cover image Priestdaddy: A Memoir

Priestdaddy: A Memoir

Patricia Lockwood. Riverhead, $27 (352p) ISBN 978-1-59463-373-7

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 [is] 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. (May)