the writer is present
This Week in Reading
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
I loved Patricia Lockwood in parts before I loved Patricia Lockwood as a whole. I first heard her exceptionally good interview on the Longform podcast last summer, the interviewer describing her as a poet with a particularly good twitter presence. In the interview she said that everything she does is a way of trying to chase the perfect sentence, a sentiment so deeply relatable I have thought about it at least three times a week since then. I next encountered Lockwood when Claire emailed me her essay about Joan Didion, an essay I have referenced here before, and reference in person at least twice a month, minimum. And then, in the spring, I read her extraordinary essay in Tinhouse and it all clicked together—that it was the same writer who had made all of these things that I loved.
Priestdaddy is a memoir that documenting Lockwood’s return home. It is staggeringly beautiful, each paragraph sculpted by a poet’s sensibility. Each page is brutal and layered, but also wickedly funny. The writing is so undeniably good that Lockwood can escape the heaviness that often plagues poets. Priestdaddy does not need to rely on seriousness to be good, does not have to be dark to be beautiful. Thirty pages in, I knew I was reading one of the best books I would read all year, and that still feels true now that I have finished it.
Lockwood left home at the age of 20 to marry a boy she met on an internet chatroom. Now, nearly 30 and completely broke, she and her husband move back into her childhood home in Kansas City. In many ways, Priestdaddy is not unlike many other memoirs about dysfunctional Midwestern families: a booming father who never seems to wear anything more than underwear, a neurotic, dramatic mother who seems to live inside the trauma of every national newspaper headline, a sister who is ten percent wild animal. The difference between the Lockwoods and the typical dysfunctional Midwestern family is that Patricia’s father is a literal priest. There is a startling dichotomy between the moral purity of the church and the frenzy of Lockwood’s family, but neither negates the other. Priestdaddy dismantles my perception of the church, not by revealing a secret hypocrisy of Catholicism, but by showing me that conservative values and religious piety do not have to come with sweetness and mildness and a reserved nature—that the deeply religious can be just as wacky and brash as the faithless.
Patricia Lockwood is blatantly writing this memoir about her family while living with her family, a fact that does not seem to perturb them in the slightest. “Ever since I confessed I might be writing about her, my mother has risen to heights of quotability exceeded only by Confucius, Muhammad Ali, and that guy who was always saying things like “You have hissed all my mystery lectures. You have tasted a whole worm.”” Patricia Lockwood is also blatantly writing the memoir, in her memoir. The writer is present, both at home, and in the book.
Reading Patricia Lockwood write about her family reminded me of the way I talk about my family. Hyperbolic, yet barely even scratching the surface. When asked to describe my parents I usually say that my mother is Edna Mode from The Incredibles and that my father is Yukon Cornelius from the Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer claymation. I really don’t feel like more description is necessary.
My grandma is 94 and living alone in a one bedroom apartment in Seattle. Worried about her recent propensity to knock herself over, her children have installed webcams throughout the apartment, the link to which has been shared with the entire family. Her children check the webcams to make she is home before they call, stalking the incredibly boring movements of their geriatric mother with the dedication of a military sniper. Instead of being offended by this invasion of privacy, my grandma relishes the attention. “Do you check the cameras?” she asks my mom. “Why is no one watching me!”
My uncle, having got thrown out of his house for reasons to psychotic and complicated to explain in this anecdote, slept on my grandma’s couch for nearly a year. When my family came down to visit me a few weeks back, my cousin whipped out her phone. “Have you been checking the webcams? I take screenshots of Uncle Hoang doing stuff,” she informs me, swiping through an entire photo gallery worth of stills of my uncle on his laptop, my uncle taking a nap, my uncle standing in the kitchen.
I tell stories about my family, and they feel like an exaggeration. I’m after all, only telling the funniest ones, the one that best exemplifies the loudness, the self-absorption that defines every member of my family, including myself. But I also feel like I am never able to fully express the sheer force of my family, the complete lack of logic that seems to guide their every decision. I have, of course, turned them into characters, into conversational currency, but I have done nothing that they have not done first. We are all turning each other into stories, into gossip passed through max volume phone conversations and email threads about my cousin’s period and group texts that I refuse to join. I have turned them into an anecdote, but they have done the same to me, one thousand times over. And moreover, we all turned ourselves into stories first. Every member of my family is fully and completely themselves, but they are also, absolutely, performing that version of themselves.
This is the least attractive thing about writers—the compulsion to turn everything into a story, even as it is happening. The inability to ever fully exist within your life, because you are simultaneously outside of it, narrating it. I worry that I am being disingenuous, that I have never done anything independent of the knowledge of how I would describe it to someone else later.
I got hit by a car on my birthday, three days ago. I was riding my bike down Hollywood Boulevard, on my way home from a matinee movie, my backpack full of Trader Joe’s peonies, when a car turned left and T-boned me. I am okay! Or as okay as you can be after being hit by a car. My entire left leg is a hurricane of purple and black bruises, and my arm is pretty ripped up, but I have no broken bones. As I have recounted the incident again and again, to my parents, to my friends, to insurance agents, I have honed a longer, more detailed version of the story, but the best version is still the nine word sentence: “I got hit by a car on my birthday.” Like so many parts of my life, it feels like the punch line to a joke I didn’t know I was setting up (I moved to Vermont to live on a lesbian sheep farm. I worked at a girl scout camp and made out with a Mormon. I got hit by a car on my birthday.)
What a complete, absurd story. And that is the story that was born, four seconds after my body slammed against the hood of Jazzie Bella’s Mercedes SUV. I had that story, in my brain, in that moment. What do I do now? I thought to myself, as the car hit me. Do I cry? By this point, of course, I was already crying. Is it performative if I cry having thought that I should probably cry? I wonder to myself, while sobbing hysterically. I am always just a tiny bit too self aware in any given situation, and then feel guilty for that self-awareness.
The universe doesn’t follow a tidy story arc—getting hit by a car on my birthday is not a metaphor. But it is kind of funny (no one is allowed to think that this is funny besides me, so I will seize the joke fully). We can, theoretically, exist outsides the bounds of narrative. I just haven’t figured out how yet. So here, have a story.
Further Reading
Definitely read the two Patricia Lockwood essays linked above, and also The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.