The pioneering poet and memoirist on her new book “Priestdaddy,” and how a confrontation with religious orthodoxy gave her a model for her own vocation. A conversation with Amy Gall.
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Overview
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
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 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 Booker Prize finalist Patricia Lockwood, author of the novel No One Is Talking About This, a vivid, heartbreakingly funny memoir about balancing identity with family and tradition.
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.
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.
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 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 Booker Prize finalist Patricia Lockwood, author of the novel No One Is Talking About This, a vivid, heartbreakingly funny memoir about balancing identity with family and tradition.
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.
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780698188396 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/02/2017 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 413,496 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Patricia Lockwood was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana and raised in all the worst cities of the Midwest. She is the author of the novel No One Is Talking About This, a 2021 Booker Prize finalist, and the memoir Priestdaddy, which was named one of the ten best books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review, and two poetry collections, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a New York Times Notable Book. Lockwood's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor.
Read an Excerpt
Somehow or other, the seminarian has heard about milfs and he is haunted by the concept. He fears hordes of milfs are roaming the plains of dating, simultaneously breastfeeding and trying to trick young men into having sex with them. “Are milfs something that’s popular in secular culture for guys in their twenties to go after?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say gravely, signaling Jason across the room to write that quote down word for word. “Very, very popular. The most popular thing now.”
His eyes widen and he crosses his legs, as if to protect his holy jewels from the very notion of a milf. I consider other possible lies to tell him.
In Britain they call them Nummy Mummies, and due to the gender imbalance left over from the Great War, there are two of them for every male.
There’s no way of telling whether your own mother is a milf, but if she likes to play bingo, it’s almost certain.
The wine of Italy is stomped out by milfs, so when you taste the wine, you are tasting their desire.
During the full moon a milf lactates a powerful sex milk that is instantly addictive to any man who tries it.
He interrupts my reverie to explore the subject further. “What’s the difference between a milf and a cougar?”
“Cougars are . . . hornier,” I say, thinking fast. “A milf doesn’t have to be horny at all, it just has to be a Mom You’d Like to F, but a cougar is horny, and it prowls.”
“So disordered,” the seminarian breathes. Calling people “disordered” is practically his favorite thing to do, and a tawny animal woman who chases after tender cubs is about as disordered as it gets. “I hope I never meet one.”
I get very close to his face and fix him with my most feline expression. “Too late, buddy. You already have.”
*
I want to take the Gay Inkblot Test so bad I can taste it. According to my father, they administer an inkblot test to all the men who are studying to become priests in order to determine whether they’re possessed by the handsome little demon of Same Sex Attraction. (He refers to it as SSA, both for jauntiness and to save time.) I’m not sure whether the inkblots themselves have been somehow designed to be gay—balls everywhere, kaleidoscopic bursts of abs, the words “I’M GAY” doing backflips in the ink, a dong on the classic Rorschach butterfly—or whether they just expect people to see gay things in them. Either way, the test cannot be categorized as either scientific or sane, but my father places great faith in it.
“It’s foolproof,” he tells me, with the self-satisfaction of a man who knows he would pass. If he took the test, he would see only Batmobiles, but these guys would see the naked body of Robin. His beliefs about homosexuality are in general keeping with those of the church, with a few small but distinctive flourishes of his own. Earlier this week, for instance, he informed me Elton John became gay because he was “raised by too many aunts.”
When the seminarian took the inkblot test, he saw bunnies. “You saw . . . bunnies?” I ask. “Bunnies are fine,” he says with authority. “Bunnies are very wholesome. What you DON’T want to see is half- animal half-humans. That would show you were messed up.” Regular bunnies are just evidence you love Easter, but woe to the one who looks into the ink and sees a rabbit with the luscious lower half of a man.
Important: do you understand how badly I would fail this test? I would get something worse than an F. But my father refuses to even let me look at the Gay Inkblots. He’s afraid of what he might find. He knows he was saved from ever seeing me bring home a girl named Boots with screws in her ears for one reason and one reason only: because I got married when I was twenty-one to a man I met in cyberspace.
“We don’t know if it works on women,” they say cautiously, when I raise the subject amid the happy family clamor of the dinner table. “That’s not . . . we haven’t studied that yet.”
