Why did I get this book?
I read some of Lockwood’s book reviews in the London Review of Books and I was just very taken with her writing and got a hold of her memoir Priestdaddy right away. It’s just that it’s taken me a bit of time to get around to reading it.
Is it what I thought it was?
I had no expectations other than hoping the prose in the memoir would be as engaging as the book reviews. It is.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I’m really interested in thinking about individuality, subjectivity, selfhood, etc., and it’s certainly a great read in those terms. I don’t teach contemporary literature and I can’t imagine having the temerity to put this book on any syllabus that I was attempting to claim an expert right to teach. I’d certainly recommend it to anyone I know, though.
Quotes
The entire book is supremely quotable. Just about every paragraph got my attention—it’s funny, sad, moving, archly ironic, poetic, often all at the same time.
“There I am, sluglike and drooling, unwilling to close my mouth until my first words arrived to me. ‘You were the kind of baby I could set down on a blanket and then come back three hours later and you hadn’t moved,’ my mother tells me approvingly. ‘That’s how I knew you were a thinker.’”
“I like to think I sprang from a head; I like to think the head was mine.”
“I’ve always found it the easiest thing in the world to see my father as a baby, lolling on his back in the middle of fresh sheets, smoking a fat cigar to congratulate himself on his own birth, stabbing out the cigar—with great style—in the face of his first teddy bear.”
“My mother loves to argue, and love is the only argument you can win by saying yes.”
“It would not be the last time I tried to locate a nipple in church, but it would be the last time I announced it.”
“All these years I have been tending the pigs of liberalism, agnosticism, poetry, fornication, cussing, salad-eating and wanting to visit Europe, but I am back home now, and the pigs can’t come with me.”
“At nineteen, I ought to have been in college along with the rest of my high school class, gaining fifteen pounds of knowledge and bursting the sweatpants of my ignorance. What else did people do there? Changed their names to Patchouli, became vegetarians, grew out their leg hair for the first time, got so caught up in their studies of ancient Greece that they murdered a farmer while worshipping the grape-god in the countryside.”
“These were essentially poems a cartoon roadrunner would write, after retiring from a career of anarchy.”
“Catholic dreams haven’t caught up to airplanes yet. The dream that converts a Catholic is more likely to take place in a medieval prison, or on a slave ship in the days of Ben-Hur, or in a sinister outhouse filled with red light.”
“Writers like being bodiless.”
“‘He’s from the poetry internet,’ I reassured them, ‘where everybody just argues about sonnets all the time, and whether endings are Earned’.”
“My father has never willingly put on a seat belt in his life. He has always found the very idea of ‘safety’ to be ridiculous. Why would he ever want to be safe? What was he, a little girl? A miniature woman? A babylady? John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, huge hairy Samson from the Bible—those men didn’t wear seat belts. If they needed a seat belt, they tore off a man’s arm and laid it across their laps.”
“Yet connections forged in filth and nonsense are strong.”
“It was so total and unexpected I couldn’t look at it directly, as if generosity itself had opened up its trench coat and flashed me.”
“If my father is best described in terms of his nudity, my mother is best described in terms of her Danger Face, which is organized around the information that somewhere in America, a house is on fire.”
“‘Why on earth do you need to know about furries?’ ‘Because people will confess to me about them. Someone will confess to me, ‘I am a furry’ and I need to know what that is.’ It almost makes want to turn Catholic again, just so I could go to confession sometimes and lay a big, eloquent paw up against the screen right as he asked me what my sins were.”
“I didn’t know if I ought to publish it, because I never wrote about the things that really happened to me, the real things. But after enough time passes, you can publish a poem like that without feeling your own palpitating heart is doing the New Year’s drop in Times Square, watched by a million people, reflecting back a face to every one.”
“She regularly accuses men of jacking off in their vehicles, despite the fact that she doesn’t know what the act of jacking off physically entails. She just thinks it’s an extra-bad kind of wasting time, of the sort practiced in prison yards, public schools, and Washington D.C.”
