1. Priest Daddy Book
2. Patricia Lockwood Author

'I like to think I sprang from a head; I like to think the head was mine,' writes Patricia Lockwood in Priestdaddy, her memoir of growing up with a Catholic priest for a father.

• You’re going to read Patricia Lockwood’s memoir, Priestdaddy—we both know that already.You’re going to read it because you loved “The Rape Joke,” and because you loved the collection in which it lives, Motherland, Fatherland, Homelandsexuals, and because you loved all the irreverent weirdness in those pages (Walt Whitman’s tit-pics, especially), you were thrilled to hear Lockwood.
• Priestdaddy Patricia Lockwood Review by Kelly Blewett. Some people are born to write, and one of those people is Patricia Lockwood, who knew at age 6 that she would be a poet. In the final chapter of Priestdaddy, her debut memoir, Lockwood—whose poem “Rape Joke” won her a Pushcart Prize in 2015—marvels at her own forcefulness.

Priestdaddy is a memoir by American poetPatricia Lockwood.^[1] It was named one of the 10 best books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review and was awarded the 2018 Thurber Prize for American Humor.^[2] In 2019, the Times included the book on its list 'The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years,'^[3] and The Guardian named it one of the 100 best books of the 21st century.^[4]

Development and publication history[edit]

Lockwood began writing the book shortly after she and her husband, owing to financial difficulty and illness, moved back to live with her parents in her father's rectory.^[5] The 352-page memoir was published May 2, 2017 by the Riverhead imprint of Penguin Random House.^[6] In July 2017, Imagine Entertainment announced it had optioned Priestdaddy for development as a limited TV series.^[7]

Content and style[edit]

In Priestdaddy, Lockwood recounts her upbringing as the daughter of a married Lutheran minister who converted to Catholicism, becoming one of the few married Catholic priests. The book chronicles her return as an adult to live in her father's rectory and deals with issues of family, belief, belonging, and adulthood. Writing in The Chicago Tribune, Kathleen Rooney described Priestdaddy as 'an unsparing yet ultimately affectionate portrait of faith and family.'^[8]The Guardian called it a 'dazzling comic memoir.'^[9]

Reception[edit]

Priestdaddy was reviewed widely and favorably,^[10][11] with particular praise for Lockwood's wit and the 'pleasure in her line-by-line writing; the author can describe even a seminarian’s ordination ceremony in a colorful, unexpected way, her prose dyed with bizarre sexuality, religious eroticism, and slapstick timing' (Laura Adamczyk writing at The A.V. Club).^[5] Rooney likewise said Lockwood's book displayed 'the same offbeat intelligence, comic timing, gimlet skill for observation and verbal dexterity that she uses in both her poetry and her tweets.' In The New York Times, Dwight Garner called Priestdaddy “electric,” 'consistently alive with feeling,” and Lockwood's father Greg 'one of the great characters of this nonfiction decade.'^[12] Writing for Playboy, James Yeh dubbed it 'a powerful true story from one of America’s most relevant and funniest writers,' The New Yorker praised the book as 'a vivid, unrelentingly funny memoir ... shot through with surprises and revelations,'^[13] and The Atlantic lauded it as 'a deliciously old-school, big-R Romantic endeavor.'^[14] Gemma Sieff, writing for The New York Times Book Review, concluded the memoir positioned Lockwood as 'a formidably gifted writer who can do pretty much anything she pleases.'^[15]

Awards[edit]

Priestdaddy was named one of the 10 best books of 2017 by The New York Times, one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Sunday Times, The Guardian,^[16]The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York, Elle, NPR, Amazon, and Publishers Weekly, among others, and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.^[17]Priestdaddy was awarded the 2018 Thurber Prize for American Humor.^[18]

References[edit]

1. ^'The 10 Best Books of 2017'. The New York Times. Retrieved 2017-12-04.
2. ^'2018 THURBER PRIZE FOR AMERICAN HUMOR WINNER'. Thurber House. Retrieved 2018-12-06.
3. ^'The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years'. The New York Times. Retrieved 2019-06-26.
4. ^'The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century'. The Guardian. Retrieved 2020-09-14.
5. ^ ^abAdamczyk, Laura (1 May 2017). 'Perverted poet Patricia Lockwood runs wild in the memoir Priestdaddy'. The A.V. Club. Retrieved 8 May 2017.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
6. ^'PRIESTDADDY by Patricia Lockwood'. Kirkus Reviews. March 7, 2017. Retrieved 8 May 2017.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
7. ^Gajewski, Ryan. 'Patricia Lockwood's Memoir 'Priestdaddy' Optioned by Imagine Television'. The Wrap. Retrieved 6 July 2017.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
8. ^Rooney, Kathleen (May 1, 2017). 'Patricia Lockwood's memoir, 'Priestdaddy,' is smart, funny and irreverent'. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 8 May 2017.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
9. ^Laity, Paul (27 April 2017). 'Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood review – a dazzling comic memoir'. The Guardian. Retrieved 8 May 2017.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
10. ^Heing, Bridey (May 4, 2017). 'The Good, the Bad and the Hilariously Filthy: Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood'. Paste Magazine. Retrieved 2017-06-10.
11. ^Fallon, Claire (2017-05-01). ''Priestdaddy' Takes On Priesthood, Fatherhood And The Patriarchy'. Huffington Post. Retrieved 2017-06-10.
12. ^Garner, Dwight (3 May 2017). 'Patricia Lockwood Is a Priest's Child (Really), but 'From the Devil''. The New York Times. Retrieved 8 May 2017.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
13. ^'Briefly Noted'. The New Yorker. Retrieved 2017-06-02.
14. ^'Patricia Lockwood Is a Poet on the Edge'. The Atlantic. Retrieved 2017-11-02.
15. ^'A Poet's Loving Take on Her Unorthodox Catholic Family'. The New York Times. Retrieved 2017-06-12.
16. ^'100 Best Books of the 21st Century'. Retrieved December 8, 2019.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
17. ^'The 20 Best Books of 2017, According to Amazon's Editors'. Bustle. Retrieved 2017-11-08.
18. ^'2018 THURBER PRIZE FOR AMERICAN HUMOR WINNER'. Thurber House. Retrieved 2018-12-06.

