2021). Its unnamed, alter-ego protagonist has found renown for her playful posts on a Twitter-esque platform. But the more she lends her sensibility to the internet, the more she fears that her private stream of consciousness has been swept away in the surge of the collective’s, which has barnacled her language with its own diction, its own clichés. Possessed by the hive mind, she is increasingly haunted by “the unshakeable conviction that someone else was writing the inside of her head.” The cure for a life lived too much online is to unplug, difficult as that might be. But what to do about an illness that no one fully understands, least of all the sufferer? Lockwood now knows that much of what plagued her was a state of perpetual migraine. She typically experienced not headaches but extreme sensory disturbances—a vision of a gorilla in a tree, say—and something that she called “the refrains,” the constant mental repetition of a line of dialogue, a sentence, a phrase from a song. She would jot these down in her “mad notebook,” a blue-covered Moleskine, along with fragments of ideas that she was having, observations from the reading she was struggling to do, and various medical regimens she was trying: gabapentin, rescue triptans, the migraine medications Ajovy and Qulipta. At the restaurant, she recalled that the first thing to really help was a tea steeped with psilocybin mushrooms that had been mailed to her by the writer Jami Attenberg. “A tiny dose,” she insisted. “You would be out in the swimming pool, sometimes for hours in the afternoon,” Kendall remembered. He is forty-four, bald and athletic, with the calm, capable demeanor of Mr. Clean’s laid-back little brother. When Lockwood was at her sickest, she became convinced that the floorboards of their apartment were going to collapse under her feet. Kendall took action, moving them out of the city and to a house on nearby Wilmington Island, where she could float freely. “I thought we could therapeutically reorient your body,” he said. “I could listen to music again,” Lockwood recalled. In the pool, she played “Hosianna Mantra,” by the pioneering German electronic band Popol Vuh, on repeat. The album, from 1972, has been described as a “meditation on faith and uncertainty”—a kind of prayer. “Maybe that’s why the writing came back.” Once Lockwood was well enough, she began to shape the fragments from this shattered period of her life into a novel, “Will There Ever Be Another You,” which Riverhead will publish in September. “I wrote it insane,” she told me, “and edited it sane”; it is a collaboration between two different people, both of whom happen to be her. Illness is repeatedly figured as a kind of impostor or thief—not merely as an experience undergone by the self but, Lockwood writes, “the thing that the self had been replaced by.” Getting sick, she said, thrust the questions that lurk at the heart of all novels, and all lives, to the center of hers: “What is the performance of a self? What is a person? What am I?” So, in her company, did I. There is a kind of Lockwood lens that brings into focus the improbable and hilariously bizarre features lurking in the midst of ordinary life, which a different writer might prefer to smooth over for realism’s sake. One morning in Savannah, I went with Lockwood and Kendall to Fancy Parker’s, an upscale gas-station grocery store, to get snacks. After breaking off to examine the chips selection, I found the two of them in the home-goods corner, where an employee with the bulging biceps and voluminous pompadour of Johnny Bravo was wrangling a massive statue of the Virgin Mary onto a shelf next to some scented candles. Lockwood chatted with him amiably. “We get the Catholic catalogues in my home, and they can be quite pricey,” she said, as if they were discussing the cost of eggs and not a life-size sculpture of the mother of God. In Lockwood’s world, the apparition of a saint is not strictly strange. She is the second of five children born to Greg and Karen Lockwood, high-school sweethearts from Cincinnati, Ohio. Karen came from a big Catholic family; Greg was an atheist and, like many atheists, proud of it. After they married, at eighteen, he enlisted in the Navy, serving on a nuclear submarine. It was hundreds of feet under the sea, following marathon viewings of “The Exorcist,” that he met God and found his faith. Soon afterward, Lockwood was born, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her father began his career as a Lutheran minister, but converted to Catholicism when she was six. At the Vatican, his case was reviewed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later to be Pope Benedict XVI, who gave him permission, as Lockwood writes, to keep his wife and even his