Dwight Garner Reviews Patricia Lockwood's Priestdaddy

Dwight Garner contributed a fabulous, thoughtful review of Patricia Lockwood's memoir Priestdaddy to the New York Times's "Books" section yesterday. We've posted a little bit about Lockwood's memoir already, on these pages, but this is the famed New York Times critic's first glance. He writes, "Lockwood’s prose is cute and dirty and innocent and experienced, Betty Boop in a pas de deux with David Sedaris." Seems like a book we'd like to read a little more about. "When her stuff is good, it is very good," he writes. More:

Witness her poem "Rape Joke," which put her on the map, and much of the other verse in her sexy and endearing bummer of a collection, "Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals" (2014).

When her attention drifts, as it sometimes does in her memoir, the kookiness wears. Each sentence is its own quirky cameo appearance. Lockwood is a one-woman cupcake factory, and nothing is coming out of the kitchen unless it has sprinkles, curls, powdered sugar and, lastly, a filthy word piped onto the top.

The good news about "Priestdaddy" is that it roars from the gate. Its first third is electric. It’s not just that Lockwood has fresh eyes and quick wits, but that in her father she’s lucked upon one of the great characters of this nonfiction decade.

Greg Lockwood is no typical Catholic priest. He’s a big bear of a man, fond of guns, cream liqueurs, pork rinds and flatulence as a conversational gambit. When the mood strikes him, he pulls out his red guitar and begins to make an inchoate noise that his daughter likens to "a whole band dying in a plane crash in the year 1972."

Read on at New York Times.