Amid a global pandemic, one young woman is trying to keep the pieces together—of her family, stunned by a devastating loss, and of her mind, left mangled and misfiring from a mystifying disease. She's afraid of her own floorboards, and 'What is love? Baby don't hurt me' plays over and over in her ears. She hates her friends, or more accurately, she doesn't know who they are. Has the illness stolen her old mind and given her a new one? Does it mean she'll get to start over from scratch, a chance afforded to very few people?
A claustrophobic travelogue of online and IRL adventures abounding with whimsical interludes, all packed taut with her signature wordplay ... She writes a lyrical and barely legible journal of holy and sacrilegious feelings, a pocketbook emptied out in search of the nation’s plot ... So singular ... Her ability to tease out the absurdity of ordinary communication is magnificent, even infuriating ... Compounded sorrow haunts the book ... Lockwood...manages to explicate the harried, nonsensical, grief-soaked timeline with acrobatic skill.
Febrile, poetic ... What she’s produced is a searching, pointedly disorienting text, studded with passages of extreme beauty and generous humor, that wears whimsy like a shivering veil over consuming discomfort, even terror. It is less consummately pleasurable, page by page, than No One; it is uneven; occasionally it drags. But because it is a work that seeks to capture the deranging effects of the recent past, confusion is a powerful lens ... Turning over the last page, I asked with pleasure, What was that?
[Lockwood's] deft manipulation of form and language captures how alien—even, perhaps, how interesting—ordinary life with a chronic illness, in some cases, can be ... Particularly open-minded ... Long COVID seems to defamiliarize the narrator’s relationship to language in ways both fascinating and isolating ... Lockwood, for one, refuses to sum her story up neatly ... Lockwood is an alchemist, handling her own experiences with careful attention, ready to fashion them into something new.
