Priestdaddy is about what life is like for any pastor’s kid, but this one has a genuine gift for words ... there is a jellyfish quality to Lockwood’s narration. It is easy to be distracted and delighted by her strange, phosphorescent prose, but the wisp of an idea brushes against you, and before you know it, there’s a welt ... She looks back with longing at the faith she left as soon as she could, and the family she never will, telling the kind of stories that humiliate and humanize both. Priestdaddy proves over and over that Christianity isn’t as dull as you’ve been led to believe, and that religion isn’t our age’s only absurdity.
...full of American contradictions and dense with brilliant sentences ... [her father] emerges with a vividity that will be familiar to the lapsed children of religious men given to reactionary grunting and voting for Donald Trump ... Lockwood’s chronicle of her homecoming at times lacks dramatic tension, but it’s consistently charming ... Moving from a place of light into darkness and then returning to light is something very rare indeed. It has the shape of salvation.
Her parents’ habits and catchphrases, her oddly religious yet profane upbringing, and her own mischievous attitude toward her childhood religion are the stuff of pure comedy, and Lockwood doesn’t waste a drop of it ... It’s a testament to Lockwood’s way with words that glimpses of such grotesque wrongdoing, painfully candid reflection on her youth and her family, and countless sidesplitting anecdotes about her boxer-clad father and her safety-obsessed mother can not only coexist in this book, but weave together seamlessly, constructing a memoir that’s propulsively readable and brimming with humor and insight.
It goes without saying that Lockwood will have you snickering on the train, trying to relay her jokes to friends and strangers alike but receiving confused (and possibly horrified) looks in exchange ... But as we know from her poetry, Lockwood’s humor can shape-shift into something else entirely, something quite moving ... Priestdaddy is a book necessary for 2017—a meditation on living in the house of an unabashed patriarch, of asserting one’s humanity and continuing to take up space.
Patricia seems determined to extract every ounce of humour from her parents, hanging around the house ready to transcribe each doom-laden conversational gem that falls from her Irish mother’s lips ... Past and present intertwine, there’s no particular flow, shape or purpose, and individual chapters form discrete narratives ... The tone falters whenever she strives for high style or moral purpose, but at least the reader never has to wait too long before the next bon mot. At times the sheer fictionality overwhelms. Greg appears to be a particularly broadly drawn Dickens character rather than an actual human being ... A thoroughly modern mess of a book, replete with whimsy and charm.
...[a] delightful and debauched prose debut ... using the same offbeat intelligence, comic timing, gimlet skill for observation and verbal dexterity that she uses in both her poetry and her tweets, she delivers an unsparing yet ultimately affectionate portrait of faith and family. And her metaphors really are deserving of royalty status ... The frequency of her jokes and the grotesqueness of her hilarity lead to a high density of pleasure; virtually every page is packed with the potential to make the reader laugh out loud ... Priestdaddy gives both believers and nonbelievers a great deal to contemplate.
In Priestdaddy, portraits like this abound — in which each sentence shimmies with wonderful, obscene life, but the person behind it isn't quite visible through the dance ... Lockwood's descriptions of trauma, a rape and a suicide attempt, for instance, are mere paragraphs, and then we return once more to the wheeling, dancing circus. She doesn't owe us these revelations, of course, but Lockwood is best when she is concrete. The force of her sentences, though stunning, is not enough to carry the family portrait past the first 150 pages. Her writing about the Catholic Church, however, is scorching ... At her very best, Lockwood is antic, deadpan, heartbreaking — and so, so gross.
Lockwood’s commitment to fun burns bright in Priestdaddy ... Lockwood may be an absurdist, but she’s a perceptive one. Her mom serves as the memoir’s quiet heart ... But for all its madcap humor, Priestdaddy feels fraught with un-negotiated darkness. This makes the book at once fascinating and frustrating: Around the edges of even the silliest anecdote laps our awareness that the gleefully blasphemous narrator once attended protests outside abortion clinics and had swaths of the Bible seared into her memory ... ultimately, Priestdaddy announces itself as a labor of love, an expression of gratitude to Lockwood’s parents and a celebration of their idiosyncrasies ... Reconciliation and connection are beautiful notes on which to conclude a family memoir. But Lockwood races to the ending, to forgiveness, before fully illuminating what must be forgiven.
In her first work of prose, Priestdaddy, the poet Patricia Lockwood proves herself a formidably gifted writer who can do pretty much anything she pleases ... Sometimes she’ll tie off sections with too Hallmark-y a bow but for the most part, her voice is wonderfully grounded and authentic. She writes well about difficult things: abortion, the too-short life of a maintenance man named Darrell, molestation in the church ... What I loved about this book was the way it feels suffused with love — of literature, nature and the English language; for her family, those loved ones whom this book is for.