children, “no matter how bad they might be.” Greg Lockwood turned out to be no ordinary man of the cloth. As depicted in “Priestdaddy,” his titanic charisma was matched only by his gale-force whims. Karen, the family’s indefatigable center, kept the household running as Greg moved them from rectory to rectory in what Lockwood has called “all the worst cities of the midwest.” Lockwood was an observant and funny child, adept at entertaining the array of parishioners who came to seek her father’s counsel, and at keeping the family peace. “My brothers were fighting constantly, always playing sports, and Tricia was usually reading,” her younger sister, Mary Burns, told me. But there was not much at home to read. “We had the appearance of real books,” Lockwood said. “It was like doll-house food; you couldn’t eat it.” The Lockwoods’ library contained three genres: dense theological tomes, classics illegibly printed on tissue-thin paper, and books about submarines. Every so often, though, she would encounter another sort of book, one that instinct told her was “real”: James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” or “A Girl of the Limberlost,” by Gene Stratton-Porter, or “Tell Me a Mitzi,” Lore Segal’s collection of children’s stories about a Jewish family in New York. This one’s different, she would say to herself as she pored over the text, parsing its qualities. “At that point, you’re already thinking about process, the working of a writing mind,” she recalled. When she was a high-school senior, Lockwood was accepted to the Annapolis campus of St. John’s, the great-books college. Before she was slated to leave, her father summoned her to his study. “The orotund, indignant sound of Rush Limbaugh was blasting from a radio in the corner, and the drunken leprechaun sound of Bill O’Reilly was blasting from the television,” Lockwood writes in “Priestdaddy.” Her father told her that he couldn’t pay her tuition. There would be no degree for her, just as there had been none for her older sister, Christina, a talented lyric soprano who had been forced, under similar circumstances, to abandon plans to attend the singing program at Washington University, in St. Louis. “Priestdaddy” is an affectionate book; Lockwood uses her humor to tickle, not to lash. Still, this moment gives pause. Shortly after Greg announced that he couldn’t pay for Lockwood’s education, he spent an eye-watering sum on a guitar that had been made for Paul McCartney. I asked Lockwood whether she ever felt angry about what she had been denied. “Oh, God, no,” she said, without hesitation. “I would have died at college. I would have died just trying to get in the door.” But a darker tone does sometimes seep into her recollections. For all its domestic eccentricity, her upbringing was deeply conservative. She characterizes the prevailing attitude among the women of her community as “marianismo,” an ideal of femininity, modelled on the Virgin Mary, that is rooted in purity and self-sacrifice. “My brothers could stay out till three in the morning and drink and do whatever the fuck they wanted to, pardon my French,” Mary told me. “But then if me or Tricia or Christi wore a tank top, it would be a big argument.” (Mary learned from her sisters’ examples, arranging a scholarship, without paternal support, to become a research pharmacist.) For Lockwood, a period of adolescent misery culminated, at sixteen, in her taking a bottleful of Tylenol before getting scared and waking her parents. “I know all women are supposed to be strong enough now to strangle presidents and patriarchies between their powerful thighs, but it doesn’t work that way,” she writes. “Many of us were actually affected, by male systems and male anger, in ways we cannot always articulate or overcome.” In 2013, when she was thirty-one, Lockwood published a poem called “Rape Joke” on the website The Awl. The previous year, her first collection, “Balloon Pop Outlaw Black,” had become a small-press best-seller. The work in that book was surreal and stealthily philosophical—its opening poem was a fifteen-page meditation on the ontology of Popeye the Sailor Man—but impersonal. Now Lockwood took a different approach. The comedian Daniel Tosh had recently done an infamous standup set in which he praised rape jokes; when a female audience member challenged him, he declared that it would be funny for her to be gang-raped then and there. Lockwood had her own sense of humor. And she had her own story to tell.

The rape joke is that you were 19 years old. The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend. The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee. Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. “Ahhhh,” it thinks. “Yes. A goatee.” No offense.

