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Priestdaddy

A Memoir

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Priestdaddy

By: Patricia Lockwood
Narrated by: Patricia Lockwood
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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.

©2017 Patricia Lockwood (P)2017 Audible, Inc. Women Memoir Marriage Witty Funny Heartfelt
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Editor reviews

Editors Select, May 2017

I want to be careful about the way in which I write about this book. Not because the subject matter is scandalous (it's not), but because, like all beautifully complex things, it'd be easy to mislabel or to put Lockwood's memoir in a box, to diminish its magnificence and, ultimately, the spell it cast over me. It deserves more than that. So, I'll say this: Great writers are often lauded for having an original voice. Well, Lockwood has that and then some (including an amazing - and amazingly absurd - sense of humor). More importantly, she's an original thinker whose devotion to language and words and poetry - her primary trade - can be felt in every line, every turn of phrase, and every bit of confounding imagery that seems to reveal some hidden, intangible truth that normally exists just outside of fingertips' reach. —Doug, Audible Editor

Critic reviews

"Patricia Lockwood's side-splitting Priestdaddy puts the poetry back in memoir. Her verbal verve creates a reading experience of effervescent joy, even as Lockwood takes you through some of her life's darker passages. Destined to be a classic, Priestdaddy is this year's must-read memoir." (Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club)
"Beautiful, funny and poignant. I wish I'd written this book." (Jenny Lawson, author of Furiously Happy)
" 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. If I could write like this, I would." (Joss Whedon)
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The first half of this book is great, funny and entertaining, but found the narrators voice grating and couldn’t finish it. The story also gets a bit lost towards the end. As a wayward daughter of a preacher I really wanted to love this but didn’t unfortunately

Really wanted to love it but didn’t

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This is an intriguing memoir about the author's experiences of living in an unconventional, but highly religious family, with a Catholic gun-toting priest for a father. It is highly sarcastic, and hilarious at times, reading about Patricia Lockwood's family antics. When I first began this autobiography, I honestly believed it was set in the 1960s as her father disallows the sisters to go to college, instead spending money on guitars, and describing the effects of living next to a radioactive plant. But lo and behold, Lockwood is writing about only a decade ago.

She leads an eccentric lifestyle, following in her family's footsteps, writing poetry and travelling across the US after a marrying a man off the internet. But it also reveals her doubts about their customs and practices, and how she questions the function of the church - especially with claims of molestation. An interesting and enjoyable listen.

The eccentric and quirky life of a Catholic family

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I think if you don’t like this book you just don’t get it. I thought the narration was perfect and thought it could only be the writer that could do this justice. Nothing really happens but it doesn’t need to. The author captures the everyday in her own life, like a fly on the wall. I think the poetry and irony comes first and any comedy is incidental. Imaginative, full of gorgeous metaphors and definitely different.

Every line is Poetic

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I bought this book because I also have a Priest Daddy, though mine after a brief period of awol returned to serve the Catholic faith. There are thousands of kids like me always have been always will be.
Amongst Cops (children of priests) we long for priests to be allowed to marry and form families. After reading Patricia’s book I’m not so sure. Her Dad would drive a Saint to distraction, in the first third of the book I was splitting my sides with laughter Patricia she sees the ridiculous in so many situations. Truly the Catholic faith can be a joke. And then she’d tell an anecdote and I’d be shocked shaken and couldn’t quite believe my ears at the tragedy of what she was relating, especially her story of her overdose, her story about abortions, and the story of the birth defects case by the Manhattan project which took place in her neighbour hood.. I feel like I’ve just come out of a washing machine and am still dizzy.
It got me meditating on my own story and the stories of other children of Priests, but there is no such thing as a painless life, God doesn’t write us Enid Blyton stories. I want to reread the story but I found reading about her indifferent Daddy too painful. That is the story of so many children of Priests we all had indifferent Daddies who love the Church more than their kids. I’ll just dip into chapters to fully absorb the story.
Patricia God love you, keep the faith

Naval discipline to Catholic disciple and back again

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Beautifully written and performed. It had me laughing out loud a lot of the time and at other times it was incredibly moving. Her portrayals of her parents are hilarious, especially her mother who surely deserves her own show!

Hilarious - both warm hearted and irreverent

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