Patricia Lockwood

Isaw​ the end of it then, I mean the end of it as it was, as my mother told the story of my father’s sudden deafness. The turn towards the deer in the snow, two pairs of black eyes, the earplugs falling out soundlessly, the shot – then the line on his hearing chart falling off a cliff at a thousand decibels.

It was our first visit to Kansas City since before the election and the...

Aseries​ of haphazard walking errands led to me wandering downtown, lugging a tub of CBD gummies, a multipack of ultra-absorbent tampons and a 10 lb biography of Sylvia Plath. That seemed correct, a spontaneous piece of performance art. I had heard Heather Clark, the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, speak at a conference on biography the previous spring. I...

Tell me​ your mystic and I will tell you who you are. The Little Flower, she of the astonishing self-love? Hildegard of Bingen, glowing like rock crystal, or Simone Weil, picking herself like a scab? Teresa of Avila, a chilly forehead and a warm thigh, or St Simeon, being written by the tip of his stylus? You may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black...

We​ had been watching The X-Files at a rate of about two episodes a year; I expected to be finished when I was approximately 114 and living in a small fishing village in Japan. But ever since my husband lost half of his blood volume after a bowel resection in 2022, after the 47 days in the desert during which I personally tended his wound, the calendar had become meaningless, as had numbers....

An eldest sister​ was born in the North, daughter of a judge who never lied and a scholar who always did. That was A.S. Byatt. Christened Susan, what on earth, she was later known as Dame Antonia. Byatt wrote about sugar and snails and sex cults and the dead children of children’s book authors. She wrote about William Morris and Mariano Fortuny. She wrote about Cambridge, where she and...