Priestdaddy

American poet and essayist Patricia Lockwood’s memoir, Priestdaddy (2017), details her unique experience of having a father who is a married ordained Catholic priest, having converted to Catholicism from the Lutheran Church. Winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, Priestdaddy was also named by the New York Times on its list of "The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years."

The memoir jumps around in time, beginning close to the present-day when Patricia is an adult and married to her husband, Jason, for the past ten years. Forced to quit his job following expensive eye surgery, Jason faces a great deal of economic strain. He and Patricia decide to move in with Patricia's parents while the couple regains its economic footing. Patricia's father, Greg, was a Lutheran minister with a wife and children when he decided to convert to Catholicism. He received a special dispensation from Pope John Paul II to become one of the few married Catholic priests in the world. Now, Patricia and Jason—two secular feminists who met in an online poetry forum—must adjust to life in a rectory.

This experience causes Patricia to question her notions of family and home. She struggles to square her adult beliefs with her father's piety and conservative politics. She is also disturbed by his casual sexism. She finds more in common with a young seminary student living at the rectory. While he, too, has a much different belief system from hers, Patricia finds she is able to reach him through humor, challenging his somewhat rigid views on sex and gender roles.



The book then flashes back to Patricia's childhood, during which she is acutely aware of the sexual abuse scandal facing the Catholic Church. She laments the code of silence that allows serial abusers to remain in the Catholic Church, blaming not only the Church's leadership but also members of the congregation who refuse to speak out against it. This segues into a discussion about Patricia's own experience with sexual abuse. At the age of nineteen, she is raped by her older boyfriend who had known her and her family since she was twelve years old. She tells her parents what happened, but their reaction is to blame her, the victim. Her father's immediate response is to trace a cross over her in the air and say, “I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” In Patricia's landmark poem, "Rape Joke," she says his reaction, "even in its total wrongheadedness, was so completely sweet." After Patricia publishes "Rape Joke," her mother becomes more sympathetic to her daughter's trauma.

Patricia then discusses her adolescent dreams of becoming a famous singer. Devastated by her inability to sing well at church, she considers this a metaphor for her broader feelings of alienation from her congregation. Nor does Patricia feel she fits in at school, leading to a suicide attempt as a teenager. It is her discovery of her love of writing that saves her life, allowing her to carve out an identity for herself.

The narration returns to the present-day at her young seminarian friend's ordination. At the event, Patricia sees a priest she recognizes from childhood. Apparently, he had been sent away at one point for "counseling" in the wake of "inappropriate behavior." She is disgusted and disappointed that this man who almost certainly perpetrated sexual abuse is still at large and still operating as a priest. Patricia questions the Catholic Church's priorities around who deserves protection and who does not. Why, she wonders, does the Church seem to care more about protecting unborn fetuses than it does young boys and girls? This causes Patricia to reflect on her parents' pro-life activism during the 1970s and 1980s. She also reflects on her mother's unique status as a priest's wife and how that plays into the Catholic Church's rigid gender roles of what a woman should and should not be. It is difficult, she writes, for women to be thought of in any capacity other than as a mother or a nun. Furthermore, Patricia reflects on what the life of a nun must be like.



Near the end of the book, Patricia and Jason move out of her parents' home, nine months after moving into the rectory. The experience redefines how Patricia views herself as a woman, reminding her that, despite the growing acceptance of feminism, women still have a long way to go to escape society's confinement. Nevertheless, she is grateful for her parents' support during her time of need, despite the fact that they differ on so many ideological fronts.

According to The New Yorker, Priestdaddy is "a vivid, unrelentingly funny memoir ... shot through with surprises and revelations."