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By the next chapter, the narrator has COVID, America is in lockdown, and nothing feels anything like it should. The writing jumps around with her addled mind as she tries to process her domestic environment. In one moment, she ponders the question of how original a Cabbage Patch Kid is after every part has been replaced. In another, she makes up a Beatles song about Anna Karenina. Her madness is at its most American when she swaps conspiracy theories with her friends, her own pet one being that “none of the popes had ever been the real pope”. The prose bounces between paragraphs and fragments, while the protagonist runs the full gamut of singular pronouns. Lockwood’s writing offers few handrails to the reader, but the untrammelled, madcap flow offers a compelling depiction of a creative mind lost in a virus. The velocity and madness of the book both diminish in its second half, as the author recovers from her illness and returns to her normal existence. Sadly for the reader, the self Lockwood finds again is not that of a misfit being impossibly funny, but of a writer who has made it, whose life is filled with more names to drop and less friction. Pamela Anderson and Kurt Russell are just two of the celebrity collaborators mentioned, while an entire chapter is built around the narrator speaking at the same venue as the Canadian writer Anne Carson. The most emotional section of the book – chronicling her husband’s surgery and recovery– gets disappointingly short shrift, while the reader is presented with a series of David Sedaris-style vignettes about family life, travel, and hobbies. Fortunately, Lockwood is at least as funny as David Sedaris, and far more distinctive. Throughout Will There Ever Be Another You, she displays only a playful fluency with the poetic qualities and absurdities of language, providing vivid bursts of introspection: “Memories that are allowed to run on inside you maintain a kind of vascular velvet.”
