“The working title is Priestdaddy,” I say, determined to make a totally clean breast of it. Not that my father believes a breast can ever be clean. “Wait till The New York Times gets a load of that,” he says evilly. Then, turning his attention back to the football game, he bellows, “C’MON ANDY!” and kicks a meaty leg in the air. He refers to all athletes by their first names, as if they are his sons.
Fast on the heels of reading No One Is Talking About This, the Man Booker-shortlisted novel based on some of Patricia Lockwood’s own experiences, I picked up her well-regarded memoir Priestdaddy, and it was incredibly illuminating to read these in tandem: as different as these two works are (Priestdaddy is much funnier and observant), it seems obvious now how the person with this background wrote that novel. To briefly summarise: Lockwood’s father received a rare dispensation to become a Catholic priest after already being married and having started a family, so she and her four siblings lived in a series of rectories as her father moved from parish to parish, her devoted mother doing her best to turn these dreary boxes into family homes. Lockwood’s father was a boorish, chauvinistic, guitar-wailing, gun-toting iron fist in a lace-trimmed cassock, her mother a submissive worrywart, and as soon as she could, Lockwood ran away with a like-minded sensitive soul whom she met on the internet. After a decade away, however, an expensive health crisis forced Lockwood and her husband to return to the family home for eight months, and during that time, she recorded her parents’ words in the present, interspersed with her own memories from the past. Primarily known as a poet, Lockwood’s writing is flush with amusing metaphors and acerbic asides (which I see some reviewers found overwhelming) and I found this whole memoir to be interesting, compelling, and well-written.
I sometimes wish my childhood had been less obsessed with the question of why we are here. But that must be the question of any childhood. To write about your mother and father is to tell the story of your own close call, to count all the ways you never should have existed. To write about home is to write about how you dropped from space, dragging ellipses behind you like a comet, and how you entered your country and state and city, and finally your four-cornered house, and finally your mother's body and finally your own. From the galaxy to the grain and back again. From the fingerprint to the grand design. Despite all the conspiracies of the universe, we are here; every moment we are here we arrive.
Lockwood’s mother — devout Catholic, supportive matriarch, constantly searching the internet for new dangers to worry over — sounds like an interesting character, but it’s her father — sprawled on the couch in see-through boxers as he yells at the macho movies on the television — who steals every scene in which he appears. And he’s a priest? (I have no idea how this book makes no commentary, or includes no reactions from new parishioners, on just how weird and unusual this situation is; it just is what it is.) A typical observation:
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. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun. Consequently our own soft sinner, a soulful snowshoe named Alice, will stay shut in the bedroom upstairs, padding back and forth on cashmere paws, campaigning for equal pay, educating me about my reproductive system, and generally plotting the downfall of all men.
Lockwood writes more about how this man affected her as a father than his role as a practising priest (although stories about his pastoral duties are also included) and that made the material more relatable to me:
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 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.
And again, Priestdaddy goes some way to explaining the content of No One Is Talking About This. Lockwood must have been pretty popular on social media in her days of poverty and writing lewd poems in a garret if she could mention on twitter that her husband needed surgery and her fanbase funded it within days. She references the poem “Rape Joke” (which can be read here) and how it led to her eventual successes in publishing:
Usually publishing a poem is like puking in space, or growing an adolescent mustache — no one really notices, and it might be better that way. Something about this one catches, though, and in the space of a day it is everywhere. Thousands of replies, messages, and emails pour into my various inboxes. A dozen girls send me their own versions of the poem, filled in with their own details.
The content and online popularity of that poem further illuminate both Lockwood’s novel and this memoir, and taken all together, it feels audacious and authentic. With amusing lines and fine observations throughout all that I’ve read from Lockwood, I don’t know what more can be asked of her. I'm looking forward to what she comes out with next.
