Priestdaddy
A Memoir
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3.8 • 17 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
'Priestdaddy caused a sensation when it hit bookshelves in 2017' Vogue
'Glorious' Sunday Times
'Laugh-out-loud funny' The Times
'Extraordinary' Observer
'Exceptional' Telegraph
'Electric' New York Times
'Snort-out-loud' Financial Times
'Dazzling' Guardian
'Do yourself a favour and read this memoir!' BookPage
The childhood of Patricia Lockwood, the poet dubbed 'The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas' by The New York Times, was unusual in many respects. There was the location: an impoverished, nuclear waste-riddled area of the American Midwest. There was her mother, a woman who speaks almost entirely in strange riddles and arnings of impending danger. Above all, there was her gun-toting, guitar-riffing, frequently semi-naked father, who underwent a religious conversion on a submarine and found a loophole which saw him approved for the Catholic priesthood by the future Pope Benedict XVI, despite already having a wife and children.
When an unexpected crisis forces Lockwood and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, she must learn to live again with the family's simmering madness, and to reckon with the dark side of her religious upbringing. Pivoting from the raunchy to the sublime, from the comic to the serious, Priestdaddy is an unforgettable story of how we balance tradition against hard-won identity - and of how, having journeyed in the underworld, we can emerge with our levity and our sense of justice intact.
'Destined to be a classic . . . this year's must-read memoir' Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club
'Irrepressible . . . joyous, funny and filthy . . . Lockwood blows the roof off every paragraph' Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine
'Beautiful, funny and poignant. I wish I'd written this book' Jenny Lawson, author of Furiously Happy
'A revelatory debut . . . Lockwood's prose is nothing short of ecstatic . . . her portrait of her epically eccentric family is funny, warm, and stuffed to bursting with emotional insight' Joss Whedon
'Praise God, this is why books were invented' Emily Berry, author of Dear Boy and Stranger, Baby
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Equipped with acerbic wit and a keen eye for raunchy detail, poet Lockwood (Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals) ventures into nonfiction with this wickedly funny memoir about moving back in with her parents. For eight months in 2013, Lockwood and her husband, Jason, moved back to Kansas City to live in her childhood home. It's a situation colored in no small way by the presence of Lockwood's larger-than-life family, particularly her father, a practicing (and, yes, married) Catholic priest, who loves sports cars and guns and watches action movies in his underwear, and mother, a sweetly earnest, hyperactive woman whose "preferred erotica on the internet German Christmas handcraft." The book includes flashbacks to Lockwood's childhood and adolescence as she grapples with her religious upbringing and finds refuge in the written word. The result is Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood meets David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day, with a poetic twist.
Customer Reviews
Choppy
3.5 stars
Author
American. Poet and essayist. Her first poetry collection Balloon Pop Outlaw Black (2012) was widely praised, and her second, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, was a 2014 New York Times Notable Book. This memoir was named one of the 10 best books of 2017 by The New York Times. Since 2019, she has been a contributing editor for The London Review of Books. Kirkus Reviews has called Lockwood "our guide to moving beyond thinking of the internet as a thing apart from real lives and real art," whatever that means. Her highly anticipated debut novel No One Is Talking About This, which was released early 2021 in the US, won't be in Oz till May*. I should read Priestdaddy first, having missed it first time around.
Summary
The author is 30 when she and hubby are rendered skint by the cost of major health care procedure and move from Savannah, GA back to her parents' home in Kansas City, MO. Her Mum of Irish Catholic stock married a non-believer husband only to see him find God while on duty in Naval submarine (they showed the movie The Exorcist 74 times during one voyage). He came home and became a Lutheran pastor while his wife pumped out kids. Lutheranism wasn't enough though and he eventually converted to Catholicism, taking advantage of a ruling by Pope Benedict that ordained Protestant ministers could keep their wives and kids and still be ordained in the Catholic church (after psychological screening. And payment of a fee, no doubt.). Dad's also a pro-gun, anti-Democrat (“My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur”), who is fond of electric guitars and prancing about the house in only his underwear. And that's just a sample of the material Ms Lockwood has to work with, or, some might say, work over.
Writing
Choppy. Ms L's poetic bent allows her to create carefully polished sentences and paragraphs, which she lets fall where they may. The results are sometimes spectacular, sometimes less so. In between anecdotes and memories, which can be laugh out loud funny, she serves up intricately crafted personal philosophy and plenty more that are just setting up a punchline. It all becomes a blur after a while.
Bottom line
Love it or hate it, and the reviews I've read suggest opinions are polarised, this is a wild ride. Ms L is clearly a talented artist, but spent more time showing off than she needed to
* now mid-February
Verbal diarrhoea
Nothing more to add really. Watch TV it's about the same as this drivel