Author Interview: Patricia Lockwood
The author of Priestdaddy on describing parents in lieu of changing them, book titles, and the good side of “church weirdness”
by Tara Bagnola and Charlotte Bruell for Literati Bookstore
How to introduce incomparable poet and memoirist Patricia Lockwood to those who have yet to read her? To best contextualize her most recent memoir, Priestdaddy? Well, here’s bookseller Charlotte:
I read Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy after I found it lounging within a stack of new books at work. I can state with absolute confidence that I have truly, never laughed as much while a reading a book before. Lockwood is an utter singularity in this world, tangling ferocious humor together with bizarre and biting anecdotes of her life. Lockwood drops you into her memoir amidst her and her husband Jason’s forced move back into her parent’s house after medical costs deplete their finances. The reality you find yourself in amidst Lockwood’s off-putting and riotous prose, necessitates a mental re-calibration; Lockwood’s parent’s are anomalies — her father is a Catholic priest, her mother is the wife of a Catholic priest. Lockwood, as the product of a strikingly unique upbringing, provides a stunning narrative that compellingly bridges the discrepancies between a major religious ideology and the mind and mentality of a riotous, contemporary, feminist writer.
Charlotte and fellow bookseller Tara were fortunate enough to ask her some questions about family, religion, and smutty metaphors, below. Patricia Lockwood reads at Literati on Saturday, May 6th, at 7pm.
I think as people, we have this tendency to want our parents to be perfect — or at the very least, we want them to undergo some sort of metamorphosis that transforms them into being the people that we want and need them to be. Realistically, that almost never happens, and our parents mostly carry on being the perpetually pants-less, “feminazi”-hating human beings that they’ve always been. You seem to have the ability of accepting your parents for all that they are, even as often at odds as they are with your views. How do you accept those things without losing your mind and continue to have a very intimate type of closeness with your parents? Help us, Tricia!
When I enter the rectory, every cell in my body just lies down flat on the floor and calls out “Jesus take the wheel.” I give over to some higher power, and become a time-lapse video of sand blowing off dinosaur bones in the desert. It never occurred to me to want my parents to be perfect. To me, they were just as they were, a fact of the world to be observed. If changing your parents is impossible, and for most of us it is, your next best option is to figure out how to describe them.
Calling this book “hilarious” is an injustice of truly epic proportions. I read Priestdaddy and within mere moments of completion the sun was shining, my skin was clear, and woodland creatures had folded all of my laundry. I think if you were to write another book we’d have universal healthcare in like a fortnight. Obviously, humor is endemic to your very being, but it’s also, in my experience, one of the most effective tools for tackling some pretty intense shit. When used as expertly as you do, humor is like the Mickey Finn of empathy and understanding. Would you agree with that, and was that your intention? What do you think we gain from using a little crude levity to discuss the uncomfortable? Do you think something is lost?
Some of the best memories of my childhood are memories of my siblings and me entering a sort of united hysteria while we were being yelled at. Within that hysteria, no one could get at us. We were freely improvising within a situation we could not control, we were turning language against the lecture. It was so necessary to us that I knew I had to preserve it here. The voice I use in Priestdaddy is not one that I specially developed for this book — it is the voice of those memories, of that first awareness that laughter was on our side.
For us, your mom was truly the breakout star of the book. I’ve never met a woman so totally wrapped in complexity and contradiction on just about every level. She’s the wife of a Catholic priest, she’s a conservative, she’s the champion of cum-stain vigilante justice, and totally has the potential to be raunchy as all hell, but still such an absolute mom. Honestly, she’s as much of a glorious anomaly of a human being as you are. This is really just an excuse for us to fawn over your mom, but we’ll toss a question in here so it doesn’t get weird: Do you think Priestdaddy has changed your mom’s own perception of herself? The perspective that you’ve taken has illuminated something uniquely beautiful about her, that we found to be absolutely compelling and magnetic. Has this process changed your relationship with her?
Back when we were kids, we used to joke about my mom keeping something called a Happy-About-Me journal. Whenever she would get any sort of compliment or word of appreciation, she would completely come alive, just bloom like a flower, in a way that was really sweet to see. (Of course she would also compliment herself quite lavishly, and about things that no one else would dream of seeing as positive, such as when she hit that guy with her car and the cop told her anyone else would have killed him, and she tilted her head like a little bird and said, “So actually, in a way, I saved his life.”) Writing this book the way I did — in her house, and consulting her as I went, and giving her the chance to get great lines in — was one long opportunity to get to see that look on her face, to cast her as a literary figure, someone worth quoting. As long as I lived there, we were in league together. She hasn’t read it yet, so she’s a bit apprehensive, but nearly everyone has had the same reaction: that she is the star.
I have to ask about the title. So rarely does a working title make it to the cover of the final product, and yet here we are. I’ve never come across a book that’s elicited such an array of purely visceral reactions. What do you want someone who isn’t at all familiar with your “Smut Queen” reputation to think when they come across Priestdaddy on the shelf?
Ideally, I’d like someone to look at it and think, “Now there’s a girl who has a priest for a dad!” Just deliver the premise to them straight away. I like a certain amount of playfulness in a title. I never understood why, when it comes to titling our books, we suddenly have to be all like Murtherer’s Remorse. Or As the Crow Flies. Or Shakespeare Quote That’s So Much Better Than Anything in the Book That It’s Embarrassing for Everyone Involved. Calling it Priestdaddy was such a personal joke between me and my husband, was so tied up in the writing of the book, that there was never a question I would call it something more traditional, like Lapse or Jesus Piece or The Amen Break.
You say in the book, “If the church teaches us anything, it’s that sometimes we have to answer for what other people have done…the question, for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the ‘us’, and what is the ‘them’, and how do you ever move from one to the other?” Though you no longer consider yourself a member of the Catholic Church, you write like you’ve grown used to existing in this liminal state. From your own remarkably unique vantage point, do you ever find yourself feeling implicated in any “Church minutiae” or weirdness, good or bad?
Oh yeah. On the good side, I always feel proud when the nuns rise up and sass the pope or the president or whoever. But when Catholic tragedies and crimes and scandals bob up into the news — like that recent story about the mass grave found at an Irish orphanage — you feel a shame and anger and helplessness that is personal, even familial. You know the sort of person this has been done to. You are one of them.