“In fact”—the seminarian sighs—“no one knows how lesbians work.”
“It’s easy,” I say. “You put one leg over her leg, and then she puts her other leg over your other leg, and then you brush each other’s hair forever while not going to church.”
He rolls his eyes. “You’re not a lesbian, Tricia,” he tells me patiently. “You wear dresses.”
“If you’re so determined to figure out who’s gay and who’s not,” I say to my father, “then why don’t you ask someone who has actually met some gay people, gay people who haven’t had to pretend their whole lives not to be gay?”
Gaydar is not real, and I hope never to be in the business of perpetuating crude stereotypes, but the priest who owns his own harp and gets ten different brown-bagged magazines about the Royal Family delivered to him each month? Is possibly not a straight man. But Dad assures me the Gay Inkblot Test is quite sufficient for their needs. So a word to my queer brothers who are longing for a life in the Church: you are safer than houses, for the time being. Go with God.
*
The seminarian talks frequently about his “celibate powers,” which mainly consist of being able to get up extremely early. No, it doesn’t sound good to me either, though it’s plausible my extreme deficiency of celibacy is the reason I often sleep till noon. To protect and strengthen these celibate powers, he has developed a move called the celibacy block, where he holds up both arms in front of himself in the shape of a cross to ward off the person who’s trying to seduce him— mainly women, as he explains to me, who are “wearing volleyball shorts when there isn’t even any volleyball going on.” “You know what would be a better idea,” I tell him. “To just point a gun at any girl who’s cute and yell ‘I DON’T THINK SO’ at the top of your lungs.”
The celibacy block is necessary, it seems, because the woods are full of women who lust after men of the cloth. “We call them chalice chippers,” the seminarian explains one Sunday, piling his plate with the cold cuts and pickles my mother always sets out after the last Mass.
“They’re everywhere,” my father adds, vengefully forking a slice of roast beef, and goes on to tell us the story of a woman who once gave him “a teddy bear soaked with your mother’s perfume, to try and tempt me.”
How would that even work? Has any man who ever drew breath been seduced according to this method? Also, I would love to date a woman who soaks teddy bears in perfume and sexually gives them to priests, because she has got to be crazier in bed than any atheist ever dreamed of being. Maybe once you got back to her apartment you would see an even bigger teddy propped up against her pillow, soaked in holy water and waiting for you, with a Bible between its legs opened up to the Song of Songs. Maybe it’s for the best, after all, that the seminarian knows what a furry is. If they ever come for him, he’ll be ready.
*
I am not sure what the seminarian wants, exactly. He acts with admirable propriety at all times, despite the fact that all the chairs in this house are upholstered with velvet and leave perfect impressions of your hindquarters whenever you sit down on them. My mother obliterates the prints with the palm of her hand whenever she encounters them, but I sneak back in and sit on the chairs again when she’s not looking. The seminarian is unaffected by this campaign, however. His sights are set on something higher. The firmest desire I ever hear him assert is that he would like to have a lady wash his clothes, perhaps in a river.
“Why a river, specifically?” I probe further, carrying two mugs of tea in from the kitchen to fortify us against the doldrums of four o’clock.
“I want to watch her rub my clothes on the stones,” he responds.
I look down at him for a long moment, wondering if I should tip the tea out into his lap so he doesn’t get too turned on by my gesture of servitude, and he shrugs. “I like domestic stuff,” he tells me, his voice falling to a sudden romance-novel huskiness. So fuck a butler. Men, it bears repeating, are so weird. This is so far outside my area of sexual expertise it’s not even funny. Tell me you want to role-play a butlerfuck while pretending to serve your penis on a big silver tray and I will nod with understanding, and perhaps even offer to film it. But you want a woman to wash your clothes in a river? What are you, some kind of pervert?
