Patricia Lockwood Books in Order

Patricia Lockwood was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and grew up moving through the Midwest, a region she has written about with equal parts exasperation and affection. Her childhood was shaped by a large family, a serious religious world, and a father whose path from Lutheran minister to Catholic priest made home life anything but ordinary.

She began writing poetry when she was eight.

Early on, poems gave her a way to follow a thought wherever it went, from a sharp observation to a joke to something unexpectedly tender. That freedom still runs through her work, even when she is writing a novel or memoir.

Before she became widely known for books, Lockwood found a large audience online through strange, deadpan posts and comic “sexts.” They were short, mischievous, and often very weird, but they also showed how much she could do with a sudden change in tone.

She did not leave poetry behind.

Her first collection, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, arrived in 2012. The poems mix elaborate titles, cartoon logic, sex, animals, pop culture, and odd little turns of phrase. Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals followed in 2014, pushing into questions of gender, power, nationalism, the natural world, and American absurdity. Neither collection asks readers to keep a straight face for long.

In Priestdaddy, published in 2017, Lockwood turned toward family history. The memoir begins when financial strain and a medical crisis send her and her husband back to live in the rectory where her parents live. From there, she looks back at her father, Father Greg, and the faith-filled, chaotic childhood that formed her. The book won the Thurber Prize for American Humor, but its family portrait has real warmth beneath the jokes.

Her first novel, No One Is Talking About This, came out in 2021. Its unnamed central character is deeply caught up in an online world called the portal, where memes, outrage, politics, and jokes rush past without pause. A message from home breaks that rhythm, and the novel makes room for grief, care, and the limits of digital language. It was a Booker Prize finalist and won the Dylan Thomas Prize.

Will There Ever Be Another You, published in 2025, follows a woman whose mind and daily life are thrown off course by a mysterious illness during the pandemic. Lockwood uses the instability of illness as part of the book’s form, letting memory, fear, love, and dark humor jostle together. It continues her interest in what happens when a self has to make sense of a world that no longer feels reliable.

Across poems, fiction, memoir, and essays, Lockwood returns to bodies, belief, family, internet life, and the strange scripts people inherit about sex and identity. Her narrators and speakers often notice the ridiculous thing first. Then the emotional fact sneaks in. She is also a contributing editor at the London Review of Books and lives in Savannah, Georgia.