One hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf wondered why, “considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings,” it had not “taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.” In the century since, Woolf’s provocation has been met many times over—in works as varied as Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, and John Green’s YA best seller The Fault in Our Stars. More recently, books such as Lisa Olstein’s Pain Studies and Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom have examined the uncertainty of chronic illness. What does another entry into the canon of sickness writing have to offer readers?
Woolf wrote in “On Being Ill” that “it is to the poets that we turn” when “illness makes us disinclined for the long campaigns that prose exacts.” But she also acknowledged that “some prose writers are to be read as poets.” Let me make the case for reading Patricia Lockwood’s new novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, which explores the effects of long COVID on a writer, in precisely this way. Lockwood does happen to be an accomplished poet as well as a devotee of internet speak, with its oddly revealing turns of phrase.
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