Patricia Lockwood, _Priestdaddy: A Memoir_

 LOCKWOOD IS ANOTHER poet who seems to be devoting more time to prose lately. I hope she is not done with poetry, but I do enjoy her prose. Her piece on Elena Ferrante earlier this year in LRB was delightful.

The most powerful chapter in this memoir, as it happens, reads like a prose poem: “Voice,” mainly about Lockwood, as a teenager, struggling with trying to sing and incidentally struggling with much else and eventually attempting suicide. Like her best known poem, “Rape Joke,” it translates trauma into the driest imaginable standup routine, a certain deadpan affect combined with starkly lit clarity.

The book is only occasionally about Lockwood’s childhood and youth, however. Mainly, it narrates a period of roughly a year during which Lockwood and her husband, their finances capsized by medical expenses, live with her parents. A tricky situation in any circumstances, but Lockwood’s father boosts the ante. 

He’s a Roman Catholic priest, for one thing—the Roman Catholic church famously does not let its priests marry, but married men may become priests and continue to live with their families. He holds militantly right wing opinions about homosexuality and guns, often SPEAKS IN ALL CAPS, likes to lounge around the house in his underwear, and likes to play electric guitar...loudly. Not exactly Going My Way, in other words.

Lockwood recalls watching a video of The Exorcist with her sister as a child and being scared to death. An opportunity for parental soothing and reassurance, in a lot of households—“honey, it’s just a movie”—but Father Lockwood assures his daughter that everything in the movie is based on actual fact and furthermore it all happened right in St. Louis, the town where they were then living.

I was grateful not to have to live with Father Lockwood, but he was unfailingly entertaining to read about—grotesque but compelling, like certain Flannery O’Connor characters or Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces. The book is often screamingly funny (see the list on 146-47, “I Guess the Plots of My Father’s Favorite Movies Based on the Sounds Coming through the Walls”). It’s surprisingly tender at times, without ever getting soft. Could become a classic.