The boyfriend was twenty-six. He had known Lockwood since she was a child; her father taught him world religion in high school. He chewed tobacco and drank Mountain Dew. When it happened, she was face down on the mattress. “The rape joke is that when you told your father,” Lockwood writes, “he made the sign of the cross over you and said, ‘I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,’ which even in its total wrongheadedness, was so completely sweet.” “Rape Joke”—it is included in Lockwood’s second poetry collection, “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals,” from 2014—went viral. Online, women poured out their own stories. “There was a girl who e-mailed me about her coach,” Lockwood told me. “You do what you can in the moment. But she wasn’t even in the same country.” Of her parents, she said, “There were proper failings on their part. How much do you carry with you?” “Priestdaddy” is animated by the rare force of reconciliation: of the present with the past; of Lockwood’s adult self with her youthful one; of the child with her imperfect parents, whom she allows herself to forgive. Not long after the rape, Lockwood left her father’s church, though the church has not fully left her. “Obviously, I’m someone who experiences glimpses beyond the veil,” she told me. She closely identifies as a Lockwood, a member of her father’s genetic line; she points to the inveterate lewdness of their dancing, their propensity for nudity. From her father, she has inherited what she calls a “demon of performance,” which overtakes her when she is speaking publicly. He has his pulpit, she hers. Following the papal election of Benedict, Greg Lockwood took to performing the Latin Mass, and, more recently, displayed a MAGA flag in his smoking alcove; lately, he has suffered health complications after going on something Lockwood calls “the meat diet.” When she and Schreck teamed up to turn “Priestdaddy” into a television show, they imagined Bryan Cranston in the role. The show wasn’t green-lighted, but Lockwood is untroubled by the failure. “Can you imagine?” she asked me. “Years of your life, doing your life?” The apartment was in a state of dorm-room disorder: dishes scattered on the kitchen island, books stacked on the coffee table and crammed together on trinket-laden shelves. “Everything that belongs to me is in the Corn Cave,” Kendall said, referring to the downstairs garage, where he works at a desk surrounded by weight-lifting equipment and two hoverboards. He is the resident tidier; in an effort to contain the cat fur, he had draped the sofas in white blankets, a strategy that Lockwood privately characterized to me as “a man’s idea that can’t be changed.” Lockwood is the accumulator. After learning that she would not be attending college, she had moved her things into an abandoned convent next to her parents’ rectory, spending her days reading and her nights prowling the internet. In a poetry chat room, she struck up a friendship with someone who lived in Colorado. This turned out to be Kendall. His own father was a Baptist pastor and missionary; he grew up in Thailand and South Korea. They had never so much as exchanged photographs when, in February of 2002, Kendall arrived, in a sea-foam-green Mercury Mystique, to take Lockwood and her books back with him to Fort Collins. They got engaged the same day, in a Kroger’s parking lot. How had they known there would be an attraction? “Well, I was in his dream,” Lockwood said. When he first saw her, Kendall startled in recognition; a year before, a woman with Lockwood’s face had appeared in his sleep. “You were very beautiful,” Kendall said. “Very beautiful, and very evil.” “But you don’t know,” Lockwood went on. “Look at Tevye and Golde”—the shtetl couple from “Fiddler on the Roof.” “We basically had an arranged marriage that was arranged by our minds. You just build it from there.” Perhaps because they have been together for their entire adult lives, perhaps because they have no children and therefore no need to embody domestic authority, there is a cahoots quality to the Lockwood-Kendall relationship. They like to cruise around Savannah on a tandem electric bicycle, Kendall in front, steering and pedalling, Lockwood perched on the back seat. If you call one on the phone, the other is generally within earshot. “I store things in him,” Lockwood has written: memories, dates, her A.T.M. pin. She isn’t comfortable driving, so he chauffeurs their car. Before my trip, Kendall e-mailed me from Lockwood’s account to tell me where they lived, “since I’m the one who actually knows our address.” “Some people marry their dads, and some people might expect me to do that,” Lockwood said. “But I married my mom.” “Lockwoods need a helper,” Kendall agreed. In “Priestdaddy,” Lockwood