*
A priest ’s uniform includes the following: a white collar, either cloth or celluloid. A black short-sleeved shirt, black slacks and black belt, black shoes. Black Gold Toe socks. No other kind of sock is even considered. Underwear, I think. They buy these items from a special Sacred Clothing catalog, which for some reason is illustrated with pictures of priests laughing insanely, raising crunk cups to Christ, and posing in close embraces. No one knows what they’re doing, but they appear to be having just as good a time as the Victoria’s Secret models. Pillowfights do not seem far away. When my father started saying the Latin Mass, he gave up the short-sleeved shirts and slacks and took to wearing a cassock, which is just a long black dress for a man that everyone refuses to call a dress. (“It is a dress,” I have reiterated many times, trying to open people’s eyes to the truth. “And the pope wears what a baby would wear to the prom.”) The seminarian wears a cassock too, because he’s traditional, and he asked for thirty-three buttons on his: one for each year of Jesus’ life. On formal occasions, both of them affect a pompom hat, which has no utility as far as I can tell and which no one has ever been able to explain to my satisfaction.
“Really, a pompom hat?” I ask one day, when the seminarian and my dad are both sitting across the table from me decked out in their full regalia, looking like two dark Muppets from the realms of hell.
“It’s not a pompom, it’s a tuft,” the seminarian tells me. “A pompom would be silly.”
“We don’t call it a hat, we call it a biretta,” my father adds, his tuft going absolutely wild.
Ah. Why wear a regular hat, when you can wear a hat that sounds like a firearm. I begin flipping through the latest Sacred Clothing catalog and pause at a picture of a hundred-year-old priest and a twenty-five-year-old priest spooning each other in front of a stained-glass window. “Look at these incredible fantasy scenarios,” I say, turning the picture sideways. “I’m taking this upstairs with me. This is my Playboy now.” A few pages on, a photo of a female minister wearing vestments in all colors of the rainbow catches my attention. “Wait a minute, there are women in this?”
My father screws his eyes up very tinily, as if to cause the female minister and all others like her to disappear. “Those goofy Anglicans,” he says, and then makes the distressing moo-cow noise he always makes when imitating the communications of feminists, who lurk in his imagination in rabid, milk-spurting, man-stampeding herds. “MooOOooo, we all gotta be equal, don’t we?” he mocks, with such perfect assurance of my agreement that I wonder if he has ever really looked at me, or heard a single word I’ve ever said. Perhaps, when all is said and done, I am more like a son to him than a daughter.
Table of Contents
Introductory Rites 1
1 Meeting of the Minds 15
2 Low Country 37
3 Babies in Limbo 53
4 R & R Circus 71
5 Men of the Cloth 75
6 Dinner with the Bishop 95
7 Put It in Print 113
8 Touch of Genius 123
9 The Cum Queens of Hyatt Place 135
10 Swimming Hole 143
11 Hart and Hind 163
12 Men of the Cloth II: The Clothening 179
13 Blow, Gabriel, Blow 183
14 Voice 203
15 I Am a Priest Forever 223
16 Abortion Barbie 239
17 Missouri Gothic 259
18 Power and Light 279
19 Interior Castle 301
20 Island Time 315
Acknowledgments 335
Interviews
Barnes & Noble Review Interview with Patricia Lockwood
Patricia Lockwood may have a fraught relationship to Catholicism, but she's sure that the Church made her a better writer. "It is one of the richest sources of language that we have. If you go through the first twenty years of your life as a Catholic and you can't string together a decent metaphor, you're fucked."
Reading Priestdaddy, Lockwood's memoir about the year she and her husband moved back home to live with her father, a guitar-playing, sports car–driving Catholic priest, is like watching the English language being born again. At turns funny, absurd, and heartbreaking, Lockwood's observations about her family, the cultlike youth group she attended as a teenager, and the scandals within the Church are told with an inventiveness that brings even the most mundane details to life. When asked by her husband what a seminarian is, for instance, Lockwood offers, "an unborn priest, who floats for nine years in the womb of education, and then is finally born between the bishop's legs into a set of exquisite robes."
The book does not shy away from more serious topics, particularly the frequent cover-ups of sexual abuse committed by both the priests and the male parishioners in Lockwood's community. But Priestdaddy may also complicate secular readers' assumptions about the religious Right. While Lockwood experienced a childhood of repression and constriction, especially in relationship to her body and her role as a woman, she was also afforded a surprising amount of freedom, particularly around art and writing, that may not have existed outside of the Church.
