On a humid evening in May, Patricia Lockwood, who writes with the impish verve and provocative guilelessness of a peeing cupid, was scanning the menu at a Mexican restaurant near her home, in Savannah, Georgia. Her husband, Jason Kendall, an agricultural-commodities researcher whom Lockwood calls Corn Man, sat next to her. Both find dining to be a delicate business. Lockwood got COVID in March of 2020 and continues to experience aftereffects from the virus; she has adopted a ketogenic diet—high in fat, low in carbs—to help manage her symptoms. Kendall has had a fragile stomach ever since he suffered a set of catastrophic hemorrhages three years ago and nearly died.

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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?”

Like other writers to whom the label of autofiction has been applied, Lockwood finds it fruitful to draw on her own experience in her work. Yet, when she writes in a strictly factual mode, she is sometimes accused of fabrication. In 2016, The New Republic sent Lockwood to a Trump rally in New Hampshire, where she described seeing a photograph on the jumbotron of Melania in a bikini embracing an inflatable Shamu. Writing for the L.R.B. about Karl Ove Knausgaard—she is a contributing editor at that publication, brought on not to edit other people’s essays but, she told me, “as an outsider artist” to write freewheeling, minimally edited essays of her own—she recounted a trip that she had made to a literary festival in Norway, only to discover that Knausgaard had cancelled his appearance and been replaced by an Elvis impersonator. Both details were singled out by critics as too outrageously weird, too obviously Lockwood-like, to be unembellished. This makes her indignant. “I almost never make up anything,” she told me. “I just notice different things.”

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.”