“I wrote it insane, and edited it sane,” Patricia Lockwood says, of her new novel, which is a singular account of losing her mind, body, and art to COVID. Plus:
Alexandra Schwartz
A staff writer covering books and culture.
Back in the good old days of Twitter, the writer Patricia Lockwood helped to make the internet silly and sublime with tweets such as “.@parisreview So is Paris any good or not” and a series of absurdist sexts involving rock slides, dewdrops, and plot holes in the novels of Dan Brown. But she got her literary start offline, as a poet. She went on to prove herself as a memoirist, critic, and novelist, imbuing each genre with her distinctive sense of humor and unreproducible voice. I loved her 2017 memoir, “Priestdaddy,” about her eccentric childhood as the daughter of a guitar-shredding Midwestern Catholic priest. And I loved (and reviewed) her first novel, “No One Is Talking About This,” from 2021, which perfectly captures the enthralling, mind-eroding experience of being very online.
In the summer of 2020, Lockwood published a piece in the London Review of Books called “Insane After Coronavirus?” She reported that she had caught COVID in March, and gave a characteristically funny but disturbing account of what was starting to be known as “long COVID.” The virus had messed with her body and, worse, her mind; she struggled to string sentences together. Earlier this year, when I learned that Lockwood had written a new novel, “Will There Ever Be Another You,” about her experience of chronic sickness, I wanted to talk to her about it, and to understand what had happened to her in the course of the past five years. This spring, for a story that appears in this week’s special centenary issue, I went down to Savannah, where Lockwood lives with her husband, Jason Kendall, and their three cats. When she texted me to “bring your ho clothes”—Georgia in May is hot—I knew we’d get on well.
At the heart of Lockwood’s life and work is her partnership with Kendall, whom she first met, in a poetry chat room, when she was nineteen and he was twenty. “I store things in him,” she has written, a dynamic that I observed firsthand. (“I believe I’m forty-three,” she said, when I asked her age. “Jason can correct me.”) The three of us spent a very enjoyable stretch of days together, walking, talking, drinking vodka and schnapps, watching a rustic Azerbaijani family’s YouTube channel, and cutting open agates on the lapidary saw that Lockwood and Kendall keep in their basement. The couple has been beset by illness—Kendall had his own recent brush with mortality—and the story that Lockwood’s book, and my Profile, tells deals with sickness and recovery, but also with caretaking, companionship, and, above all, love.
How Bad Is It?
Donald Trump announced his plan to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board on Monday, accusing her of making false statements on mortgage agreements. Later that night, Cook, who has not been charged with any crime, stated that she would not resign. Today, Cook’s lawyer said that his client would file a lawsuit challenging the President’s actions.
How bad is it? The President has been pressuring Jerome Powell, the Fed chairman, to lower interest rates since the beginning of his second term. Cook has “supported Powell’s wait-and-see policy, which has infuriated Trump,” John Cassidy writes in his new column. The attempt to dismiss Cook also comes just weeks after the President fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, following the release of a jobs report showing weak hiring. “Taken together, these steps constitute an unprecedented effort to wrest personal control of the U.S. economic-policy machinery,” Cassidy argues, “but one which is entirely consistent with Trump’s broader effort to accumulate as much power as he can and dismantle any remaining constraints on his actions.” The silence, so far, from business leaders has been stunning. Read the full story »
Editor’s Pick
What The New Yorker Was Watching in 1925
On the occasion of our centenary, Richard Brody revisits the movie writing from the magazine’s first year, which included forward-looking criticism, gossip, a large dose of Charlie Chaplin, and a review of one of the greatest films in the history of cinema. Read the story »
More Top Stories
Our Culture Picks
- Read: The novel “World Pacific,” by Peter Mann, weaves together three narratives: a marooned adventure writer, the twin of a comatose patient, and a British spy keeping tabs on Nazi sympathizers in California. The result is “bracing and erudite.”
Watch: Ron Howard’s new thriller, “Eden,” features bursts of foul temper, wild sex, grisly violence, and nihilist ideology—and a bunch of beautiful people on an island.
Listen: The visionary composer Terry Riley’s “In C,” from 1968, gives off a jangly euphoria. “I feel it’s my field to create magic in sound,” he once said. “Magic in the sense of transcendence of this ordinary life into another realm.”
Daily Cartoon
“Should we try and buy now even though rates are high, or should we wait until Trump has bullied the Fed into destroying the economy?”
Cartoon by Adam Douglas Thompson
Puzzles & Games
Today’s Crossword Puzzle: Place for change—ten letters.
Laugh Lines: Test your knowledge of classic New Yorker cartoons.
Name Drop: Guess the identity of a notable person in six clues.
P.S. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce just got engaged. Swift made the announcement on Instagram, with the caption “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” The post shows Swift’s mastery of what Amanda Petrusich calls “you guys” energy, “a chatty, ersatz intimacy that feels consonant with the way we exist on social media.” 💍
Erin Neil contributed to this edition.
