Patricia Lockwood is an American poet, essayist and novelist. She is the author of the comic memoir Preistdaddy, about being raised by a Catholic priest, and the novel No One Is Talking About This, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2021. Her most recent work of autofiction, Will There Ever Be Another You (Bloomsbury), concerns the pandemic, illness and madness.
Hello Patricia. Where are you today?
I am in Crawfordville, Florida, as my sister-in-law is undergoing chemo. I’m sitting out in her yard. There’s a bunch of pickup trucks, fishing tackle, and a bear in the woods named Rick Ross that comes and drinks my brother’s peanut oil. I’m in a true panhandle Florida situation here.
Will There Ever Be Another You is partly a Covid novel. What made you want to write about something the world is begging you not to write about?
Begging me personally: Patricia Lockwood, don’t you dare! I wanted to do it because everyone was saying not to. The garbage that no one else wants to take out? I’m like, listen, I’ll do it. I’d like to be writing books about a fairytale castle, something normal that people read in the tub. But [you write] the thing that comes on you with urgency. I think that enough time has passed that people are thinking: maybe we do want to talk about it. Maybe we have interesting insights. Maybe, maybe there are things we actually do want to remember.
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The book is also about the experience of illness. How’s your health now?
A lot better. In 2020, after I had Covid, I went into status migrainosus. I was always experiencing some part of a migraine – the aura, the pre- or post-drone – but I didn’t experience pain. I only experienced altered states, Lewis Carroll-type Wonderland migraines. You don’t want the pain, but it is a signal that you understand what’s happening to you. If suddenly the world changes colour; there’s a rip in your vision; everything turns to rainbows; you can’t feel your hands, or you see gorillas in the trees … What is there to tell you that that is an organic state, rather than that you’ve stepped off the cliff and are plummeting to the centre of the world? When we figured out most of it was migraine, I started a CGRP inhibitor. The second you feel those symptoms removed, you’re like, oh, I wasn’t mad. You feel very foolish.
You’ve been described as a major literary voice of the internet age. What’s your relationship with your phone now? Does it affect your style?
The internet has turned into an absolute pig wallow. It is so far from the playground of creativity we had. It was this bustling city that you felt part of, then you saw things slowly disintegrate in real time. You saw dictators installed; weird robots on the street. But it’s still very hard for people to leave. Luckily for me, I got off my phone when my niece was ill, and in 2020, every time I would pick up my phone I triggered migraines by scrolling. With No One Is Talking About This, some reviewers assumed that I was speaking in an internet dialect, but I wasn’t really. I was using those things, but still writing and speaking as myself. It was a literary voice, incorporating this new vernacular, but not entirely written in that vernacular. Going very far out of the online world was like returning to that natural music you hear when you let there be a little bit of silence.
In your first novel, you wrote about Trump: ‘The problem was that the dictator was very funny, which had maybe always been true of all dictators.’ Does he make you laugh?
Oof. There is that line in that book. But I never really wanted to laugh. Something happened to me around the time of this second inauguration. I felt: I can’t enter into that madness again. I can’t allow his language to take over. I can’t take up residence in his head and I can’t let him enter into mine. So I did go offline for the first six months of the presidency. But in America, amid deportations and ICE, there’s really no instinct to laugh.
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about what the modern fragmented attention spans of our era means mean for reading.
I sympathise: I had it too. It was the first thing that happened to me after I was ill, and it was so much a part of my identity. Who am I if I can’t engage in those long, blissful afternoon stretches of being inside a book? But I do worry about it. I see it with a hardcore reading public, people who want to be reading books at all times. That concerns me.
A student at Harvard asked me: does that mean that we should be writing in that style? I said no. It might be that the reading public now wants something in the opposite direction. In the face of AI and the fractured attention span, I think we’re going to see a new avant-garde that insists on the participation of the human in our literature again. I feel there is a new, weird literature emerging that has a stronger human fingerprint on it. I’m feeling stirrings of weird literature. My book is weird, that was the thing I really liked about it. Katie Kitamura’s new book Audition, it’s weird. These are strange books. It’s about 20 years out from the beginnings of the alt-lit heyday. So we’re due, I think, for a return of zines and for a return of the weird. I’m speaking it so it will manifest.
You’ve been announced as a judge for next year’s Booker prize, on a panel including Mary Beard and Jarvis Cocker.
When I was asked, I was like: am I the silly judge? And they were like: no! But I still think I might be. I’m actually really worried that I’m gonna be singing Pulp songs under my breath … But I’m very excited. It’s one of those things where, when they ask you, you think, oh God, can I? I mean, it’s such a Herculean task.
Do you know what you’re looking for? You mentioned the literature of the weird.
I’m gonna choose the craziest book on Earth! No. You can think about what “a Booker book” should be, which can cause anxiety. But I want to read with my gut. I trust the little hairs, I trust the back of the neck, I trust the base of the spine. I trust that instinct that says: this is something.
You were shortlisted for the prize in 2021. What do you remember from that time?
It was so surreal because of Covid. I had a chemical burn on my lip from a Boots lip stain that I tried. I sat next to [the winner] Damon [Galgut] at the ceremony, and my husband noticed that the makeup person came out and only powdered him: that’s how you knew he was gonna win. I gave [Galgut] a lucky rock beforehand. I asked everyone if they wanted one, but he was the only one who said yes, so he was holding a little piece of larimar when he won. Afterwards they put the losers on a special bus. You’re riding through the streets of London as a loser. But I would have been horrified to win. There is said to be a curse if you win on your first novel.
You wrote brilliantly about meeting the pope in 2023. What are your thoughts on the new American pope?
You have a certain equanimity when you were raised in the church the way I was. You don’t ever get that excited about a cop, right? Even this Chicago pope, White Sox fan … he’s still in it. You don’t have a sense of celebrity because the bishops, the church higher-ups, those were the guys who came to dinner at your house and left your mum to wash the dishes. It’s domestic for me.
What are you working on now?
It’s an urban fantasy, and the working title is Folk. It’s set in the world of art errands, art emergencies, art epiphanies. I was thinking about how we’re going to rebuild our literature and our arts after this period where things are being torn down. I’m always trying to do something crazier than the last time.
What are your Christmas plans?
I’m having my Christmas right now. My sister-in-law is on her third chemo cycle, and reacted really badly to the drugs. But we got this day where she was feeling better, and she could cook a meal for her family and just be very present while I was playing with the kids. Sometimes the clouds break and there’s this ray of sunlight. Something amazing happens for those who are suffering. That, for me, is Christmas.
Photograph by Peter Garritano