London Review of Books Looks at Patricia Lockwood’s Memoir, Priestdaddy
In LRB’s “Bible Study in the Basement,” Namara Smith reviews Patricia Lockwood’s memoir, Priestdaddy (Riverhead, 2017). Smith recalls the poem that made Lockwood famous: “Lockwood was praised for having ‘casually reawakened a generation’s interest in poetry’, and her next collection, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (2014), was reviewed in the New York Times. Her memoir returns to this autobiographical terrain.” More from this review:
Lockwood’s work often turns on the moment when the familiar becomes unsettling. In her poems, reassuring objects – pettable animals, comics, pencils, blackboards, chalk – are endowed with unnerving qualities: Bambi becomes a stag (‘Now look at the fawn and grow an antler’); dismembered cheerleader parts rain down on a hornet-suited high school mascot; nipples are compared to ‘perfect pink erasers’; an adolescent boy stares at Magic Eye pictures waiting for them to yield up ‘their innocent parts’. In Priestdaddy this moment arrives about a third of the way through the book. Lockwood is telling a funny story about a priest she knew, her sex-ed teacher in high school (‘He used to waggle his head back and forth and say, “No beejays, girls! No hand jobs!”’), when the tone shifts abruptly: ‘You see it coming a mile off, but I didn’t, none of us did: the priest was arrested for having sex with a 14-year-old boy, and he went to jail soon after I was let out of high school for good.’ A few lines earlier, Lockwood had been describing the ‘enclosing quality’ of the shadows outside the cathedral in St Louis, ‘like the part of the blanket that’s tucked right underneath your chin’. Now she pictures a room decorated with a brass cross and potted palms, where ‘the ceiling was so low and the walls were so close that you felt more inside than you ever felt elsewhere. And a priest was in it, and a boy.’
‘When the first wave of scandals broke, in 2002, I felt briefly confused. Didn’t everyone know?’ Lockwood asks. Her childhood was full of stories like this; not exactly secret, but not talked about either, part of the unspoken knowledge that binds together members of any group. A respected member of the congregation, arrested for sexually abusing his daughter, was welcomed back on his release as if nothing had happened. A priest, a friend of Lockwood’s father, used to sit with her six-year-old brother on his lap, cooing his name and flicking ‘his eyes at my mother as if daring her to stop him’. (‘Already I had learned to recognise the ones who hated women, from the way they treated my mother.’) After Lockwood’s rape, her parents send her to a ‘pro-life gynaecologist’ who says to her, ‘“Well, now you’ve learned you can’t trust everyone, can you?” in a voice wiped entirely of human sympathy.’ It was then, Lockwood writes, ‘I began to suspect that something is not right with the way these people have arranged the world, no matter what their intentions.’
Early last year, Lockwood wrote a Hunter S. Thompson-like dispatch from the New Hampshire primaries for the New Republic, one of the pieces of election journalism that came closest to capturing the lunatic energy powering Trump’s campaign. (She then tweeted ‘fuck me, daddy’ at Trump using the magazine’s account.) The final third of Priestdaddy moves into similar territory...
Read the full review of Priestdaddy at London Review of Books.