Hey all, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Glenn Weldon. Writers and artists will be grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic for many years to come, which only makes sense. It was a rare universal experience in a world that's growing more and more atomized every day. In her new novel, Will There Ever Be Another You? Author Patricia Lockwood documents one particularly puzzling aspect of that time that is still with us, the so-called brain fog of long COVID. And if the experience

of reading the book is at times disorienting, that's kind of the point. Lockwood strives to

capture the sense of confusion and dissociation she experienced for years after contracting COVID in March 2020.

She talked with NPR's Ari Shapiro about it. Here's that conversation.

This might be the most meta introduction to an author interview that I've ever delivered.

In Patricia Lockwood's new novel, the narrator is a novelist named Patricia,

who describes a book tour to promote a previous novel in early 2021.

I am readying myself for another interview when the crowd bursts into the Capitol.

I have to go get a haircut, with my phone held tensely in my lap under the barber cape,

and wonder the whole time whether the speaker of the houses having her head chopped off.

The haircut itself is administered by a stylist in his 50s,

who believes in me in a way that no one ever has before,

that I can carry off an early 90s fly-girl situation.

When I step out of the salon and back into the stream of what is happening,

I have a feeling that I have possibly never had before.

American.

Four years ago, I was part of that book tour she describes in this latest book.

Well, Trisha Lockwood's novel is out now. It's called No One Is Talking

About This. That was then. This is now. Patricia Lockwood's new novel is called, Will There

Ever Be Another You? Trisha, thank you for joining us again for this Russian nesting doll moment.

All right. Thank you so much for having me.

I remember you most of all as a man of taste.

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