ianmart1n reviewed Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
Review of 'Priestdaddy' on Goodreads
5 stars
delightful & beautifully written. weird in a way that feels like home
paperback, 352 pages
Published May 1, 2018 by Riverhead Books.
4 stars
(11 reviews)
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 …
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.
gimley reviewed Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
Review of 'Priestdaddy' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
It takes more than weirdness to make an interesting memoir, especially when you write with an awareness of how weird it is. Still, I might have continued with it but instead started reading a real memoir. [b:Changeling: A Memoir Of Parents Lost And Found|8712342|Changeling A Memoir Of Parents Lost And Found|Sandra Newman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1331799134s/8712342.jpg|13585209]
GG reviewed Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
Review of 'Priestdaddy' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Not everyone will love this book as much as I did, but Patricia Lockwood is a poet, and every carefully-chosen sentence in this memoir is both luminously beautiful and hilarious. Her extremely dry sense of humor is the perfect tone for this story that largely covers the time that Patricia and her husband had to move back in with her mother and father, a Catholic priest (this is explained in the book). It's a loving and funny story about family, memory, and growing up.
