In July 2020, Patricia Lockwood published an essay about the unusual neurological symptoms she experienced during a bout of Covid-19. She compared herself to the amnesiac played by Harrison Ford in Mike Nichols’s film Regarding Henry (1991), in which a New York lawyer loses his memory after being shot in a grocery store. Will There Ever Be Another You, Lockwood’s second novel, is a more substantial reckoning with the illness she described half a decade ago. 

It begins with the central character, a stand-in for the author, travelling to Scotland with her husband, sister and mother. They are all trying to recover from the death of her baby niece. Lockwood’s facility as a comic writer is on full display in the opening pages. Her husband is overjoyed at the number of bald men in Scotland (‘One of me!’ he exclaims); her mother becomes faint from a lack of iced tea. 

Towards the end of the trip, Lockwood’s protagonist – she’s called Patricia just once – begins to feel ‘not quite herself’. From this episode on, the linear narrative dissolves. By the start of the second section, she has been suffering a fever for forty-eight days. She’s stuck at home in