Patricia Lockwood

NEW STATESMAN AND OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 'Destined to be a classic . . . this year's must-read memoir' Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club 'Irrepressible . . . joyous, funny and filthy . . . Lockwood blows the roof off every paragraph' Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine The childhood of Patricia Lockwood, the poet dubbed' The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas' by The New York Times, was unusual in many respects. There was the location: an impoverished, nuclear waste-riddled area of the American Midwest. There was her mother, a woman who speaks almost entirely in strange riddles and warnings of impending danger. Above all, there was her gun-toting, guitar-riffing, frequently semi-naked father, who underwent a religious conversion on a submarine and found a loophole which saw him approved for the Catholic priesthood by the future Pope Benedict XVI, despite already having a wife and children. When an unexpected crisis forces Lockwood and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, she must learn to live again with the family's simmering madness, and to reckon with the dark side of her religious upbringing. Pivoting from the raunchy to the sublime, from the comic to the serious, Priestdaddy is an unforgettable story of how we balance tradition against hard-won identity - and of how, having journeyed in the underworld, we can emerge with our levity and our sense of justice intact. 'Beautiful, funny and poignant. I wish I'd written this book' Jenny Lawson, author of Furiously Happy 'A revelatory debut . . . Lockwood's prose is nothing short of ecstatic . . . her portrait of her epically eccentric family is funny, warm, and stuffed to bursting with emotional insight' Joss Whedon 'Praise God, this is why books were invented' Emily Berry, author of Dear Boy and Stranger, Baby

A Memoir

Priestdaddy

Mari-Claire Parrin

Stephen Schenkenberg

Usually publishing a poem is like puking in space, or growing an adolescent mustache—no one really notices, and it might be better that way.

When the patriarch of your family is a priest, it can be difficult to tell what is church and what is not.

The priests are kissing books constantly, with wet, juicy, open mouthed kisses. This is the only part of the ceremony I understand.

People assume that the shutting-up made her smaller. But locking yourself up can be a way to shrink the castle down to your size, and to expand your body toward the wider limits of the walls, until you are rooted at the foundation, see sideways out the glass, and do your highest thinking with the smoke that leaves the chimney. And still, through the window, you can send out sweets. Emily did not show her face to the children, only the hands and arms that set down the poems. What if she wanted simply to reveal, and not to be exposed? What counts as hiding, and what counts as devoted contemplation?

Priestdaddy quotes

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