I spoke with Lockwood during her trip to London about the similarities between artists and priests, the power of being genderless, and how to write your way into your body. --Amy Gall
The Barnes & Noble Review: Do you think there are similarities between the calling of the artist and the calling of the priest? Patricia Lockwood: I totally think so. I think you have to have something special inside you to decide that you even feel that call. You do wonder, is it a presumptuous thing to decide that you've been called to these particular lives? When you are a writer, how is it that you know that you are being called to be "the voice"? That's a big thing. That requires either some narcissism, some very healthy self-belief, or it's a real calling. I think it must have been that way for my father as well; something about his calling was external, like something inside of him was flowing toward some other purpose. And that's how it feels for me. I wonder if I would have had such faith that I was absolutely meant to be a writer if I hadn't seen that example.
BNR: Corruption aside, I felt almost jealous of the ceremony surrounding Catholicism. Art doesn't have those kinds of clear, outside markers of achievement built into it.
PL: I know! Wouldn't it be great if a mantle just descended upon us? A difference I've noticed between myself and other women of my age is that a lot of them talk about having impostor syndrome, and I never, ever had that, to the point where I wondered if I was abnormal. And then I thought, Well, look at your dad and the position you are in and the and the example you had of how one could move through life, and I thought, Well, it makes sense then that I wouldn't ever question it.
BNR: Do you think that's an empowering aspect of religion?
PL: Maybe so. Or maybe it means that I'm deluded. With writing it's the kind of thing that other people get to decide. I can say that I feel this calling, but if what I produce doesn't speak to people in some way, my calling doesn't mean shit. But part of the feeling of having the calling is that other people's experience of my work is also beside the point. I did always expect that I would be read, but it also feels like even if I weren't read, I'd continue to write. I've always thought that my assurance as a writer is more male, in a socialized sense.
BNR: It's interesting, because you are also grappling in this book with the really restrictive aspects of growing up Catholic and female, and how that affected your sense of your body.
PL: And maybe if you receive those sorts of messages about your body and about what it means to be a woman, one way to free yourself of that is to just never think about being a woman at all, to take some sort of third road. I mean, gender has always been such a particular and interesting question for me. I never feel female. In my mind, I'm just some unsexed spirit flying by. And it's hard to know if that is even to do with my feelings about my own gender or if it's just about avoiding the extreme, oppressive role that you are raised to inhabit if you are a female in the Catholic Church. I think to get around that oppression I thought of myself as being neither male nor female.
BNR: Do you think that writing about yourself so intimately in this book has brought you closer to your body?
PL: The body has always figured very largely and viscerally in my work, but as I said, I largely always feel very unsexed. But if you look at my metaphors as far back as it goes, I'm always writing about the body in a very specific way.
BNR: Do you feel in your body when you write?
PL: No. I feel like a cloud with a bird in the middle of it.
BNR: Gender is such a hard thing to define for yourself, and the body can sometimes contradict what you think about your gender in your head.
PL: Yeah, and it can make you feel pinned down. And it forces you to consider things you don't want to think about as this spirit of the air who is just pure idea. And I don't know if that's a function of being raised in the Catholic Church, where we talked so much about the body and there were these images everywhere you looked of the body suffering and in pain. In my household, you were constantly coming up against the limits of the body, and I just wanted to float above it. Catholic thinking is so centered in the body, specifically in its agonies and to some extent its ecstasies, but it's hard to not feel hemmed in by it.
BNR: You talked about observing pregnant Catholic women in your community, and that seemed liked a deeply bodied, ecstatic experience as well.
PL: It felt like you were at the center of biology. There was a happiness to these women, too, that had to do with giving yourself over to the cycle of life. And in a lot of cases, the body wants to be pregnant -- nature dictates that if you don't take certain precautions you will have a lot of kids. So there was this very interesting air of handing yourself over to nature, which to them was God. It was interesting to be part of that and not know if I wanted children or if I would be a good mother or that sort of thing. I imagine you would find a similar thing in Orthodox or Mormon populations, but it's very specific and hard to describe to people outside of those communities who haven't experienced it.
BNR: It seems, because women are so sidelined in Catholicism, being pregnant is also a way of being centered and powerful.
