It sounds like the setup to a joke: a viral author and a global virus walk into a novel. The punchline is long Covid, an illness that defies narrative – dissolves it. Patricia Lockwood’s new autofiction, Will There Ever Be Another You, is the product of that cruel dissolution. “I wrote it insane, and edited it sane,” she explained in a recent interview. The madness is the method. But must you know the mind before you can know the madness?

Lockwood is the literary Frankenchild of Dorothy Parker and Flannery O’Connor: a heretical wit fused with gothic strangeness, vintage quippery rewired for the digital age. She’s the kind of writer who inspires parasocial devotion and copycat haircuts. Even her cats are internet-famous. The sacred text of Lockwood lore is Priestdaddy, her glorious 2017 memoir, which introduced readers to the American author’s trouser-resistant father, an ordained Catholic priest who blew his daughter’s college fund on a vintage guitar.

The pandemic handed Lockwood a new absurdity. She contracted Covid early, in March of 2020, when transmission was blamed on grotty fingers and every doorknob was suspect – the era of fruit bleaching and handwashing jingles. She was among the first writers to give shape to the cognitive estrangement of the virus, its febrile illogic. “Hours, days of my memory had fallen out of my mind like chunks of plaster,” she wrote that July, as if the worst was behind her.

Will There Ever Be Another You is the tale of what happened next, inflicted on a fictional Patricia: aphasia, hallucination, migraines, amnesia, paranoia, relentless self-obliteration. Can a novel carry that skull-fire without being consumed by it? That is the wager of this book.

“What are you working on?” people kept asking me. Little stories, I would evade, and leave it at that, because if to write about being ill was self-indulgent, what followed was that the most self-indulgent thing of all was to be ill. But I was determined to do it. I was going to write a masterpiece about being confused.

The result is cortical shrapnel – you can almost hear this book rattle when you open it. Lockwood’s title carries no question mark: it is prayer, punchline, eulogy, manifesto, nightmare, often all at once. Fragmentation is not a new mode for Lockwood (she was christened, after all, “the poet laureate of Twitter”). But it is one thing to disrupt, another to be disrupted. There is a new kind of anguish here, a longing for coherence.

The opening pages are where she comes closest. Hollowed by the loss of a child, an American family travels through Scotland, kept afloat by “pure itinerary”. A precious item is lost. Shortly afterwards, our heroine slips into fever. The treasure is returned; her mind is not. It feels like a dark enchantment, a faerie bargain. “It stole people from themselves.” Lockwood writes of her illness. “You might look the same to others, but you had been replaced.”

Delirium reigns. We wheel from Roland Barthes to Cabbage Patch Kids, via Anna Karenina and the “butthole cut of Cats” (classic Lockwood territory). But there’s a drum of obsession beating underneath the chaos. Doppelgangers, changelings, clones, dolls; photographs and synonyms – these pages teem with replicants and replication. The modus operandi of a virus.

It’s time to rouse the ghosts of Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag: the patron saints of sicklit. Critics invoke Woolf to show how difficult it is to pin illness to the page (“English … has no words for the shiver and the headache”); Sontag to mark the grief of displacement (“the kingdom of the sick”). Woolf makes illness mystical; Sontag makes it ordinary. It has always been both. It’s time the conversation deepened. Our stories certainly have.

A hundred years have passed since Woolf complained that literature ignored the body; now, it’s a site of wild and magnificent invention. Katherine Brabon’s novel Body Friend (2023) gives chronic pain human form, like an intimate version of Fight Club; Sanya Rushdi’s account of psychosis is so lucid it unsettles the very notion of madness (Hospital, 2023; translated by Arunava Sinha); Kris Kneen’s An Uncertain Grace (2017) is an orgy of transformations and transgressions: erotic, technological, and ecological. These are just three books within arm’s reach (all happen to be by brilliant Aussies).

Across all forms and genres, writers are breaking taboos – of decorum, shame and syntax – to exalt in our corruptible flesh. There’s Ottessa Moshfegh’s metaphysical collapse (My Year of Rest and Relaxation), and Hanya Yanagihara’s baroque trauma (A Little Life). Kazuo Ishiguro’s robots and clones; Jeff Vandermeer’s spores and mutations; the ravenous and rotting world of body horror. The body is no longer an absence, it’s a stage.

Lockwood’s detonated form is evocative, but not especially innovative (Eimear McBride was doing a version of it more than a decade ago in A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing). We need accounts of long Covid, and plenty more of them. But Will There Ever Be Another You feels auteurish, the literary equivalent of a Wes Anderson film: over-styled and perilously close to self-parody. A delirious in-joke.

Online and on the page, Lockwood’s brilliance has always been her ability to strip a joke back to its mechanics, and – somehow – make it sharper in the disassembly (see her viral poem Rape Joke). But that power has begun to turn in on itself. Her first novel, No One Is Talking About This (a prequel of sorts), assumed a fluency in the language of the internet, known as “the portal”; Will There Ever Be Another You assumes a fluency in Lockwood.

Fandom is the price of entry here: not just a familiarity with the cult author’s work, but with her life: her estrangements and griefs, her delights and obsessions, even the precarious state of her husband’s bowels. Maggie Nelson’s most recent book, Pathemata, read the same way: privileging intimacy over literacy. Nelson was also writing about chronic pain, and perhaps that’s no coincidence. Pain traps you deep inside your own brainbox; Will There Ever Be Another You recreates that trap. But how you read it – how you are able to read it – depends on your relationship to Lockwood. And this book assumes you already have one.