writes that her “flaming certainty that I was born to write books dovetailed so neatly with Jason’s belief that he was destined to be a sort of Leonard Woolf figure, helping to usher female thinking into the world, that mostly we accepted our pinched circumstances as foreordained.” After they married, Kendall enrolled in a Ph.D. program in philosophy, but soon dropped out to work as a journalist and support them both. “I was a bitch and a burden writing poetry,” Lockwood said. Kendall appointed himself her de-facto agent, sending her poems out to magazines and journals. The poetry world was insular, and Lockwood had no special connections, no M.F.A.; it took more than a decade for her to publish a book. In 2011, Kendall bought Lockwood her first cellphone. She joined Twitter on a lark, and immediately fell headlong into the medium. It offered the possibility of inhabiting a persona detached from one’s person—a thrill for a writer, if a treacherous temptation for other sorts. That year, Anthony Weiner used the platform to send a photo of his erect penis straining against the front of his boxer briefs to a twenty-one-year-old. Lockwood took that episode and ran wild with it. Tweets like “I’m A Heterosexual Man And I Am Opening The Door Of This Airplane Because I Want To Touch Some Cloud Tits” or “I am a mushroom in a forest. There are drops of dew all over my tip. Nabokov reaches down a hand to pick me” were hilarious; they also offered a roguish nose-thumbing to the pitiful, priapic pomp regularly on display throughout the culture, online and off. “Tweeting is an art form,” Lockwood tells her mother, in “Priestdaddy.” “Like sculpture, or honking the national anthem under your armpit.” By the time she began working on “No One Is Talking About This,” though, that case was harder to make. It was 2017; the fact that the President (in the novel, he is simply called “the dictator”) was using Twitter as his personal megaphone seemed emblematic of the platform’s wider debasement. Yet the novel’s protagonist cannot break free from her addiction. Lockwood refers to Twitter as “the portal,” an alias redolent of dark magic and myth. When her protagonist is trapped there, it is her husband who must descend, like Orpheus, to try to fetch her back:

“Are you locked in?” he would ask, and she would nod and then do the thing that always broke her out somehow, which was to google beautiful brown pictures of roast chickens—maybe because that’s what women used to do with their days.

A digital dependency requires digital methadone. The joke—and it is a good, sharp one—is that Lockwood’s protagonist takes the same satisfaction from Googling chickens that a woman from another time might have taken in cooking them; the real has comically, distressingly, been demoted beneath its own depiction. And yet we often enjoy and celebrate the depiction of reality. We call it art. “Will There Ever Be Another You” begins the year before COVID. Lockwood’s protagonist is on vacation in Scotland with her mother, sister, and husband. In an excerpt published in this magazine, they visit the Fairy Pools on the Isle of Skye, where they drink the wonderful, cool water. But, later, the protagonist begins to feel “that she was not quite herself.” The world spins and tilts; she vomits and is restored. Yet there lingers an ominous sense that she is teetering on some precipice. The sister has recently lost a child; at the Fairy Pools, she nearly loses her phone, too, which is filled with the baby’s pictures. “There is an Exchange,” the narrator thinks; “something passes between this life and the next that allows you to be here for a while.” Who is she to suppose that she has dodged it? “Everyone must pay.” There is a cut, a blackout. When the novel’s curtain rises again, we are in a long breathless rush of a section called “The Changeling,” and everything is different. “She had now had a fever for forty-eight days,” Lockwood writes. Her protagonist has a bald head (“she had asked her husband to shave it, thinking of scenes from old books”) and takes wormwood “like a witch from the Bible.” The great flip has happened; the mind has ceded its power, and the body reigns supreme.

Her eyes beat dust out of the tapestry until it was bright. Was she “a little bit high all the time”? Had the sickness blazed new pathways and cast light on tangled old ones? To be sure, she had forgotten the multiplication tables, and now felt there was a secret number between two and three. To be sure, there was the rough pink sensation that she was holding Rasputin’s penis in her right hand. To be sure, she could no longer remember names . . . she had to write everything down, and go back and read it later and be surprised by herself. Maybe that was paradise. Maybe she had died.

