Priestdaddy: A Memoir

“I'm not interested in heaven unless my anger gets to go there too. I'm not interested in a happy eternity unless I get to spend an eternity on anger first. Let me speak for the meek and say that we don't want the earth, if that's where all the bodies are buried. If we are resurrected at the end of the world, I want us to assemble with a military click, I want us to come together as an army against what happened to us here. I want us to bring down the enemy of our suffering once and for all, and I want us to loot the pockets, and I want us to take baths in the blood.”

Whoa! Don't be fooled by the reviews that extol the comedic aspect of this book. Lockwood is one angry writer who crosses the fine line between humor and hysteria with show more her jumbled and irreverant reflections on her quirky upbringing and Catholicism in general. She states that she was raised in an alternate reality and "her childhood sky was green". One of the pivotal events of her childhood is when her priest father got tired of the grape juice the Lutheran church offered and went for the Catholic wine. To say she felt let down by her father putting his religion before family is putting it mildly. Her rebellion was mostly in her poetry and journal writing until she underwent two major traumas as a teenager that were minimized by her parents, especially her father.. The rage came out in her poetry and, to a lesser extent, when she married a young man she met through the internet.

There are many laugh-out-loud experiences in this book, but knowing her history makes me realize that bawdy humor is how Lockwood copes with pain. It seems she takes pride in being known as "The Smutty Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, KS." I suggest if you want to discover her inner pain just google "Rape Joke" to know how broken she is.

Ordinarily, I would be offended by the nature of some of her remarks; however, her use of language in general is amazing and full of memorable imagery. Poetry is her first love and she explains her process to her mother in these words: "…unfocus your vision like you're trying to see a Magic Eye and loosen up your hearing like you're trying to understand Donald Duck." (133) She has a special bond with her mother who accepts her as she is and is thrilled to be quoted in this book. Even her father gave the blessing so to speak. Which leads me to the conclusion that, although she grew up with a weird dad and a crazy mom and they made some mistakes, there is no mistaking the underlying love in this book. One just has to read deeply and in between the lines of "indelicate" language to find it. show less

Reading this book is like hanging out with a friend who is unafraid to be their unapologetic, problematic self with you. Lockwood’s gift for metaphors that stretch your mind without becoming academic, combined with her unpretentious sense of humor, make her narration addictive. Her life story is not told in a way where she recites facts with clarity or attempts to impart a meaningful picture of life as the daughter of a priest. Rather, she tells her story in a way that makes the reader part of her journey to understand how to live with a past that is fraught, sometimes painful, and also cherished.

The end of the book sort of putters off, but that also makes sense. Lockwood is still young, and this book reflects her youth. But she show more grapples with existence and abortion and religion and feminism and popular culture in a powerful way that I can not compare to anyone else. Her writing makes me hopeful about the world; she is irreverent, funny, and is respectful and cognizant of the characters in her memoir. I have always loved her Twitter account, and this book proves that she is capable of so much more than fleeting, beautifully random and sometimes offensive one-liners. show less

Priestdaddy is Patricia Lockwood's account of her childhood as the daughter of a Catholic priest, through the framing device of the year she and her husband moved in with her family. Lockwood's father is a larger-than-life character, a manly man of out-sized opinions who dominates every room he's in. Her mother is also colorful, a good Catholic wife with a passion for the ways the world can injure or even kill you.

Lockwood is a poet with a fierce sense of humor and both her facility with language and her ability to write an uproariously hilarious scene are integral to this memoir. It's a wonderful balancing act between the accounts of very funny things that happened, accounts of things that are very funny because of how Lockwood tells show more the story, and accounts of how her childhood shaped who she is as an adult, not all for the good. She has a wonderful, and wonderfully easy-going husband whose presence grounds both her and this book.

Here's her description of her father's guitar playing.

It sounds like a whole band dying in a plane crash in the year 1972. He plays the guitar like he's trying to take off women's jeans, or he's standing nude in the middle of a thunderstorm and calling down lightening to strike his pecs. . .

