Priestdaddy : a memoir

Title:

Author:

Lockwood, Patricia author

ISBN:

9780141984599

Additional ISBN:

9780141984599

Personal Author:

Lockwood, Patricia author

Publication Information:

London : Penguin Books, 2018.

Physical Description:

336 pages ; 20 cm

General Note:

First published in the US. by Riverhead Books, 2017.

Personal Subject:

Lockwood, Patricia.

Subject Term:

Poets, American -- 21st century -- Biography.

Authors, American -- 21st century -- Biography.

Genre:

Autobiographies.

Language:

English

Abstract:

The childhood of Patricia Lockwood, the poet dubbed 'The Smutty Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas' by The New York Times, was unusual in many respects. There was the location: an impoverished, nuclear waste-riddled area of the American Midwest. There was her mother, a woman who speaks almost entirely in strange riddles and warnings of impending danger. Above all, there was her gun-toting, guitar-riffing, frequently semi-naked father, who underwent a religious conversion on a submarine and found a loophole which saw him approved for the Catholic priesthood by the future Pope Benedict XVI, despite already having a wife and children. Priestdaddy is a story of how we balance tradition against hard-won identity - and of how, having journeyed in the underworld, we can emerge with our levity and our sense of justice intact.

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Summary

When the expense of a medical procedure forces the 30-year-old Patricia to move back in with her parents, husband in tow, she must learn to live again with her family's simmering madness, and to reckon with the dark side of a childhood spent in the bosom of the Catholic Church. Her father is a gun-toting, all-American, frequently semi-naked priest who underwent a religious conversion after watching The Exorcist 70 times on a Navy submarine; her mother, who emerges as the book's real heart, is a woman preternaturally concerned with the various disasters that could be about to befall her loved ones - and any nearby babies - at all times. Told with a keen comic sensibility that packs a laugh on almost every page, this is at the same time a lyrical and affecting true story of how, having ventured into the underworld, we can emerge with our levity and our sense of justice intact.

Genre:

Autobiographies.

Reviews (6)

Publisher's Weekly Review

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) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

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.--Sexton, Kathy Copyright 2017 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

PRIESTDADDY, by Patricia Lockwood. (Riverhead, $16.) Lockwood weaves together her origin stories: of her coming of age in a family headed up by a Roman Catholic priest, and of her development as a poet. As our reviewer, Gemma Sieff, put it, Lockwood "proves herself a formidably gifted writer who can do pretty much anything she pleases." This affectionate and witty memoir was named one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2017. THE GOLDEN LEGEND, by Nadeem Aslam. (Vintage, $17.) In a fictional Pakistani town, Nargis, a prominent architect, is suddenly widowed after her husband is killed in an attack. She and others struggle to guard powerful secrets and survive under extremism - offering a window onto the most turbulent and chaotic aspects of real-life Pakistan. But for all its violence, the novel is suffused with hope. BEHAVE: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, by Robert M. Sapolsky. (Penguin, $20.) What in our bodies - our genes, our hormones - accounts for human behavior? Sapolsky, a MacArthur "genius" grant-winning scientist, offers a wide-ranging study, looking to everything from neurobiology to endocrinology for answers. His delightfully quirky tone and rich array of anecdotes make this book a standout. BEAUTIFUL ANIMALS, by Lawrence Osborne. (Hogarth, $16.) Two wealthy expatriates vacationing on a Greek island become fascinated by a refugee they meet there. Their efforts to help him, though rooted in charity, dovetail with a perverse brand of narcissism, which Osborne captures with a sharp eye. Our reviewer, Katie Kitamura, praised the novel's ambiguous morality, writing, "Osborne is a startlingly good observer of privilege, noting the rites and rituals of the upper classes with unerring precision and an undercurrent of malice." THE COLOR OF LAW: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein. (Liveright, $17.95.) Starting in the 19 th century, Rothstein found that virtually every branch of government helped perpetuate pervasive residential segregation, using tactics like racial zoning and biased tax exemptions. In his view, society has an obligation to remedy what he sees as the caste system that resulted. THE RESURRECTION OF JOAN ASHBY, by Cherise Wolas. (Flatiron, $18.99.) A debut novel wrestles with the tensions between familial duty and creative freedom. At 25, the title character has published two best-selling books, but a pregnancy threatens to derail her work. Wolas offers several views of her complex, memorable heroine, and the interplay of Joan's distinct selves - as a mother and as a writer.

