Patricia Lockwood on How Illness Can Give You ‘Another You’

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KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When writer Patricia Lockwood fell ill with Covid in March 2020, she says she felt insane for months, experiencing “Brian fog” (not brain fog) and what she called “The Refrains,” where a single song lyric would play over and over in her mind. So she decided to make sense of it all by writing “a masterpiece about being confused.” We talk to Lockwood about what it was like to write while “insane” and edit while in full health, and how she found humor in the absurdity of illness. Her new novel is “Will There Ever Be Another You.” Guests: Patricia Lockwood, novelist and poet Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for KQED podcasts comes from the Exploratorium. Discover the Art of Light this winter with glow.
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0:19.1	Sponsorship of this podcast comes from Stanford Summer Session, allowing visiting students to study at Stanford for an academic term.
0:27.3	Learn more at summer.stantford.edu.
0:31.3	From KQED.
0:34.1	Welcome to Forum.
0:35.5	I'm Mina Kim.
0:36.3	When writer Patricia Lockwood got COVID in March of 2020,
0:40.3	she experienced a mind-altering, long-lasting brain fog, and she wrote down her thoughts,
0:46.6	and some of the fear and confusion around her at that time, notes that would eventually become
0:51.6	her latest novel, Will there ever be another you?
0:55.6	Quote, people were up at 3 a.m.,
0:58.0	contemplating the purchase of apple-flavored horse deworming paste,
1:01.7	which had gone up to 30 bucks a tube.
1:03.9	People, or maybe just her, were becoming confused
1:06.8	after they got out of the shower
1:08.3	and applying large tracts of deodorant to the skin of their
1:12.4	face. Listeners, have you ever lost your sense of reality, your sense of self due to illness?
1:19.0	We'll talk to Lockwood about what anchored her through long COVID, including finding the
1:22.9	funny and the absurdity of it all, and what it says about the things that sustain us in the most
1:28.4	disorienting times.
	...

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