PL: Absolutely. You almost want to say it's about status, but it's about power and power in neither a negative or positive sense but simply a way of taking up space. If you believe, as the seminarian told me in the book, that "women are the tabernacle of life," of course that makes you, as a pregnant woman, important. And people may look at Catholic women with tons of kids from the outside and think, Oh, these poor, oppressed women, but of course that's not what people's experiences of their own lives are. And I wanted to show that.
BNR: Was it difficult, as an adult, to observe your family and the Church, or did that feel like a natural role for you to play?
PL: It felt very hard to be back in my family home and back at the center of Catholicism, so much so that I disassociated. I so did not want to be in my body as I was undergoing these conversations, and when I was in the church talking to parishioners, it's almost like I fled outside myself into this place of observation. And maybe that is what I'm talking about when I talk about my experience of genderlessness as a child and a teenager. Maybe it is that disembodied place where you are just a pure eye.
But now, having gone through that, I would say I feel better disposed or more comfortable with owning the fact that I am Catholic, at least culturally. When you leave the house or leave a religion, there is probably a period of anger that can last for a while. But going back in and considering things as an adult, I didn't want to take people's religious feelings lightly. Because Catholicism is true for those people, it is the Gospel and it dictates how they live their lives.
BNR: You said of the Catholic Church, "The question for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the us, and what is the them, and how do you ever move from one to the other?" Do you think you've answered that question?
PL: I think I've seen for myself how difficult it actually is to answer a question like that. Even when I was writing the book I still felt like I was under the jurisdiction of these people. I found it very difficult to put down anything that might enrage someone or that someone would find too revealing. I was still thinking about what was considered a secret and not a secret on [the Church's] terms. And in that sense I think you always still belong to the circle, in that your first instinct is to close the shape and protect the other people and what's within. But I don't think everyone feels that way. I think my experience [of feeling protective of the circle] was maybe more intense in that regard.
BNR: You do confront the abuses of power, particularly the sexual abuses that took place within the Church. How did you decide what to tell and what not to tell?
PL: There are definitely things that are not in the book that I did not put in there because they were not mine. And there were other things that might have happened to a friend of mine that shed a much wider light on what's going on in the Church, and I had to think, Do I put that in? Do I make her anonymous? So, on a case-by-case basis, I had to make those decisions. If it felt like it was necessary to the story, then it went in.
And the question of what's mine to tell is an effective question of the modern moment. It's not something the New Journalism was considering in the '60s and '70s. But now, I see a lot of young women grappling with what is theirs to talk about. I don't see it so much among men. But there have also been many cases lately of high-profile stories written by men that blew up because they revealed things that shouldn't have, and they realized in the wake of it that they'd made a mistake. So maybe men will start considering ownership, more out of their own self-protection if nothing else.
BNR: In the book you talk a lot about the struggle to believe in yourself and trust your own instincts. Do you think writing the book strengthened your sense of self?
PL: I think it did. While I never had any doubts about myself as a writer, it was impossible for me to write about myself. I always had this voice in my head when I wrote about myself, questioning whether I was telling the truth. With my father, when he yelled at me as a child, he would say that I was not being truthful, to the point where I would begin to doubt my own words even when I was being truthful. So I had a difficult time setting down the most basic facts about myself, even saying, 'Today I felt happy, today I felt sad." I just questioned if that was true. And I think, writing a book where I had to do that on every page probably did help to strengthen my sense of self.
But that might be why I also have such a hyperbolic and outrageous voice as well, because if no one believes you, are free to say anything that you want.
BNR: This book made me feel drunk with word joy. What is your favorite thing about language?
PL: Its flexibility. I almost said malleability but that's not exactly right. I think of it more like a body, like a gymnast springing and doing back handstands. There are these rigid rules, there is a skeleton, there are laws by which language abides, but within that there's such movement.
I also love the rigidity of language. I was always one of those enforcers who spelled really well and had this innate sense of grammar. I was a real prescriptivist when I was younger. And part of that is just being an asshole. Everyone is a prescriptivist when they are teenagers. But I think I was more of an asshole than most.
But with this book I get to break the rules and stay within them at the same time. It's like my father; he has the desire to lie down with the rulebook so he can feel safe, but at the same time, he is this outrageous character who also wants to exist lawlessly, flying by in a motorcycle. It's the same with me.
--May 12, 2017
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