Guardian Review

The American poet goes for laughs in recounting her midwest Catholic upbringing, complete with anti-abortion rallies and virginity pledges "My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur." Patricia Lockwood's dazzling comic memoir is set in midwest America and centres on a man who likes to clean his gun, listen to Rush Limbaugh and drink from a mug that reads "I love my 'white-collar' job" -- despite being married with five children, he is a Catholic priest. Father Lockwood, as presented here, is a truly unusual man. Upstairs in the family home, he shreds his electric guitar in a prog-rock frenzy and sips cream liqueurs ("He looked like a gigantic brownie drinking drops of dew"). He has a habit of yelling out "Hoooo-eee" for no particular reason, cooks a great deal of meat and dresses either in his full priestly regalia or nothing but his underwear ("He was wearing his most formal boxer shorts, the ones you could almost not see through"). When Patricia was 19, in 2002, she met her future husband Jason on an internet poetry forum. She was living at home -- her father, a "loose, lazy pile of carnality", was happy to spend money on himself but unable to fund his children through college. After months of exchanged messages, Jason drove from Colorado to Missouri finally to meet her. He half-assumed she would be "fifty years old and Latina"; Lockwood was worried that poets "were the sort of people who said 'lo' in conversation". Her parents were naturally wary of the stranger, and Jason was greeted by her father with the screech: "Gimme your license. I got cop friends." Though an immediate marriage proposal took place -- "in the parking lot of ... the most matrimonial of all grocery stores" -- her mother and father were convinced Tricia was about to drive off with a murderer. It was her sister Mary who pointed out that "We are the ones who are not normal". The outline of Lockwood's family story has been known since she was interviewed in the aftermath of " Rape Joke ", her autobiographical poem that, when published in 2013, instantly found a vast online audience. She was at that time already "indie-poetry royalty", in the phrase of the New York Times, thanks to her first collection of poems, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, and was celebrated too for her "sexts" on Twitter. (Here are three, from 2011-13: "Sext: Botany Class. I do leaf rubbing after leaf rubbing until the teacher kicks me out for Moaning too much"; "Sext: I am a water glass at the Inquisition. You are a dry pope mouth. You pucker; I wet you"; "Sext: I am a Dan Brown novel and you do me in my plot-hole. 'Wow,' I yell in ecstasy, 'this makes no sense at all'".) Called, perhaps too often, the poet laureate of Twitter, she drily notes in Priestdaddy that it took the social-media commotion attendant on "Rape Joke" for mainstream publishers to come calling: the poem was the centrepiece of Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, her second collection, which showcased what the Atlantic magazine has described as her "witty, sexually slippery, polymorphous and Millennially mischievous" work. The writing of a memoir was prompted by Lockwood's return, complete with husband and cat, and after 12 years away, to live with her parents, "penniless, exhausted". Jason was an editor on a small newspaper, who believed he was "destined to be a sort of Leonard Woolf figure"; the couple accepted their "pinched circumstances". When Jason developed a rare eye condition, and they had to raise $10,000 for treatment, Lockwood appealed to her Twitter followers and the money was collected within a day. But the operation went wrong; Jason needed further procedures, and could no longer work. Their only option was a room in the rectory (a sign outside the house reads "God answers knee-mail"). During their nine-month stay, Lockwood finds herself "jotting down everything everyone says, as fast and free as it comes out of their mouths". Her mother rises "to heights of quotability exceeded only by Confucius, Muhammad Ali"; her father shouts at the TV "I like Chunky Soup ... oh yeah ". The New Yorker has described Lockwood as "an exemplar of brilliant silliness", and Priestdaddy is indeed brilliantly silly, with much comedy squeezed out of her Catholic upbringing. (Rumours of Satanists are rife, and new religious robes incite the comment: "The embroidery! Do you see the detail on those lambs!") But the book strikes other notes. It would have been impossible not to address the church's record on child sexual abuse, especially when "the topic of which priests had been removed from their parishes ... was discussed over the dinner table"; the "code of silence" exerted a great power. She reveals that, as a 16-year-old, she took 100 painkiller tablets and had to have her stomach pumped ("Sex would probably have helped," she