PRIESTDADDY

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.

PRIESTDADDY is a memoir of growing up with a Catholic priest for a father, framed by the story of having to move back into his house at the age of 31, accompanied by her husband (whom her father once threatened with a gun at a Don Pablo’s) and her cat (whom her father has expressed an interest in exterminating, out of a vague notion that cats are Democrats.)

Known as the “Poet Laureate of Twitter,” Patricia Lockwood's writing has been featured in publications including Tin House, Slate, The New Yorker and Poetry. Her tweets on subjects ranging from sexts to object impermanence have the Twitterverse on fire (if you haven’t followed @TriciaLockwood yet, you are in for a treat) and her poem “Rape Joke” was shared tens of thousands of times on Facebook and written about in Salon, The Guardian and Gawker. In this, her first memoir, she reveals the wild childhood that produced such a brilliantly twisted mind, and you will never look at The Priesthood the same way.

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 cult like 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 sexual 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.

In her beautifully written prose debut, Lockwood effortlessly pivots from the raunchy to the sublime, from the comic to the deeply serious, describing how she found her voice as a writer, reflecting on the Church’s recent history of scandal and abuse, and exploring issues of belief, belonging, and personhood.