September 1 & 8, 2025

Pick of the Issue this week is Alexandra Schwartz’s “Going Viral.” It’s a profile of writer Patricia Lockwood. I’m a fan of Lockwood’s literary criticism. Her “Malfunctioning Sex Robot” (London Review of Books, October 10, 2019), an evisceration of John Updike, is one of my all-time favorite reviews, not because I enjoy seeing Updike shredded, but because Lockwood’s voice in that piece is so brilliantly original and compelling. Schwartz describes Lockwood’s style superbly. She says, “Across genres, her calling card is her unmistakable voice, which sasses and seduces with quick wit and cheerful perversity, pressing the reader close to her comic, confiding ‘I.’ ” She also says, in a line that made me smile, that Lockwood “writes with the impish verve and provocative guilelessness of a peeing cupid.” 

Schwartz delves into Lockwood’s personal life – her battle with Covid (“Her memory had crumbled; she could barely read”), her father (“a guitar-shredding, action-movie-obsessed Midwestern Catholic priest”), her “adolescent misery,” her husband (“forty-four, bald and athletic, with the calm, capable demeanor of Mr. Clean’s laid-back little brother”), her Savannah apartment (“The apartment was in a state of dorm-room disorder: dishes scattered on the kitchen island, books stacked on the coffee table and crammed together on trinket-laden shelves”), her fascination with stones and gems ("She owns three different kinds of blowtorches"), her dosing herself with a quadruple espresso every morning before she starts writing, and so on. Do I need to know all this stuff in order to appreciate Lockwood’s writing? No. But it’s all interesting. I like the ending with Lockwood on the beach, flashing her breasts at two men flying overhead in a helicopter. 

Reading Schwartz’s absorbing piece, I thought of the theory recently espoused by the critic Merve Emre that the writer’s “I” is fiction. In “Going Viral,” Schwartz shows a writer who is, in person, every bit as wild, idiosyncratic, and complex as she is on the page. Schwartz authenticates Lockwood's “I.”