Review: Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

Booker Prize nominated author Patricia Lockwood had a very unusual childhood. So much so that she has written an impressive, darkly comic memoir about what it was really like to grow up in a household where her father was a gun-toting, guitar playing Roman Catholic priest. Children of Catholic priests are few and far between in the United States where Lockwood grew up--in fact her father who was already married with children when he converted to Catholicism due to a special, and still very new at the time, exception by the Catholic church that allowed Anglican priests or in Lockwood's case, Lutheran ministers, to become priests on conversion. Provided, of course, that the entire family passed a number of tests. Anyway, Lockwood was inspired to write the memoir when she and her husband returned to the family home after being away for twelve years.

As is characteristic of Patricia Lockwood's writing style, Priestdaddy is written in short paragraphs and snippets that often feel disjointed, and a little haphazard. The comedy is quite black as she details how the family would move around the USA, often placed in churches that had been rocked by scandal, or in communities that were nuclear wastelands. Mostly, however, it details just how eccentric the family is. Many of the events detailed nearly defy belief, such as the author detailing how she planned to leave the family home with a man she met from the internet and how her father, dressed only in his underwear spoke to the author's newfound partner (who proposed to her that day) as he polished his guns. Then there is the heartbreaking way on how she missed out on a university education, the strange way her parents handled the news when they learned their daughter had been raped and ... suffice to say this book is not detailing the exploits of a typical family. After a while, the episodic dark comedy became a little frustrating and I found myself wishing it would detail a little more of her father's job and the direct impact it had on the author and her family.  

Overall, the memoir is entertaining enough, but not really the book that I was looking for. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: Binding 13 by Chloe Walsh

Image
I picked up a copy of the first novel in the Boys of Tommen series assuming that it was set in a university. Turns out that I was wrong. The characters are all in high school, though as per the note in the front, the novel is pitched at readers over the age of eighteen. The setting is quite dark and topics addressed include alcoholism, physical abuse and bullying. The romance, pairing a fifteen year old girl who is small for her age and described as having a childlike appearance with a boy who is physically mature, sexually active, who invades her privacy and is not far from his eighteenth birthday seems questionable.  After suffering through years of bullying at school, some of which put her in hospital, Shannon has transferred to a private school, one so expensive that her mother has to take out a loan to pay all the fees. Things are going well, she has friends at her new school, there are strong anti-bullying rules in place and everything at Tommen College seems well, nicer ... ...
Read more

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean...
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu...
Read more