“The landscape is dotted with pristine lakes where feral eighties Jet Skis run loose, and gas stations begin to sell fresh crickets.”
“I step into the nearest shallows with the two youngest toddlers, holding their chubby, resilient wrists in my hands, and immediately my every sense is locked into the ancient, timeless female effort of Preventing the Next Generation From Dying.”
“‘Dad? I’m writing…well, I’m writing a book about you.’ ‘Hahahaha!’ he says, throwing back his half-cherubic, half-satyric head. His angel and his demon aren’t even posted on opposite shoulders. They’re standing on top of his neck, making out. ‘Hahahaha. I’ll murder you.’ ‘Don’t say you’re going to murder her!’ my mother calls out. ‘Not nurturing.’”
“If you are not friends with women, they are theoretical to you.”
“He rolled his eyes. ‘Do you even know what vagina means,’ he asked me. I did, but it was better in those instances to play innocent. ‘It’s sort of like a pussy, isn’t it?’ ‘It means scabbard in Latin.’ ‘Pussies aren’t in Latin,’ I told him.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
Well, the title is literal: her father became a Catholic priest after converting to Christianity while serving on a submarine and subsequently becoming a Lutheran minister. This is a memoir, but it does something I commonly look to fiction to do for me, which is remind me that there are so many ways to become a person and so many ways of feeling (and representing feeling) your selfhood. There’s nothing in this book that feels familiar to me in experiential terms and I love that.
Once again, I feel kind of bad that I know so little about a massive swath of contemporary literary writers. I feel like I need to mark off a whole month of doing nothing but reading recent novels and autofictions, no genre works allowed. If I were a building, there would be a whole cultural portico that was threatening to collapse for lack of maintenance.
I had no idea that a married Protestant minister can become a Catholic priest with a dispensation to remain married. I felt compelled to look it up to make sure this wasn’t just some weird lie that Lockwood’s parents told her.
I keep a little index of memoirs and biographies where college figures in someone’s life either as a formative experience or as something they brushed off or skipped entirely. Lockwood is one of those who skipped it, though she had applied and been accepted at St. John’s. I found myself wondering counter-factually if going to any college—even St. John’s, with its Great Books curriculum—would have dulled what is so bright and startling in her writing and thinking. For a small subset of people, I think the way even the most unconventional college can conventionalize and structure learning is really unhelpful.
It is so easy to imagine a different person with a different voice telling this life story where almost everybody is hateful and awful rather than human and hilarious. It’s a reminder maybe of the costs of compressing people down to their politics—though I feel also as if that is not something we all want to do; the only way to know Lockwood’s familial world the way she does would be to be inside of it and to have the kind of temperament that she does. It seems like a nicer way to be and think—she makes me feel ashamed, like I need to be more fun and more ironical in my own head and see people through some kind of perpetual fog of bemusement. Every now and again I did kind of want her to get briefly serious, just to show that she can if necessary, like seeing that a quarter horse could also trot a novice rider patiently up a bridle trail. I know she can—there’s a kind of cold, magnificent anger lurking behind her brutal review essay about Updike, for example, and it does show now and again in the book too—there’s a sharp turn at one juncture in talking about the Catholic hierarchy and the covering up of sexual misconduct, and right after that about her famous poem “Rape Joke”. The moments of seriousness, of raw feeling in the moment, feel as if they have to be earned—as if she herself hesitates to share them in a genre that is supposed to be intimate. (She says as much in talking about the publishing of “Rape Joke”. “How long can you outrun your subject, when your subject is your own life?” I don’t know either, but it’s a hell of a marathon before you feel as if her life is catching up with her breathless, speeding prose.) There’s also a sharp lurch into seriousness in a late chapter on abortion and parenting that really caught my attention today of all days with the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
She does make me think also with some regret of something my mom said to me when I was a teenager, which is that if I wanted to write fiction, I would have to be much more observant than I was, a point which turned out to be a pretty good observation. Lockwood is fantastic at observing small details and weaving them into everything.
I can’t quote everything I love, but there’s a passage about eating unconsecrated hosts “by the fistful” late in the book that is just fantastic.