American poet and essayist Patricia Lockwood’s memoir, Priestdaddy (2017), details her unique experience of having a father who is a married ordained Catholic priest, having converted to Catholicism from the Lutheran Church. Lockwood’s father is a Roman Catholic priest, and he is certainly not the holy man one might expect. He comes across as profane and a bit crazy. Lockwood herself becomes the rebellious daughter one might expect after some of the typical choir loft experiences in her youth.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Table of contents
Patricia Lockwood Looks Back on Herself
Memoirs are the kinds of books which, for the most part, we expect to see out of people in their senior years, brimming with life experience to share with the rest of the world. It’s not every day we see the publication of a biography liked Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood, who was in her mid-thirties when she released her charming and humorous past to the world.
Starting at the logical point, the book introduces us to the central figure of Patricia Lockwood‘s life, her father, Greg Lockwood. Though he was a Catholic priest his whole life, Greg’s lifestyle and habits were about as far as one could go from the stereotypical view of priesthood, mirroring the chaotic and freewheeling nature of the 1970s in the United States.
Patricia herself left the Church’s county years ago, but an unexpected circumstance forces her husband and her to move back into her parents rectory. However, after so many years away from the family nest, Patricia‘s world has become quite different from her parents’, and for both better and worse, their views begin to collide.
Priestdaddy Amazon
The memoir is essentially split in two intertwining sections, with the first one being dedicated to Patricia‘s reminiscences about her formative years. Rather than simply recounting all she remembers, she instead chooses various key moments which marked her as a young girl and recounts them with the insight we (hopefully) gain in our later years.
If you are not friends with women, they are theoretical to you.
― Patricia Lockwood, PriestdaddyThe second part of the book is dedicated to the eight-month period during which she and her husband lived at the Lockwood household. Namely, she recounts her husband’s struggle to truly understand the often cruel laws of Catholicism, as well as her education of a seminarian also living with them.
The Profane Catholic in Priestdaddy
As implied by the title of the book as well as my short summary of it above, Father Greg Lockwood is by far and large the main focus of the book from start to finish. The more we learn about the man, the more I can see him being a polarizing figure, especially depending on where one was raised.
At the start, I found his whole lot and approach to life to have been more on the humorous side than anything, with his holiness being put further and further into question with nearly every word he says. Patricia Lockwood shares quite a lot of vividly-depicted memories of his behaviour in the household, and they all serve to pain the picture of a man who was larger-than-life in his own ways.
However, as the book progressed further and further, we do get an exposition of the “darker side”, if you will, of growing up under Father Greg Lockwood‘s roof. Often times close-minded, profane, and even depraved, I found his company less enjoyable during such times. Consistently teetering from humorous to troubling, I can see how some people might have trouble with a whole book about him.
It did feel to me like the author was about as impartial as we can expect in her recollections about Father Greg, and it didn’t seem like she was trying to portray him in any specific light, other than the one she remembers him in of course. There’s always a question of subjective bias in a biographies, such demons are unavoidable, but I felt they were kept to a minimum here.
While Greg Lockwood was virtually always surrounded by the seven other members of the household, I found it slightly disappointing we didn’t get more information about their perspectives on the whole thing. Then again, they might have simply been outside of the author’s reach.
An Ecclesiastical Household
While Patricia‘s father may certainly not have been a common priest, we still get a wealth of fascinating insight into what it’s like behind closed doors for a Catholic minister’s family, and we get to see it both from the author’s perspective when she was a young girl, and then once again years later down the line.
Personally, I never had much of an idea about how such a family lived, beyond them saying grace at dinner and making prayers every night. While I’m certain there are still plenty of details left for me to uncover, I feel like Priestdaddy gave me a rather comprehensive and digestible overview of the dynamics at work in such a household.
Part of what you have to figure out in this life is, Who would I be if I hadn’t been frightened?
― Patricia Lockwood, PriestdaddyOn one hand, the nurturing love, warmth, acceptance and understanding appear in certain forms, but on the other hand, they are often counteracted by the oppressive nature of the restrictive existence led by the family.
Overall though, I would say Priestdaddy has more of a humorous tone than anything else, and I would attribute this to the author’s style. As a matter of fact, I would go as far as saying Patricia Lockwood has a unique and original voice, one I hope to recognize more of in the future as she develops it. She has a special way of wrapping in comedy even the more difficult of subjects.
If there was one flaw with the book, it was how it progressed from about three-quarters in and onward, with the author’s proficiency as a poet making itself known. The language does tend to become more descriptive and wordy in general, sometimes to the detriment of the pace. However, I didn’t find it a big enough deal to stop me from finishing it.
The Final Verdict
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood is quite an original and unusual memoir which, despite its faults, offers interesting insight into Catholic upbringing as well as the life of a priest who was certainly cut from a different cloth.
If you’re interested in learning about life in the household of the irreverent Father Lockwood through the scope of humour, then I think you will enjoy what the book has to offer.
Patricia Lockwood
Patricia Lockwood is an American poet, essayist and novelist whose career began with the publication of her memoir, titled Priestdaddy.
Her debut novel, No One is Talking About This, was released in 2021 and earned a fair share of critical acclaim. Additionally, she has also published various poetry collections, some of them for the New York Times.
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!
Priestdaddy By Patricia Lockwood
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.”
The Winged Thing Patricia Lockwood
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.