★ 2025-05-30
In the wake of a disorienting illness, a woman attempts to write “a masterpiece about being confused.”
What on earth is happening to the unnamed protagonist of this novel? She suffers from “bizarre nonsense dreams,” feels there is “a secret number between two and three,” and sees “a zigzag” in the corner of her eye that she refers to as “the angel.” Has an unnamed illness “stolen her old mind and given her a new one?” We’re told she “first got sick” in March 2020, and because the details of the protagonist’s life and work track so closely with the author’s, we assume it is Covid-19, which left Lockwood in a post-Covid fog, described in an essay for theLondon Review of Books. This is no straightforward illness diary, but a “mad notebook” capturing the sensory experience and psychic state of a character in extremis. It opens with a family trip to Scotland, seemingly before the pandemic—but never mind, linearity and narrative are beside the point. In Scotland, the protagonist suddenly believes in fairies; throughout the book she is obsessed with changelings, doppelgängers, knockoff Cabbage Patch Kids, cloned sheep,Mrs. Doubtfire, a potential TV adaptation of her memoir,Priestdaddy, and all manner of facsimiles that point toward the existential question of the title. Somewhat incidentally, she reads and feverishly analyzesAnna Karenina, tries her hand at metalworking, and, after her husband undergoes emergency surgery that leaves him with 36 staples in the abdomen, finds herself “in charge of the Wound.” Wherever this phantasmagoric book takes us, it is shot through with a poet’s love for the slippery absurdities of language and abundant laugh-out-loud gags. Can we hope for a one-woman show?
There is only one Patricia Lockwood, and this surreal, silly, and sneakily profound book could only be hers.
