From Patricia Lockwood - a writer acclaimed for her wildly original
voice - a vivid, heartbreakingly funny memoir about having a married
Catholic priest for a father.
Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met - a
man who lounges in boxer shorts, who 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.