She hasn’t. Online, people are talking about horse-deworming paste; there are reports that the C.E.O. of Texas Roadhouse has killed himself to escape the continuous ringing in his ears. In the city square where the protagonist sits on a bench, struggling to type what Lockwood’s readers will recognize as her “Insane After Coronavirus?” essay, she can barely summon the energy to raise her hand in support of what seems to be a Black Lives Matter march. On and on the section goes, a whirling fifty-page stretch of disorientation and disintegration. A vaccine is said to be imminent; the narrator’s own sister is working on its development. “Her father would refuse to take it, of course, believing it put barcodes in people. But she would welcome a barcode, to keep track of herself—a chip to identify her, lost and shivering.” In the century since Woolf published her essay, there has been a great deal of writing about illness. Here and there, in Lockwood’s novel, you can catch glimpses of books that she has drawn on, a passing reference bobbing like a cork on the wild waves of her prose. There is “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” by Katherine Anne Porter, set during the 1918 influenza pandemic, and Woolf’s own “Mrs. Dalloway,” and “Down Below,” Leonora Carrington’s account of her breakdown and brutal institutionalization during the Second World War. “That’s kind of a model for this book,” Lockwood told me. Form is important to her. “No One Is Talking About This” is written in a series of textual bursts that give the impression of a social-media feed set on the static page. Though “Will There Ever Be Another You” is billed as a novel, Lockwood prefers to call it a pineapple, or a chandelier—“a revolving object that you’re seeing all sides of at once.” If the book’s prismatic structure and subjective immediacy feel baffling to encounter, that is because bafflement is the point. “A lot of times, in books about illness, there’s this desire for people to believe you, so you use clinical language,” Lockwood said. “You include doctors’ reports. You talk about the research or the history of this particular illness. I wasn’t going to do any of that, because it didn’t matter if you believed me. I was just going to put you inside the cyclone.” The writer Zach Powers, one of Lockwood’s closest friends, pointed out to me that another aspect of contemporary illness writing is the narrative demand that the sick person vanquish the sickness, or achieve some sort of closure. “Especially in terms of a chronic illness, to fit the story into the shape of an arc is to, in fact, lie about the story,” he said. Lockwood doesn’t lie. One of the strangest aspects of her illness, and her depiction of it, is that she did continue, in some sense, to function throughout it. Partway through her novel, she abandons the third person in favor of the first. We see her with her family at Schützenfest, a German fair in Cincinnati, where she experiences a zigzagging rip in her vision (a scintillating scotoma, she learned later), and at home, taking mushrooms and “reading Anna Karenina so hard I almost died.” Then there are interviews and photo shoots to do for “No One Is Talking About This,” which she is expected to cogently discuss at the exact time that words fail her. When that book is nominated for the Booker Prize, she travels to London to attend the ceremony. A few months later, she is on another plane to London when her husband comes lurching down the aisle, his face white as a sheet. These events are recounted in a section of the novel called “Life-and-Death.” It is a theme with which Lockwood was already intimately familiar. In early 2018, while at work on “No One Is Talking About This,” she learned that there was a complication with her sister Mary’s first pregnancy. The fetus was diagnosed with Proteus syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that involves the unstoppable growth of the body, and wasn’t expected to survive birth. Mary was in danger, too, but she was already twenty-six weeks pregnant: too late to have an abortion in Ohio, where she lived. Her best chance of saving her fertility, and her life, was to deliver early, but induction before thirty-nine weeks was prohibited without special dispensation. For Lockwood, this situation was infuriatingly personal. Her parents had been passionate members of the pro-life movement that had formed after Roe v. Wade. In one chapter of “Priestdaddy,” she describes her mother bringing her to a protest outside a family-planning clinic. She was a toddler, overwhelmed by all the shouting, the lurid images of mangled fetuses brandished on poster board; afterward, they went to the local jail to bail out her father, who was proud to have been arrested. Now her sister’s life was at risk. “You asked if I could get angry,” Lockwood said to me. “I was on the phone with my mother, and my voice went into this pig squeal. I mean, they took us to these rallies. I was very, very, very angry.” Lockwood flew to Cincinnati to be with her sister. Thanks to an aunt who worked at the hospital, Mary was granted permission for an early C-section. Her daughter, Lena, was born in July. Defying all expectations, she continued to live. “When I became pregnant, that was really emotional for Tricia, because she had never been able to get pregnant,” Mary