Patricia Lockwood on Drawing From Tolstoy and Avoiding “the Butthole of the Universe”

Nearly a century and a half ago, when famous novelists doubled as beacons of moral virtue—this seems farfetched, but let’s pretend—Leo Tolstoy penned a thought experiment titled, “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?” The author was 62 that year, and a beneficiary (conversely, victim) of innumerable spiritual awakenings. He thought that those attracted to vice, which in Russia meant practically everyone, “especially our so-called cultured classes,” used intoxicating substances to procrastinate. To run from truth. “To drown the voice of conscience in themselves.”

It’s unclear what sort of moral standing society ascribes to the novelist in 2025. But Tolstoy might squirm upon learning that one of this summer’s most anticipated books revolves around reading Anna Karenina on magic mushrooms.

“There’s a very psychedelic, almost microdose component in [Tolstoy’s] writing,” says the author Patricia Lockwood, speaking via phone from her home in Savannah, Georgia. “You’ll look over and a corner will be lit up. Something will be outlined. You’ll feel the hairs rising on the back of your neck…”

In the stylistically stringent, ruthlessly self-policed world of contemporary literary fiction, Lockwood is a rare popular author unbounded by both trend and decorum, whose substantial ethical investigations are interspersed with vagina jokes and “a new illness called Who Foot Is That.” Lockwood’s newest work, the largely autobiographical Will There Ever Be Another You, takes this one-woman variety show to new heights. It’s smart. It’s dirty. It’s very funny. And it was spurred, she says, by a series of pupil-swollen consultations with Tolstoy. (Read an excerpt, here.)

It was the summer of 2021; Lockwood had spent more than a year dealing with lingering symptoms from a ghastly bout of COVID that she caught in March 2020 after giving a talk at Harvard. No One Is Talking About This garnered significant critical attention early in 2021, but Lockwood, as she tells it, was in shambles. She’d contracted COVID far earlier than most Americans, and struggled not just physically but with our collective lack of knowledge about the disease. “The psychological aspect, too,” she adds. “The guilt of being a vector. It wasn’t just that you feared other people, you feared your own power to make other people ill, to put them in your own state.”

Lockwood says that she often “forgets” her artistic method between books, and has to “figure it out again every single time, to relearn how to write.” Her year of COVID erased much more than usual. “Coming back from the illness was legitimately about learning to do very basic things,” she says. “My language had been so halting, it really felt like I was reading not individual words, but individual letters, like, particles of letters. Nothing was put together.” The Tolstoy sessions were “a turning point,” a period when Lockwood’s language rebuilt itself out of “little filaments.” She recorded the process in hardcopy journal entries that appear in a middle chapter of the new book:

“Why didn’t the Beatles ever write a Tolstoy song—‘Thank You, Mr. Tolstoy,’ ‘Mr. Tolstoy You’re Driving Me Mad,’ etc. The first lyric could be, ‘Anna Karenina, you’re a fat one.’”

“We have received your opposition to the railroads, Tolstoy. We will return to the land and keep bees.”

Lockwood specifies that she took only “the tiniest” doses of psilocybin during her rehabilitation. Otherwise, “I’d probably end up more on the Dostoevsky side of things. I’d go too much into the butthole of the universe.”

If there’s such thing as a Lockwoodism—isn’t there?—this last phrase qualifies. Despite the heavy central theme of chronic illness, there’s a delicious bawdiness to Will There Ever Be Another You, a vulgar juvenilia evoking graffiti-tag genitals or the ding dong ditch scene from Billy Madison. Lookie here: “a little guy who appeared to be penetrating his bagpipes.” Lookie there: “She swung her legs sidesaddle, in case hee vaguna was out.”

