Staying in non-fiction for this week’s BotW – but this time moving to a memoir. You’ll have noticed Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy on the WiB list for some considerable time – I actually started listening to it on audiobook, but it demands attention and with my long list of podcasts to listen to, I struggled to find time to make progress on it. I discovered early on that I couldn’t listen to it while I was running because it made me laugh too much and put me at risk of tripping myself up. So I got on the library hold list and waited for a copy to come in. And when it finally did (this is a popular book people) I had much more success reading rather than listening to it.
Priestdaddy is Patricia Lockwood’s memory of her childhood, growing up moving around the Mid-West with an eccentric, doom-prophesying mother and her even more eccentric Catholic priest father. Yes, you heard right. Lockwood’s father underwent a religious conversion and felt called to ministry after he was already married with children, and then found a loop hole that meant the Roman Catholic church would receive him as a priest. The book starts as Lockwood and her husband move back in with her parents after a medical procedure messes up their finances, and as she and her husband get used to living with the eccentric duo, she reminisces on the key moments of her childhood.
Lockwood’s father, Greg, is the biggest, flashiest character in this – he wears as few clothes as possible whenever he’s not on duty, he plays terrifyingly loud electric guitar and shouts along with action movies – but her mother manages steals the show for me a lot of the time. She’s constantly expecting the worst to happen and seeing the worst, but managing everything, dealing with the madman that she married and loopy in her own way. By the end of the book you feel like you understand her more than you do Greg.
This is funny and terrifying in equal measure. It’s also beautifully written. Lockwood is a poet and her words fairly sing on the page. There are some weighty issues here – Lockwood is a lapsed catholic and looks back on her childhood – including an anti-abortion protest she was taken to – with a particular view on the world of 80s and 90s religious super-conservatism that she grew up in. I really liked but I’d think hard about who I recommended it too – my sister, who loves reading about American Christianity in its many shades, yes; my mother, Church of England and formerly of the village’s church council and who went to a convent school probably not.
This was nominated for a whole bunch of prizes and found its way on to a lot of book of the year lists when it came out in 2017 and I’m not surprised. As always I’m behind the curve with this – but I’m glad I caught up with it in the end. And all this means that you should be able to get hold of a copy fairly easily. As I said, I borrowed my copy from the library, but it’s out in paperback, Amazon has hardbacks at a reasonable price via third parties and you can get it in Kindle and Kobo. And the audiobook I mentioned – is read by the author and is apparently exclusive to Audible.
Happy Reading!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 