'I was in God's gang back in the day; it was like a refuge, you didn't have to be hot!'

Patricia Lockwood - aka the Poet Laureate of Twitter - talks to Annabel Nugent about writing her second novel, quitting social media, and why she was right about Donald Trump

- Annabel Nugent

Meeting the author Patricia Lockwood is a lot like reading her books: warm and enveloping. Batting my hand away in favour of a hug, she sits down and immediately orders a litre bottle of still

water to go with her litre bottle of sparkling. “I need one to just chug,” she explains. When it arrives seconds later, she raises them both to her waiting mouth and mimes guzzling, tongue out, like an aspiring frat bro or a newborn calf. “Double water,” she enthuses, wild-eyed in the bar of a fancy hotel.

At 43, Lockwood is the only author ever to be shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She’s also the only one to have started their career on Twitter, writing exceptional sexts like “I am a Dan Brown novel and you do me in my plot-hole.” If you’re to believe her peers, she’s the voice of her generation. It’s an epithet not without reason: you’d be hard-pressed to find a more sincere portrait of online life than her 2021 novel No One Is Talking About This, or a memoir as screwy and sublime as 2017’s Priestdaddy, which drew from the abnormally rich reservoir of her childhood in the Midwest as the daughter of a guitar-shredding, trouser-hating Catholic priest.

A humorist in the vein of David Sedaris, Lockwood is singular, her antennae tuned to a different frequency than the rest of us. What, then, when those antennae falter? When they snap, suddenly and catastrophically? That is what happened in 2021, when she got Covid and fell into a sort of lunacy. She describes the period as one of mental and physical disorientation that resembled something like a years-long stroke. Her thoughts scrambled into word soup. Her mind loosened from its peel like a slick banana.

Lockwood wrote her new novel,