On page 48 of her new memoir of growing up in the Catholic Church, Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood’s husband, Jason, undergoes surgery for a rare type of cataracts–to quote his own description of the operation to Lockwood’s alarmed mother, the surgeon slices open the surface of his eye, then uses “a little jackhammer to blast apart the old lenses so they can insert the artificial ones”. Except the surgery goes wrong: Jason’s right eye has “gone into Wonderland”, his perception of colours and distances is strangely warped, the city now looks like “a painting before the invention of perspective”. So Jason goes back to the doctor, who removes the new lenses and replaces them with a different kind. This operation is a success, “but the valley between what he saw before and what he saw now was too wide. It was like waking up in the morning to find that English had rearranged itself, or that all pretty women had been scrambled into Picassos.”

I had a somewhat comparable experience reading this book. The way Lockwood bends language, it feels like she reconfigures the very fabric of reality, shifting our universe into a parallel dimension where things are way stranger… and, often, hornier. In this new dimension, business men become jizzness men, saxophones are revealed as trumpets that want to blow themselves, men keep nine thousand pounds of bees as memoriams for their dead father, serious conversations are held about the theological significance of the Transformers movies. In a beautiful passage, Lockwood–until Priestdaddy best known for her poems and sexts–traces the origins of her verbal gifts to some form of “ADD” that, as a child, allowed her to only read the surface of words, and their real hearts, but not the actual information they contained: the word “violinist” was, to her, “a fig cut in half”; “calamity” was “alarm bells”; “word” was “a blond hostess in a spangled dress turning black and white letters over one by one”. Though she doesn’t explicitly say so herself, something similar appears to have persisted, as few things survive unscathed from an encounter with her polymorphously perverse brain.

But it’s true, it’s all true. Lockwood’s father, the titular Priestdaddy, really did convert from atheism to Lutheranism in a submarine, after watching The Exorcist seventy-two times; he really did become a Catholic priest, by special Vatican dispensation, when he decided Lutheranism wasn’t hardcore enough, despite the fact he was married and had five kids; he really does love shredding his guitar, lounging around in his underwear, and using a special Rag to wash his legs. Lockwood’s mother really does trawl the internet in search of stories of people who have died horribly (“‘Promise me one thing, Tricia’, she begs me. ‘Promise me you will never play that deadly game called Chubby Bunny.'”); she really does call incompetent drivers things like Mr. Silver Dildo (“That silver car is his dildo, Tricia,’ she says. ‘He’s compensating with that car.'”).

Ten pages into this strange, strange world, I almost gave up. I thought it might be too much. Could I really withstand a further 320 pages of Lockwood’s constant assault on reality as I knew it? Surely there are health risks–surely my own DNA could be altered. Also–ever since reading the only Discworld novel I’ve ever read–Guards! Guards!–I’ve harboured a deep suspicion for “funny” books, as, despite objectively recognising its funniness, that book, so universally beloved, never once made me laugh aloud, and, by the end, left me feeling hollow, headachy, and bemused. I assumed that, for me, comedy was a thing that only worked if shared with others, and would therefore work best in a film, tv show, or podcast, anything that could be shared with someone else, and, in a book, only if I read it aloud to one or more people. But, despite these misgivings, I went ahead and read another ten pages of Priestdaddy… and I was hooked. And even laughed aloud, on several occasions. Finally, I’d found my brand of literary humour!

Priest Daddy Book

But lest you think this book is a relentless orgy of surreal comedy, Lockwood also knows how to tackle serious subjects–how to use her literary superpowers for good. In particular, Lockwood devotes many pages to the Catholic Church and its relationship with pedophilia. After meeting a bishop her parents described as “a living saint”, Lockwood decides to google him, and discovers he had actually been “the first American bishop to be criminally charged for failing to report suspected child abuse”. This leads Lockwood to reminisce about all those “snippets” she’d heard floating around the house as a child, about computers being confiscated, about this or that priest being sent away, this or that priest being ordered not to interact with children. Her confusion when the first big scandals broke in 2002–she’d assumed everyone knew. And even now, she writes, part of her still feels traitorous talking about these things, breaking the code of silence. “All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of the we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.”

Patricia Lockwood Author

Priestdaddy is one of the best books I’ve read this year, certainly the funniest I’ve read in a long time. It’s been very hard to resist the urge not to replace this whole review with a list of my favourite quotes and passages, and indeed I think this is the review with the heaviest use of quotes I’ve ever written. But Lockwood’s language is like nothing else on Earth, and not using quotes would have been like describing new species of flora and fauna without providing photos.