told me. They had spent a stretch of their childhood in a part of St. Louis County where uranium used for atomic bombs was purified and radioactive waste was dumped in a local landfill. Lockwood’s older sister, the singer, lost an octave of her voice to a parathyroid tumor. One of her brothers, a marine, developed a massive cyst on his jaw. Lockwood suspects that the uranium may explain her infertility, too. Now she was besotted with Lena, this baby who couldn’t see, who needed an oxygen tank to breathe, who would never be able to lift her own head. “I don’t know what I would have done during that situation if I didn’t have her,” Mary said. “My pain was her pain. My joy was her joy. I always call her Lena’s second mom.” “No One Is Talking About This” is broken into two sections: before the baby, and after. The immediate effect of the birth is to summon the narrator back from the portal and into the physical world, where the manic controversies that absorbed her suddenly feel very small. Taking care of her niece endows the narrator with purpose; love overpowers her. “No one was telling them how long they would have her, how long the open cloud of her would last,” Lockwood writes. Lena died on the day after she turned six months old, surrounded by her family. Lockwood’s father said Mass, in Latin. He had baptized her, too, pouring the water over her head from a dish shaped like a seashell. “This is how they get you—with the silver seashell dishes,” Lockwood said. Some readers have been tempted to interpret “No One Is Talking About This” as a renunciation of virtual life in favor of the real thing, but Lockwood rejects that easy opposition. In “Will There Ever Be Another You,” she describes a spirited conversation that she had with Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, at a party after the Booker ceremony. “He had taken the message from the second part that we need to be together in the world again,” Lockwood said. “And I was saying that, no, it can happen in that place, in the portal.” After Lena died, Lockwood put her picture on Twitter. “I wanted people to see it. It is real life, happening in that place,” she said. “We are making real human connections.” She paused. “That was more true then than it is now.” After hemorrhaging, Kendall stayed in the hospital for nearly two weeks. When he came home, it was with what Lockwood calls “the Wound”: a long gash down his stomach, held together by thirty-six staples. He was emaciated. In the bathroom, he fainted. “What do you do?” Lockwood writes, of herself, to herself. She felt a particular possessiveness toward the Wound, which she cleaned and tended. “You put me in charge of it,” her narrator tells her husband, when he tries to do things for himself. “You can’t take a wound back, once you give it.” If the experience of illness is inevitably one of sapping solipsism, caretaking is its life-giving corollary. It rescued Lockwood from vanishing entirely into the black hole of the self; it rescues her books from the same. “It’s the one thing that I feel it’s O.K. to have a point of pride about,” she said. “I’m not going to drive you anywhere. You don’t want me to organize anything. You don’t want me to throw you a party. But if you need some sort of extremely personal care that others consider arduous?” She snapped her fingers. “Fuck, I’m there.” As Lockwood was rereading her way through Plath’s work, some inner door had opened. For the first time in five years, she began to write poems again. “It just came back in this enormous surge,” she said. She now had enough to fill a collection and a half, and more were coming every day. “I felt like the directive I was receiving from Sylvia was that you’re supposed to write them straight through from beginning to end, and don’t fuss with them too much,” she said. Compared with her early poems, the current crop was looser, freer, based on the events of her daily life. She was in the midst of writing one called “New Cooter,” inspired by a relative who had recently undergone a vaginoplasty. This had been a hot topic at the wedding that she and Kendall had attended: in genital years, the relative was said to now be somewhere between sixteen and twenty-five. This sounded funny, dirty—familiar Lockwood territory. But later, when she sent me the poem, I saw that she had deepened the episode by braiding it with another. Before the wedding, Lockwood had visited the Cincinnati Art Museum to search for a portrait of the American painter Marie Danforth Page, who looked exactly like Lockwood did when she was eighteen “and had that plump lineless / Live-forever face.” Now the poem became about the reversal of time, the loss and sudden, surprising return of youth—through plastic surgery, in one case, and, in the other, through art. Kendall emerged from the Corn Cave and poured himself a shot of Bushmills. It was 3 P.M. He used to enjoy wine, but, because of his gut condition, he can no longer consume fruit or anything made from it. A few hours later, he was back and opening a bottle of Rumple Minze, a viscous, hundred-proof peppermint schnapps that he has found agrees with him. He handed Lockwood a goose-necked mini bottle of vodka. They both like to let their minds go in the evening. Kendall has found it useful to manage his pain with full-spectrum CBD gummies; when he does, he gets “transmissions,” short songs that pop whole into his head. Together, he and Lockwood sang one that she had put into the text of her novel, addressed to Anna Karenina—“You’re overflowing your dress and it’s making me warm”—and set loosely to the tune of “Sloop John B.” “I just get this shit delivered into my head,” Kendall said. “Meanwhile, she gets these beautiful, complete poems delivered into her head.” “I think it must be the same mechanism,” Lockwood said, seriously. “You dip into the stream.” Lockwood intends to publish her new books of poems in a single volume, bound reversibly so that it can be opened from either cover. One will be called “Stone Soup,” the other “Agate Head.” She sets great store in stones and gems. “I don’t believe in meanings or vibrations or anything,” she told me. “But I believe in personality.” In the fall of 2023, she began taking a jewelry-making class; after spending so much time trapped in her head, she found the physical activity to be a powerful release. In place of a writing desk, she keeps a jewelry-making table covered in pliers and protective goggles. She owns three different kinds of blowtorches. She and Kendall recently purchased a diamond-wheeled lapidary saw, which they keep in the Corn Cave and use to cut open agates. Each one is a surprise; a rock’s rough exterior says little about the beauties that might lie within. On a different day, I watched them debate a cut that Kendall had made. He wanted to keep slicing, to bring the stone’s parallax banding into sharper relief. “No,” Lockwood said, definitively. “You have to know when to dance away and say, Perfect.” “Will There Ever Be Another You” depicts this resolution in an epilogue set in Key West and at a place called Boneyard Beach, nestled in a state park on the South Carolina coast. One morning, Kendall drove us there. As the car rolled through Savannah’s leafy streets, he recalled the first time he and Lockwood had visited the city, in 2009. “It was spring and the sun was out,” Kendall said. “I was sitting on a bench, and I was, like, We’re going to move to Savannah, and Tricia’s going to become a great writer.” “You never told me that,” Lockwood said. She was wearing a snapback cap from the Explorers Club, the scientific society in New York. For years, she had planned to write a novel with that title, set in the waiting room of the afterlife, where a group of adventurous sorts contemplate their feats. “They were locked in the ice, they climbed these mountains,” she said. “And then, as they wait to enter the memory of history, they would still be living them. They’d have their brandy snifters full of, like, ghost brandy, and they’re just kind of stuck in that part of their lives. The living body—the adrenaline, the exhilaration.” In the book, she had planned to explore a question: Why do people go to their limits? “What they always say is that they want to push themselves to a point that they don’t think they can go beyond, but by doing it they can,” Kendall said. He and Lockwood enjoy watching programs about mountain climbers, endurance athletes, and survivalists of all stripes. “But what actually happens is they just lose all sense of themselves, because their bodies break down so completely. It’s almost like they have these hallucinogenic, mystical experiences.” “They start to cry about their families,” Lockwood added. “I always had the idea, with the survivalist shows, that they like to remove themselves so that they can feel. You live in the woods. You eat worms and raw fish. You’re deprived of human society and civilization. But it’s so that when you go back and you get to bang your wife and eat, like, a fucking turkey sandwich, it’s better than anything.” The conversation moved on to the cats, and to grain-industry phrases—“wheat streak mosaic,” “creep feeding”—that Lockwood found particularly evocative and was hoarding for her poems. We arrived at the state park. “I can carry your bag, Tricia,” Kendall said, courteously, as Lockwood got out of the car. We walked down the beach. Sand, sea, sky: the beautiful usual. Twenty minutes later, Kendall said, “We just went through the portal.” “I felt it,” Lockwood answered. Before us stretched a world of pale, naked trees bleached silver by the salt and the sun: Boneyard Beach. Some lay on the sand, their gnarled roots stripped bare; others pointed jaggedly up at the clouds. “It’s like you’re in ‘The Land Before Time,’ right?” Lockwood said. In her novel, she compares the place to a kind of church, natural and undogmatic: “Standing spires, exposed intricate roots, free-range pews and uncompleted arches, all breathing through the tiniest pinholes. . . . The live silver of the driftwood couldn’t be captured in photographs—but I could describe it, the white spotlight under the flame, votives flickering without fire.” It was hot. Kendall took off his shirt, unmindful of the scar slashing down his torso. In “Will There Ever Be Another You,” Lockwood shows him doing the same thing, in the same place. “We had walked all the way out of the world. And come back,” she writes. Now she joined him, and they turned back to retrace their steps. A helicopter buzzed low overhead, the word “SHERIFF” printed in gold on its tail boom. Two men waved from the cockpit. Lockwood looked up and grinned. Then she raised her shirt and flashed them. ♦