The Viability of the ‘Sick Woman Book’ Canon

I did not grow up a Belieber. I did believe, of course, in a menagerie of false gods that would ultimately betray me: boys—and worse, girls—repetition, starvation, simplicity. Patricia Lockwood, the award-winning poet and writer was raised a vitriolic believer but left the Church young, finding her faith in eccentric turns of phrase and bizarre twists of fate, a cyclical, carnivalesque spirituality. Her latest “novel,” though her writing requires a more expansive term (myth? prophecy? memento or auto-anti-hagiography?), is called Will There Ever Be Another You, and is a secular mystic’s recollection of long Covid, her husband’s near-death experience, and writing as a vocation.