Priestdaddy by poet Patricia Lockwood, is the account of her life as the daughter of a Lutheran pastor who became a married Roman Catholic priest. It is reviewed in The New York Times tomorrow - June 11 - and is getting noticed elsewhere.
The New York Times Review is below, if you are able to access it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/books/review/priestdaddy-patricia-lockwood-memoir.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbooks&action=click&contentCollection=books®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0And here is an excerpt from The New York Times review:
The Lockwoods are the exception to Tolstoy’s rule about happy families: They are, for the most part, a happy bunch, but happy in a way that is all their own. Lockwood’s father, Greg, is also Father Greg, a Catholic priest with a large family, which makes him a walking oxymoron. An atheist until the Navy, he found God in a submarine. On dry land, he became a Lutheran minister, overseeing a flock of people with a fondness for bright felt banners and mayonnaise. But Lutheranism is ultimately unsatisfying, and he converts to Catholicism, the religion of Lockwood’s mother, Karen. “Here is how it works: When a married minister of another faith converts … he can apply to Rome for a dispensation to become a married Catholic priest. He is allowed, yes, to keep his wife. He is even allowed to keep his children, no matter how bad they might be.” None other than Joseph Ratzinger, a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI, gives Greg Lockwood the stamp of approval.
And so Patricia Lockwood and her siblings grow up in rectories in “all the worst cities of the Midwest.” Karen is den mother extraordinaire, tidying up after her irrepressible husband, who fries up pounds of bacon, tries to hunt deer, washes his body with dish soap, shreds his groovy red guitar, answers the door at all hours to desperate people seeking $5 and/or odd jobs, tends to the dying and the newly born, gets arrested at an abortion protest, loudly coaches action heroes on television and generally leaves a trail of blessed mess wherever he goes (“The dining room looks like a dog just opened a birthday present in it”). Of course, Karen is and does much more than a den mother, and one of the pleasures of this memoir is its particularly tender mother-daughter bond. Karen is indefatigable and largehearted, a caretaker who cooks for family, seminarians, parishioners and workers alike, and frets over their collective health. She’s also a fount of hilarity and superlative turns of phrase, which Lockwood appreciates as the antecedent to her own way with words.
I have Kindled the book and intend to read it soon.