Some people are, through whatever mystifying means, able to make the guitar talk. My father can't do that, but he can do the following:

1. Make the guitar squeal
2. Make the guitar say no
3. Make the guitar falsely confess to murder
4. Make the guitar stage a filibuster where it reads The Hunt for Red October out loud. show less

Priestdaddy did finally get LOL funny around page 75, as opposed to wry or clever which it was before that. After the humorous point in the book, the author seemed to relax and get lyrical. She revealed herself to be the author of the free verse poem, "Rape Joke" that went viral 7 or 8 years ago now, and I started to pay more attention.

Much of the book dragged for me, seeming to be too vague or too specific, and I wondered whether I am too old (the author is half my age) or too non-Roman Catholic (as a lapsed Congregationalist) for it to resonate with me. But then she writes passages like this:

"I know all women are supposed to be strong enough now to strangle presidents and patriarchies between their powerful thighs, but it doesn't work show more that way. Many of us were actually affected, by male systems and male anger, in ways we cannot always articulate or overcome. Sometimes, when the ceiling seems especially low and the past especially close, I think to myself, I did not make it out. I am still there in that place of diminishment, where that voice an octave deeper than mine is telling me what I am."

In sum: the brilliant parts vastly outweighed the meh parts for me. show less

Patricia Lockwood's father is a Catholic priest. Which is less scandalous than it sounds: apparently there's a loophole that means under a very particular set of odd circumstances, it's permissible for a priest to be married. That's not the only way her dad is weird, though. He's chock-full of eccentricities that I kept wanting to find entertaining, but which are mostly just kind of awful. Her mother's a hoot, though.

Anyway, in this memoir Lockwood writes about her experiences of growing up in this household and this church, about returning to live with her parents again for a while as an adult, about her very complicated feelings about Catholicism, and about her own calling as a poet.

Her writing is weird, vivid, thoughtful, frequently show more hilarious, sometimes moving, sometimes profound and generally amazing in ways that don't necessarily seem like they should work, but really really do. I'm not sure quite what I expected from it going in, but what I got was nothing I could have anticipated, and it was kind of fascinating. show less

Recommended by my daughter, PRIESTDADDY is a winner. Patricia Lockwood's memoir ranges from moving to hilarious to profound, as she tells of growing up, the second of five children, in various rectories around the Midwest and south. It is also a meticulously recorded look at her parents' life and marriage. Greg and Karen married young, and he did a hitch in the navy as a submariner. He told of how, deep in the ocean, he and his crewmates watched THE EXORCIST numerous times, which he said prompted a religious vocation. Initially he was a Lutheran minister, then he converted to Catholicism and, under a little known papal loophole, was ordained a priest. Yes, a married priest with five kids!

Lockwood, who is a poet (and it shows, and to her show more advantage) frames her story in a year in which she and her husband, flat broke, were forced to move back in with her parents, not always a comfortable fit. They also shared the house with "the seminarian," who is something of a character himself. But not nearly as much as the titular character, who is something of a family despot, a loud "blusterer" who blasts - "shreds?" - electric guitar riffs from his room, and enjoys lounging around the house clad only in his boxers watching violent action-thrillers on TV. To his credit, he is always available to his parishioners in times of need or trouble. He is also of a very conservative, right-leaning bent, even to picketing abortion clinics (with wife and children in tow) and supporting a disgraced bishop who for years shifted and hid priests guilty of sexual abuse of children. The author herself remembers a priest who was a frequent visitor to their house, who held her on his lap and stroked her hair, "mansplaining" to her uncomfortable mother that "children need to be touched." (Her mother finally banned the priest from their home.)

I haven't even begun to touch the surface of all that Patricia Lockwood covers in this marvelous memoir of her unusual Catholic childhood, her long suffering mother and her domineering PRIESTDADDY. But take my word for it. It's a real winner. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

Patricia Lockwood is in the unusual position of being the daughter of a Catholic priest. (Allowed as kind of a transfer arrangement between religions.) She tells of her family life - both as a child and adult - the church and what it's like for women involved in the Catholic tradition, and how it has shaped her a person, woman, and writer.

It's also very funny. On Catholic radio:
"It's just a bunch of call-in shows where people talk about whether something is a sin or not, and they almost always decide that it is, in fact, a sin."
And: "My own Bible study mostly consisted of reading and re-reading all the stories about whores, and the donkey emissions that they desired."

She writes honestly and humorously about her family and herself. show more Lockwood's writing is alive and even shimmering at times, her poetry background coming through clearly. This is one of those books I read in day - it just kept pulling me along. show less