After we were married—by my father, in the same church where my parents were wed—we moved from city to city, restless and never settling. We dragged a red line behind us across the map and we did not stop. My family had moved so often during my childhood that this did not seem strange to me; in fact, the belief that people should stuff all their possessions into a U-Haul and move kit and caboodle to a different state every few years seemed to be the only similarity my husband shared with my father. We lived in Hebron, Kentucky, near where they had just begun to build a Creation Museum full of apelike mannequins of Methuselah and Moses interacting with the noble triceratops, and we lived in Keene, New Hampshire, where the LIVE FREE OR DIE license plates paraded up and down quaint Main Street, and we lived in Colorado Springs, where I could see the jagged quartz tip of Pikes Peak from my study, and we lived in Stuart, Florida, which made the dubious claim of being the Sailfish Capital of the World. Finally we ended up in Savannah, Georgia, which is the first place that ever felt like home to me.
- Recorded June 13, 2017 Patricia Lockwood, “The Poet Laureate of Twitter” (unofficial), is the author of 2014’s groundbreaking Motherland Fatherland Homelands.
- In Priestdaddy, Lockwood interweaves emblematic moments from her childhood and adolescence-from an ill-fated family hunting trip and an abortion clinic sit-in where her father was arrested to her involvement in a cultlike Catholic youth group-with scenes that chronicle the eight-month adventure she and her husband had in her parents' household after a decade of living on their own. Lockwood details.
- Priestdaddy is a revelatory debut, a meditation on family and art that finds poetry in the unlikeliest things, including poetry. Patricia Lockwood's prose is nothing short of ecstatic; every sentence hums with vibrant, anarchic delight, and her portrait of her epically eccentric family life is funny, warm, and stuffed to bursting with emotional insight.
Recorded June 13, 2017 Patricia Lockwood, “The Poet Laureate of Twitter” (unofficial), is the author of 2014’s groundbreaking Motherland Fatherland Homelands.
It looked like an enlightened underwater city with all the water gone, and seaweed still hanging in the middle of the air. Great mermaids flowed through the streets: southerners. The sun shone down because it was a blonde. The cobblestones were the former ballast of ships and the town was famous for its graveyards and every gate was topped with an iron pineapple. The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist was across the street from us, and I was amused to see that my old senses were still in tune: I could feel it whenever the bishop was there.
At one point a second cathedral grew up around it, made of scaffolding, and construction workers sat there and ate their bagged lunches and swung their legs. No one knew what they were doing, and it seemed to go on forever. The Flannery O’Connor house stared suspiciously at them all day. She had been a child in that house, with boiled-clear eyes and a watery chin. She had been briefly obsessed with the Dionne Quintuplets. She had a chicken that she taught to walk backwards. The little-leafed vines that climbed up the side of her school had fine penmanship; so did she. She would grow up, and leave, and keep peacocks. Her lipstick would always be the wrong color, but her ink would be fine: black. The sea that had been removed from the city was a force, was full of pronouncement, was equally capable of religious calm. You could feel it, you could still feel it. And over it all, anchored equally in time and eternity, the beautiful laboring sound of the bells.
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2017
NAMED ONE OF THE 50 BEST MEMOIRS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS BY THE NEW YORK TIMES
SELECTED AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY:
The Washington Post *Elle * NPR * New York Magazine * Boston Globe * Nylon * Slate * The Cut * The New Yorker * Chicago Tribune
WINNER OF THE 2018 THURBER PRIZE FOR AMERICAN HUMOR
'Affectionate and very funny . . . wonderfully grounded and authentic. This book proves Lockwood to be a formidably gifted writer who can do pretty much anything she pleases.' - The New York Times Book Review
From Patricia Lockwood--a writer acclaimed for her wildly original voice--a vivid, heartbreakingly funny memoir about balancing identity with family and tradition.
Priestdaddy A Memoir Book
Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met--a man who lounges in boxer shorts, loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates 'like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972.' His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the Church's country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, their two worlds collide.
In Priestdaddy, Lockwood interweaves emblematic moments from her childhood and adolescence--from an ill-fated family hunting trip and an abortion clinic sit-in where her father was arrested to her involvement in a cultlike Catholic youth group--with scenes that chronicle the eight-month adventure she and her husband had in her parents' household after a decade of living on their own. Lockwood details her education of a seminarian who is also living at the rectory, tries to explain Catholicism to her husband, who is mystified by its bloodthirstiness and arcane laws, and encounters a mysterious substance on a hotel bed with her mother.
Priestdaddy A Memoir Full
Lockwood pivots from the raunchy to the sublime, from the comic to the deeply serious, exploring issues of belief, belonging, and personhood. Priestdaddy is an entertaining, unforgettable portrait of a deeply odd religious upbringing, and how one balances a hard-won identity with the weight of family and tradition.