A review by bibliocyclist
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

funny reflective medium-paced

4.0

Is lightning “sunlight played backwards”?  “Could God make a freak so big even he doesn’t know what it might do?”  Who is the ideal reader, and does a book ask to be born?  To feel “arrowness,” to see what’s rendered visible in chosen words, check out Patricia Lockwood’s personal genesis tale Priestdaddy, named one of the ten best books of 2017 by The New York Times and awarded the 2018 Thurber Prize for American Humor.  Whether auguring her Father father’s moods from the transparency of his beloved baggy boxer shorts and placement of the Rag that “smells like a crime” or lost and giddy with her mother amid the endless sea of bushy-bearded Hemingway stans in Key West, Lockwood invites readers on a rollicking exploration of her origins and prods them to examine their own.  Let her take you “to the highest point to dive into eternity—or something worse.”  Become the arrow, hurtling from before to what’s next.  Whichever the path, “hit the apple or split the head, you are happy, you are straight ahead, you are flying.”