Scan barcode
A review by vreadsabook
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
3.0
I completed this book today, but I have been struggling all day with how to characterize it. This memoir is written by the no-longer-practicing daughter of a Catholic priest. Loosely built around a summer that Lockwood and her husband are forced to move home (a rectory) as adults, the memoir is primarily meant to be humorous.
Lockwood’s comedic style is composed of a vocabulary of the sacred profane all her own, applied to very dark things. I laughed aloud often when reading this book. But there were also passages where I wished Lockwood could just tell the story a little more directly. Lockwood touches on some very serious things that she lived through in a way others didn’t—the pedophilia crisis, an entire neighborhood given irradiated drinking water—yet her hand in touching these topics feels too light.
This book hit close to home. I understand the type of upbringing Lockwood had, and the anger to be found in it. I, too, was there for the True Love Waits campaign. I, too, questioned what my role was to be, as a young girl whose mind was almost entirely comprised of questions that were not wanted. I, too, have struggled to map my faith onto the political and physical world.
But our reactions seem so different. She subverts her anger out onto a page, but never seems to direct it towards those responsible. My anger was always direct. My anger, at 12, meant writing a Biblical exegesis on why women should be able to hold positions of leadership in the church, and then distributing it at a church service. My anger yelled right there, in the moment. To that end, I find the seeming passivity of the narrative difficult. Did she really become the person she was, with no asking of “Why?” or a moment of reckoning? And if there was that moment, why is it concealed from us?
Is this a difference in Lockwood’s personality and mine, or a difference of not having your earthly father mapped directly onto your heavenly one?
Lockwood’s comedic style is composed of a vocabulary of the sacred profane all her own, applied to very dark things. I laughed aloud often when reading this book. But there were also passages where I wished Lockwood could just tell the story a little more directly. Lockwood touches on some very serious things that she lived through in a way others didn’t—the pedophilia crisis, an entire neighborhood given irradiated drinking water—yet her hand in touching these topics feels too light.
This book hit close to home. I understand the type of upbringing Lockwood had, and the anger to be found in it. I, too, was there for the True Love Waits campaign. I, too, questioned what my role was to be, as a young girl whose mind was almost entirely comprised of questions that were not wanted. I, too, have struggled to map my faith onto the political and physical world.
But our reactions seem so different. She subverts her anger out onto a page, but never seems to direct it towards those responsible. My anger was always direct. My anger, at 12, meant writing a Biblical exegesis on why women should be able to hold positions of leadership in the church, and then distributing it at a church service. My anger yelled right there, in the moment. To that end, I find the seeming passivity of the narrative difficult. Did she really become the person she was, with no asking of “Why?” or a moment of reckoning? And if there was that moment, why is it concealed from us?
Is this a difference in Lockwood’s personality and mine, or a difference of not having your earthly father mapped directly onto your heavenly one?