Are You Experienced? Are You Confused?

Will There Ever Be Another You
by Patricia Lockwood
Riverhead, 256 pp., $29

THERE IS NOTHING MORE TEDIOUS THAN LISTENING to someone earnestly explain to you the insights they had while on a mushroom trip. I shall illustrate.

Once, while deep in the embrace of Psilocybe cubensis, I discovered the funniest thing in the world, a joke that may very well undergird all of creation. I did what I always do when I have a major epiphany: call my old buddy Joel. He patiently listened as I explained: What if you had a friend who was deeply into the occult, but it turned out he was really Tom Bombadil? (You know, from The Lord of the Rings?) The joke is extraordinarily funny in itself, of course, but it gets even funnier when you take into account the kind of relationship my friend and I have. You see, I often play to the type of the somewhat-unstable pal who occasionally Delves Too Greedily into forbidden knowledge. He, for the purposes of this analogy, is the relatively normal guy who—

I will stop here, because I think my point has been made, and because I want only to invoke the concept of tedium, not subject you to it. My friend very kindly listened to me for a while before telling me had had to go take care of his kids. I then left him a series of harmlessly deranged voicemails. He informs me these were very funny and not at all worrying.

I say all this because if you’ve never had the tiresome experience of listening at length to a friend whose consumption of psychoactive substances has filled their mind with dreams of absolute reality, Patricia Lockwood’s newest novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, will serve as a decent proxy.

Styled as a novel, the book is essentially a memoir covering several disparate episodes: Lockwood’s time dealing with the effervescent-yet-dreadful brain fog of long COVID, the identity-shattering experience of caring for her very ill spouse, and, yes, the time she did a bunch of psychedelics while trying to make sense of classic literature. (“The summer before, I had tried to rewire my brain with mushrooms, but succeeded mainly in becoming temporarily psychic and reading Anna Karenina so hard I almost died.”) It is frequently funny, and it is occasionally beautiful, but after reaching the end of