Christian Lorentzen Reviews Patricia Lockwood's Priestdaddy at Vulture

Patricia Lockwood's new memoir, Priestdaddy, draws on her experience as the daughter of a Catholic priest. Lorentzen explains that it's "part origin story, part narrative of her time in the wilderness." That's all true, as in part a result of Lockwood's memories of her child and her shrewd, cutting present day observations. Let's dive with that quote from Lorentzen:

Except here the wilderness is actually a homecoming, a regression from low-rent provincial American hipster paradise back to the crucifix-appointed parental home — in fact a rectory, because through a loophole in Catholic doctrine Lockwood’s father Greg is that rare animal, a priest with a wife and five children — in the un-bohemian heartland.

This isn’t the story of entitled millennials moving back to mommy and daddy because the big bad world was too hard. Lockwood and her husband Jason Kendell, neither of them college graduates, had spent an itinerant decade as committed bohemians. She was the house genius and he was her “Leonard Woolf figure,” the breadwinner who allowed her the freedom to write poetry full time. They were living in gorgeous and gothic Savannah, Georgia, where he had a job at a local newspaper. They were skating by with a joint bank account hovering in the three figures. He liked his job, and she’d broken into the pages of The New Yorker. But then his eyes started to go. He needed immediate surgery to remove cataracts if he was going to keep his vision. Their insurance covered only a fraction of the cost, but they were able to raise the funds — around $10,000 — by seeking donations online from their community of “internet addicts,” as Lockwood’s mother Karen called them, actually a mix of Weird Twitter and Poetry Twitter, zones in which Lockwood was amassing cult-like celebrity for her pithy, profane, absurd, obscene, hilarious sayings.

More details at Vulture.