Lockwood says she’s often asked about her ability to toggle literary voice on a dime, ricocheting, like an elementary school PhD candidate, between potty humor and profundity. In the hands of a lesser author these metaphorical rooms would be on opposite sides of the manor. Lockwood finds doors and passages where there aren’t any. She says it recalls her coming of age, thoroughly documented in the 2017 memoir Priestdaddy. “Those things were companions,” says Lockwood. “The comedy existed in a very high pitch, but so did the drama. So to me, it’s not an accurate representation of the world not to include both voices.”

The contradictory nature of life’s ephemera—is this not the golden goose of fiction writing? It’s what makes the Lockwood experience thrilling and, at times, destabilizing. Those looking for “plot” will be thwarted here. But with a little digging, it’s clear that Lockwood is writing about something deeper than story, deeper even than her (and, eventually, her husband’s) illness. She’s writing about sanity. About the structure of thought.

It’s toward the end of the novel when Lockwood, teaching classes “as a kind of traveling exhibit,” tells students “to invent a cryptid,” best understood as a myth whose existence can only be verified by one’s own idiosyncratic beliefs. Lockwood’s own cryptid, she writes, lives like a sunspot “in the corner of the eye,” flickering away the moment it warrants focus. “Something in the brain, neurofibrillary. An amyloid plaque.”

In the depths of COVID confusion, Lockwood says her “mad mind” busied itself searching for patterns. “It was seeing connections where perhaps there weren’t any. Dense spider webs, layers of connections everywhere, but not being able to find any meaning in it.” Sanity, she says, is the resolution of such meaning. The pandemic brought many of us to similar brinks. But while Lockwood’s work might unlock a cipher for some, she’s not going into self-help. The success of No One Is Talking About This made her a publicly renowned expert, or at least commentator, on the world wide web. Asked if this new work might cast her in a similar light with regards to illness, Lockwood says, “I doubt it’s going to happen, because I’m describing sensations. My treatment of illness is lyrical. People want illness books to be authoritative.”

It’s true: there’s about as much didactic material here as there is legible narrative. But Lockwood aspires to a few residual insights. For one, she hopes the book inspires folks to buckle down and read Anna Karenina. “I will say to anyone who is like, oh, it’s just about a woman who throws herself under a train, or it’s just a romance, you have no idea how propulsive, how warm, how completely inside the body and the body of society that book is. Will There Ever Be Another You is about the process of putting your mind back together, and your ability, your skill, your thought back together. It really felt like the mushrooms”—hence, Tolstoy—“were the first wave of that.”

There’s a recurring New York Times Book Review (and college entrance essay) question wherein three writers are invited to dinner. So here I sit with Lockwood and Tolstoy, Lockwood explaining, like she did to me, “I just do tiny, tiny, tiny bits” of the mushrooms. No harm, no foul, Leo!

Tolstoy’s beard is in the soup. His beard always ends up in the soup. “It seems to people,” he says, quoting his 1890 essay off the cuff, “that a slight stupefaction, a little darkening of the judgment, cannot have any important influence. But to think so is like supposing that it may harm a watch to be struck against a stone, but that a little dirt introduced into it cannot be harmful…”

I interrupt, plopping a dogeared Anna Karenina upon the table, open to Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin and the falling action of Part Eight.

All that spring he was not himself and lived through terrible moments.

“Without knowing what I am and why I’m here, it is impossible for me to live. And I cannot know that, therefore I cannot live,” Levin would say to himself.

“In infinite time, in the infinity of matter, in infinite space, a bubble organism separates itself, and that bubble holds out for a while and then bursts, and that bubble is—me.”

All those metaphysics, and Tolstoy still refutes a bit of mind expansion? He opens his mouth to speak; the end of Steppenwolf tumbles out. In real life I’m still speaking to Lockwood over the phone. “I got the galleys,” she says of Will There Ever Be Another You, “and I was like, how is this going to feel? It was such a long process, starting in 2020, and it began when I was so incapacitated. In many ways, this is a document that is undocumentable. An impression, or a color palette, or this abstract landscape.”

Lockwood concludes, “It feels like a very mysterious book to me.” What a curious sales pitch! And Tolstoy’s beard, alas, is still in the soup.