A Rupture in One's Sense of Self

"As Patricia Lockwood's second novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, begins, the protagonist is visiting Scotland with her family. That will be her last moment of relative normalcy, because in the very next chapter, she catches COVID, which changes her dramatically. She has a fever that won't go away, and struggles to recognize faces, write, and read. Its effects are so powerful that she wonders whether she's become a different person."

"Bekah Waalkes, in her review of the book, writes that the disease gives the protagonist the sense, "like a changeling"-an image that crops up frequently in the book-that she "has been taken and replaced by someone new." In the novel, Lockwood writes of the illness: "Had it stolen her old mind and given her a new one? Had she been able to start over from scratch, a chance afforded to very few people?""

A protagonist visits Scotland with her family and then contracts COVID, producing a prolonged fever and severe cognitive impairments. She struggles to recognize faces, read, and write and experiences a profound sense of altered identity. The illness prompts invented words, unexpected associative connections, and new artistic impulses, with a recurring changeling image that suggests replacement or rebirth. A Scotland-set account traces an influential presence on the Isle of Skye and emphasizes a matriarchal figure whose work is to make people feel magnificent, capable, and newly possible.

Read at The Atlantic