Priestdaddy

Starred review from May 1, 2017
Equipped with acerbic wit and a keen eye for raunchy detail, poet Lockwood (Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals) ventures into nonfiction with this wickedly funny memoir about moving back in with her parents. For eight months in 2013, Lockwood and her husband, Jason, moved back to Kansas City to live in her childhood home. It’s a situation colored in no small way by the presence of Lockwood’s larger-than-life family, particularly her father, a practicing (and, yes, married) Catholic priest, who loves sports cars and guns and watches action movies in his underwear, and mother, a sweetly earnest, hyperactive woman whose “preferred erotica on the internet German Christmas handcraft.” The book includes flashbacks to Lockwood’s childhood and adolescence as she grapples with her religious upbringing and finds refuge in the written word. The result is Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood meets David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day, with a poetic twist.

Starred review from March 15, 2017
A noted young poet unexpectedly boomerangs back into her parents' home and transforms the return into a richly textured story of an unconventional family and life.After Lockwood (Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, 2014, etc.) discovered that her journalist husband, Jason, needed lens replacements in both his eyes, the pair -[threw themselves] on the mercy of the church.- This meant going to Kansas City to live with her mother and eccentric father, an ex-Navy man and former Lutheran minister-turned-deer-hunting, guitar-wielding Catholic priest. For the next eight months, Lockwood and Jason, who had met online when both were 19 and begun their peripatetic married life not long afterward, found they were like -babies in limbo-: dependent on parents after 10 years of living on their own. Throughout, Lockwood interweaves a narrative of those eight months with memories of her childhood and adolescence. Though not always occupying center stage, her father is always at the heart of the book. The author describes her -priestdaddy's- penchant for creating -armageddon- with the guitar, which he treated like some illicit lover by practicing it -behind half-closed doors.- At the same time, she confesses her own uncomfortable proximity to church pedophile scandals and clerics that had been forced to resign. Lockwood treats other figures--like the mother who wanted to call the police after discovering semen on a Nashville hotel bed and the virgin seminarian -haunted by the concept [of milfs]---with a wickedly hilarious mix of love and scorn. Yet belying the unapologetically raunchy humor is a profound seriousness. Episodes that trace the darker parts of Lockwood's life--such as a Tylenol-fueled teenage suicide attempt; her father's arrest at an abortion clinic sit-in; and origins of the disease and sterility that would become her family's -crosses- to bear--are especially moving. Funny, tender, and profane, Lockwood's complex story moves with lyrical ease between comedy and tragedy as it explores issues of identity, religion, belonging, and love. A linguistically dexterous, eloquently satisfying narrative debut.

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April 15, 2017

In this debut memoir, Lockwood invites us into the unusual tapestry of her life as the daughter of Father Greg Lockwood, a married Catholic priest who eschews clothing, plays the electric guitar, despises Democrats, and calls his daughter--an irreverent poet who marries a man she met online--a "demon." Lockwood leaves the Catholic Church, in which she literally lives, and moves with her new husband to a Catholic-free life, only to return several years later when the couple suffers financial crisis. Her homecoming serves as the impetus for this memoir, which opens with her mother--a woman who delights in telling morbid stories and brags that she made a perfect score on the SAT--and introduces us piecemeal to the oddities of their family life, largely through the lens of the author's husband. This account is rich with fine prose and humor, but Lockwood guards herself so closely that she still feels like a stranger at the halfway mark. She eventually gives us a glimpse into what lies beneath, but it doesn't happen at the onset. VERDICT The title and topic will pique interest, and Lockwood's humor and humility make this a worthy purchase.--Erin Entrada Kelly, Philadelphia

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2017
Lockwood's memoir is a study in contrast. Her father, who became a Catholic priest after he was married and had a family, also happens to only wear boxers around the house, play classic rock guitar, and read Tom Clancy. Lockwood's mother adheres to the social mores of Catholicism but also enjoys a good curse and manages several rounds of puns about a semen stain found in a hotel room. And Lockwood herself, a poet who abandoned the church long ago, loves a dirty joke but still knows exactly what she should be doing at every moment during a service. After Lockwood and her husband fall on financial troubles, they move back into her parents' rectory to regain their footing. This collision of worlds brings a flood of childhood memories filled with antiabortion protests, a bizarre youth group, and the push against her conservative upbringing. Lockwood magically combines laugh-aloud moments with frank discussions of social issues and shows off her poet's skills with lovely, metaphor-filled descriptions that make this memoir shine.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)