...[a] dazzling comic memoir ... The New Yorker has described Lockwood as 'an exemplar of brilliant silliness,' and Priestdaddy is indeed brilliantly silly, with much comedy squeezed out of her Catholic upbringing ... Priestdaddy becomes in one sense a tribute to her [mother], both as an endless resource of love and care, and an intellectual kindred spirit.
She injects whimsical imagery into weightier reveries in a manner that can make your head, like the unlucky little girl’s in The Exorcist, perform what in ice skating they call a double axel. Lockwood’s prose is cute and dirty and innocent and experienced, Betty Boop in a pas de deux with David Sedaris. When her stuff is good, it is very good...When her attention drifts, as it sometimes does in her memoir, the kookiness wears. Each sentence is its own quirky cameo appearance ... Lockwood manages to make her father not only more complicated than he seems, but also oddly lovable in his lurching way ... Priestdaddy is consistently alive with feeling, however, and I suspect it may mean a lot to many people, especially the lapsed Catholics among us. It is, for sure, like no book I have read.
Priestdaddy doesn’t have a narrative, exactly. The force that pushes it forward is Lockwood’s surprising language, and her detective’s ability to spot a single small damning clue in a room full of distractions. It’s a book where the author keeps you company, confiding in you and entertaining you and making you feel like the best listener in the history of ears ... Lockwood coaxed me into sobs for the lost life of a man who I never met, and then the last lines of Priestdaddy found me crying again for all the tragedies yet to happen in this terminal condition we call life.
Lockwood proceeds with a near unflagging sense of ironic exuberance and verbal inventiveness. Her consideration of the complexity of her feelings about her father — which includes reflections on the church’s history of sexual abuse and encounters with enthusiastic pro-lifers — features on almost every page instances of memorable and original expression, and moments of witty observation ... This superabundance of comic energy and literary vigor is a measure of Lockwood’s seriousness...She might not nudge us any closer to understanding, but perhaps this is because she has absorbed the importance of a lesson bequeathed to her by her father: to learn to 'live in the mystery' of life — and perhaps 'even to love it.'
Lockwood magically combines laugh-aloud moments with frank discussions of social issues and shows off her poet’s skills with lovely, metaphor-filled descriptions that make this memoir shine.
For most of its first half, Priestdaddy is a hallucinatory account of this family funhouse with the prodigal daughter as winking narrator, casting a cutting but loving eye on those she’s closest to. It’s sharp and entertaining and a little exhausting. But as the narrative develops, it reveals more layers than the cheeky title and cover art would suggest. This is a story about all kinds of sacred things ... Lockwood’s estrangement is born of intimacy, and she chronicles it with clear eyes. When she writes about her experience of faith and her departure from it, her prose sheds much of the eccentricity that characterizes the family-focused sections, and takes on a striking, clarifying calm.
Funny, tender, and profane, Lockwood’s complex story moves with lyrical ease between comedy and tragedy as it explores issues of identity, religion, belonging, and love. A linguistically dexterous, eloquently satisfying narrative debut.
Lockwood has an eye for the precise details that capture a family’s neuroses, and the exact turn of phrase that will leave readers snickering and then scrambling to explain to horrified friends why the idea of a priest in transparent boxers is so funny. She mines incredible humor out of the tension between her lapsed-Catholic, feminist adult self and her right-wing, God-fearing parents. But Priestdaddy is not just a collection of funny essays: It’s also something weirder and twistier and sadder than that. ... What emerges from Priestdaddy in the end is an immensely tender, loving, and melancholy portrait of a family, just as funny and dirty as the title suggests but with an unexpected heart.
Lockwood is known for her brash, trickster social media presence, and that’s on full display here. She simply delights in the absurdity in others—and in creating moments of absurdity herself. Her constant harassment of the seminarian is a recurring high point ... But she also proves to be a gifted narrator in chronicling her family’s outlandishness ... The beautiful and the filthy, side by side, just as any God with a sense of humor would intend.
What’s glorious in her writing has little to do with her father and everything to do with her fascinating mother and the way Lockwood’s relationship with her matures ... This book shines brightest not when Lockwood is parsing through hurtful or odd interactions with her father, but when she dramatizes scenes with her mother or sisters.
There’s a great deal of pleasure in her line-by-line writing; the author can describe even a seminarian’s ordination ceremony in a colorful, unexpected way, her prose dyed with bizarre sexuality, religious eroticism, and slapstick timing. Lockwood churns out oddball imagery at a breakneck pace, and she, luckily, has a lot of material to work with ... While Lockwood meanders at times within the episodic structure, she anchors the book with insights into how she, an atheist surrealist poet, could have possibly come from these two distinctly nutty people ... The drawback to Lockwood’s boundless, loquacious energy is that the book goes on for far too long, with seemingly every potentially entertaining anecdote included. With the book spanning out like a long-running sitcom, its latter third feels like it won’t provide any new revelations. Which is to say, not all of Priestdaddy’s stories are necessary, though Lockwood’s bad mouth certainly is.
