Will There Ever Be Another You

Structured as interconnected chapters that shift between first and third person, the novel follows a writer as illness, grief, and the pandemic era fracture her sense of self, then traces her slow path toward restoration through art, family, and physical making.

The book opens with "Fairy Pools," in which the narrator, her husband, her mother, and her sister travel to Scotland. The trip is shadowed by the recent death of the narrator's niece, referred to only as "the Child," who died the previous January. Her sister sits apart in the rental car, scrolling through photos of the Child on her rose-gold phone. Throughout the journey the narrator collects stones, beginning with a mica-ringed pebble from the North Sea, and thinks about changelings: children taken and replaced by fairy substitutes. At the Fairy Pools on the Isle of Skye, the family hikes through natural bridges and waterfalls, drinking from the deepest pool. Afterward, her sister's phone goes missing. It holds the Child's entire short life in photographs. The narrator searches desperately, but the pools look different on the way down. That evening she falls violently ill at their castle hotel. On the last day, reviewing her photos, she spots the exact moment her sister set down the phone. Once back in range, they call; a woman found the phone and drove it to a police station. The narrator tells her "I love you," and the woman understands perfectly. Before leaving, she places the mica stone in the knothole of a tree without understanding why, and cries when she realizes it is gone. She reflects on an Exchange between this life and the next: You can only walk through the world once.

In "The Changeling," the narration shifts to third person. The narrator has been sick with a fever for forty-eight days. The illness, clearly COVID-19 though never named, has replaced her sense of self. Her head is shaved, her tongue purple from gentian violet (a topical antiseptic), and she keeps a secret "mad notebook" documenting her altered state. She catalogs cognitive symptoms: forgotten multiplication tables, inability to recall names, and a feeling she calls "Who Foot Is That." She writes about her father, a Catholic priest saying illegal Masses in Kansas City, and about "gold Heidi," a writer with whom she is developing a television show about her life. She discovers at three a.m. that a key word in her notebook is wrong, illustrating how the illness has scrambled her facility with language. She keeps a running list of synonyms for places, rebuilding language from scratch. She recalls her brother Daniel's crisis: He called her for help one night, but she was sleeping, and their father knelt over him and stopped the bleeding. She connects a knockoff Cabbage Patch Kid from childhood, a doll with no birth certificate, to her feeling of having been replaced by the illness. At the neurologist's office, she laughs at slides of her brain, and the examination blurs into memories of her childhood creek in Hamilton County, Ohio. A new nephew sits on her lap. She whispers "Say Dennis," a name she has privately considered for herself, and the baby achieves recognition, rippling like a pond.

The narration returns to first person in Part Two. In "Presence," the narrator describes a new condition: when she witnesses any living thing in motion, a "small body of sensation" is created inside her. In "The Artist Is Present," she recounts the absurdities of promoting her novel while still ill. On January 6, the crowd storms the Capitol while she is getting a haircut. In London for a literary prize, she meets Susanna, a writer who experienced a similar post-viral illness, spending ten years in a dark room. The novelist John Lanchester quotes King Lear, and they say the last "never" together. She cries, and later cries remembering it.

In "Hashish in Marseilles," she gives weekly literature classes to her niece Angel, her older sister Christina's eldest daughter, who has been homeschooled. The narrator microdoses mushrooms in tea, which grant her forty-eight-hour windows of normalcy. In "Mr. Tolstoy, You're Driving Me Mad," structured as a mushroom diary, she reads Anna Karenina under psilocybin, meditating on Anna's directness versus social convention and the candle by which Anna's death is seen.

"The Wheatfield" gestures toward a trauma the narrator does not fully detail: her father once invited an "old student" to stay in the family home, and something happened to her upstairs instead of higher education. In "Schutzenfest," she visits her father in Ohio. At a German-American festival, he panics at lightning and retreats to his car; her mother reports he is remembering Caddyshack, not a real event. The TV show will not be picked up.

In "Shakespeare's Wife," a famous woman wants to adapt the narrator's work for film. They both know the book is unfilmable because it contains a baby who cannot be depicted, but the woman is brave. The narrator considers what it would mean to hold the baby onstage every night and carries a stone the woman gave her, "which claimed to connect heaven and earth."

"Boys Over Flowers" follows the narrator and her husband watching Korean dramas, which restore her ability to process narrative and recognize faces. But her husband's health fails: He collapses on a plane, then again at JFK. When he is strapped to a stretcher, every gesture is gone from her body. She looks at him and he is holding up finger hearts.

Part Three opens with her husband's medical crisis. In "Life-and-Death," his first laparoscopic surgery goes well, but he hemorrhages twice in the night, requiring emergency open surgery. On morphine and fentanyl, he develops a delirium cosmology of colored layers: the Yellow Layer, the Fish Layer, the Spirit Layer, the God Layer. After twelve days they are told to leave; they have become "Disaster People." In "The Wound," the narrator changes his dressings daily for forty-seven days, discovering what the inside of her husband looks like: red layers, a taut opening, inner glistening. The wound becomes contested territory, each of them claiming it. She reads Proust translated by Lydia Davis, noting that those sentences also have slits and stitches. Two hundred days later, in bed, he guides her hand to his scar.

In "The Scrapers," DNA ancestry results lead the narrator back to her family's history on Cincinnati's West Side: a great-great-uncle named BLASIUS who ran a speakeasy, a grandmother who experienced a period of madness and then chose to recover, a grandfather classified 4-F (a military draft-exempt classification) for too few teeth. She is the sole receptacle for this family legend.

"Beginning Metals" traces her enrollment in a metalsmithing class, where she brings twenty years of scrap silver and discovers that the compelling thing is holding the flame steady, watching the metal relax and shimmer. She fashions a necklace with a cabochon, a polished fossil coral stone, for Angel, who touches it like a talisman. Later, at the beach, Angel slips her hand into the narrator's, a rare gesture of contact. In "The Art of Biography," the narrator attends a conference in Lisbon, meeting Teresa, a Portuguese poet who has also given up poetry. In "The Ranking of the Arts," during a Paris residency, her husband's medication makes him write poetry again for the first time in twenty years, composing a poem whose last line reads, "And everywhere you touched, a garden opened." He considers a tattoo of long flowers on the scar.

The epilogue brings the narrator to the Florida Keys, where her symptoms suddenly disappear. She encounters what she calls MANGRO, her invented cryptid: a tangle among mangrove roots, a connected thought, not something wrong with the brain but the brain itself. She and her husband visit a boneyard beach where dead trees stand touched to silver. The book closes with the narrator at a podium, a Band-Aid on her first finger, quoting from a guidebook that fish use disasters as temporary reefs: an image of damage becoming the structure on which new life grows.