Patricia Lockwood’s Fever Dream

In 2020, Patricia Lockwood lost her mind. Not in the way that everyone lost their minds — all the grocery-sanitizing and sourdough-baking; the insistence that Zoom “raves” were fun and that your friends had always wanted to pick up needlepoint, actually — but in a clinical, nebulous-syndrome-caused-by-the-novel-coronavirus way. Lockwood’s vision warped, her identity fractured, her own body grew unfamiliar. Metaphor and reality sat next to each other inside her mind, occasionally trading places.

In the hallucinatory Will There Ever Be Another You (out Sept. 23 from Riverhead), Lockwood’s second novel after 2021’s No One Is Talking About This, she writes her way out of Wonderland. “I’ve been saying that No One Is Talking About This was written sane, edited crazy, and this book was the inverse of that — written totally crazy and edited sane,” the author tells Bustle. (Both novels are autobiographical, and arguably closer to memoir, but Lockwood’s uninterested in the distinction: “I like to stay more in the generative impulse of a thing, rather than the categorization,” she says. “[Categories are] a little bit more for marketing.”) Even while editing sane, though, she was careful to keep the strangeness of the prose, the sense of dissociation. As a result, reading it feels like peering into Lockwood’s personal Otherworld.

Now on the other side, the poet and novelist wonders how much of that craziness was in her all along, just a touch more subdued. “Looking back, even to my childhood when I would feel these euphorias, feel these distances or strangenesses and get these ideas, that was part of creativity and literature for me, too,” she says. “So then it’s like, ‘Do I want to be well or do I want to be original? Do I want to be looking through a prism or looking through a lens?’”

These days, the choice is Lockwood’s. “If I wake up in the morning and I have four espressos, I'm probably going to be operating in a state of mild [migraine] aura,” she says. “But sometimes you decide that that’s OK. Sometimes you want that for the work.”

On what she’s reading now:

I’m going to read you the contents of my rat pile. And this is just very honest. So I have Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop [by Thomas Travisano]. I have the complete poems of Elizabeth Bishop, I have her complete prose.

I should maybe explain my reading a little bit — I will get on a topic or I’ll be researching a person, and then I’m reading a lot of associated material. So I’ve kind of been working on a Bishop kick here.

On the snacks that fuel her writing:

I have the aforementioned quad shot of espresso. I have a little thing of macadamia nuts, a little thing of wasabi edamame here. Basically, the most ratchet snacks in the world that you can possibly imagine. I do really well during the day if I just do protein and that sort of thing, and then let myself eat a little bit more in the evening.

On the nature livestream that keeps her company:

It’s basically [a video of] a stump where currently there’s two chipmunks eating peanuts. There’s a big black squirrel called The Dark Knight. There’s some birds that come and try their luck. But that is the sonic background: little cheeps, nibbles, crisp leaves, scuffling, occasionally the swoop of a bird. It’s like incidental music.

I believe that they’re helping me in a Cinderella way almost. I guess that’s technically more of a Sleeping Beauty thing; I don’t know that Cinderella had chipmunks. Also, Cinderella was a b*tch — you should go watch that movie again. I was recently signing tip-ins for both the U.S. and U.K. printed copies of the books, and I was putting on Disney movies in the background for some reason. I was watching Cinderella like, “This girl is a b*tch.” She’s mean to that cat.

On celebrating a good day of work:

It’s the greatest feeling in the world to write poetry all day and then go out to dinner and get hammered. But it isn’t the best. I do believe there are other ways. Sometimes I will go out and choose myself a little stone that has a personality. A ride on the bicycle built for two is always good. Just generally trying to get outside. The reward is really just to go outside and go on a f*cking walk.

On where she writes:

It is a couch. There are two money toads sitting next to me. You may not know what a money toad is, but I’ll give you a brief explainer. So around just after the inauguration, I did get COVID again, and I found that I was not able A, to read any news; B, to be on social media at all; and C, to really be in reality. So it was kind of a mini version of what I experienced before. And all I was doing was watching these YouTube videos of people going to the Tucson Gem Show — which, obviously, rocks and minerals are one of my interests.

There was this one particular woman who was constantly talking about money toads, and I had no idea what they were, but I just loved to say the phrase. Money toad, money toad, money toad. And so eventually I got a money toad. I think it’s something to bring luck and fortune into your house, but I just liked the fact that they were toads. I really felt that these toads needed homes. So I have two big giant fat ones sitting next to me, piles of books, and various other little pebbles and stones. These toads are objectively — and I’m covering their ears right now — [whispers] they’re sort of hideous. But don’t tell them that because the second you’re holding them, you’re like, “This toad has a home. This toad has a personality.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.