says of her teenage angst, "but the only thing I was having sex with then was the intolerable sadness of the human condition, which sucked so much in bed"). Between the jokes, there is a fleeting mention of her "childlessness". Lockwood's father was an atheist when he married her mother. He converted when he was working as a naval seaman, serving on a nuclear submarine, and the family legend is that it was due to multiple underwater screenings of The Exorcist : "that eerie, pea-soup light was pouring down, and all around him men in sailor suits were getting the bejesus scared out of them, and the bejesus flew into my father like a dart into a bull's eye". Gregory Lockwood dubbed it "the deepest conversion on record". He became a Lutheran pastor, but later presented himself for ordination as a married Catholic priest, which required a special dispensation from the pope. In due time, he made his terrorised children watch The Exorcist as a "tender rite of passage": "My father attempted to mute the line 'Your mother sucks cocks in hell!' but hit the wrong button on the remote and actually ended up blasting it at maximum volume." Lockwood grew up with pro-life bumper stickers on the family car; she was taken by her parents to anti-abortion rallies. During her early teenage years, she attended a religious youth group called God's Gang, where they spoke in tongues, were told in detail about the sex they shouldn't have, and sang such refrains as "He's a peach of a saviour /He's the apple of my eyes ... And that's why I'm bananas for the Lord!" She carried a card inscribed with the virginity pledge "True Love Waits", and didn't disclose that she had already lost her hymen (she called it her "herman") when she hit the water after jumping off a high diving board: "Suddenly I felt romantic towards the aqua-blue water. I scissored through it in languid strokes and pictured the baby we might make together." Priestdaddy is a haphazard coming-of-age story, but also an account of a writer forming a highly individual worldview Priestdaddy is a haphazard coming-of-age story, but also an account of a writer forming a highly individual worldview, and finding an audience. Lockwood describes the composing of "Rape Joke" -- "It came all at once ... Beads along a razor blade, but now I controlled the cut". The poem recalls an incident from her late teens: "The rape joke is that you were 19 years old. / The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend. / The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee." Having been told about the rape, her priestdaddy made the sign of the cross over her head and absolved her of her sins. Lockwood's poems often explore the objectification of, and violence against, women. In this memoir, which depicts her charismatic, dominating father with no malice, she notes: "I know all women are supposed to be strong enough now to strangle presidents and patriarchies between their powerful thighs, but it doesn't work that way. Many of us were actually affected, by male systems and male anger, in ways we cannot always articulate or overcome." In the section entitled "The Cum Queens of Hyatt Place", Lockwood recounts a trip she makes with her mother, who, on arriving for the first time in a hotel room, finds semen stains on the sheets: "This is a Catholic's worst nightmare, souls all over the bed." They wonder who was responsible. "I think it was probably a businessman," Lockwood remarks, "with a hotel fetish, who shouted the word 'amenities!' as he came." Her mother responds, without a pause: "A jizzness man, you mean." Karen Lockwood, it turns out, understands "Pun Lightning, that jolt of connection", and Priestdaddy becomes in one sense a tribute to her, both as an endless resource of love and care, and an intellectual kindred spirit. At the end of the book, Patricia and Jason have moved out of the rectory, and everything is more possible, less desperate. On a cherished holiday in Key West, Florida, Lockwood looks back, in a fine sentence, to previous stays there: "Next to the sea we were submerged, and what we said in the middle of the night did not matter, it was just breathing ... silvery bubbles that wobbled up through the depths." But family remains closer than it was, and on this vacation her mother is with them, liberated for a while from her crazed home and husband. Happy and full of champagne, she drunkenly proclaims -- as her daughter undoubtedly would -- "I love language". - Paul Laity.

Kirkus Review

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 figureslike 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 lifesuch 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 bearare 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

When Lockwood's (Motherland Fatherland HomelandSexuals) husband needed eye surgery to prevent blindness, the young couple, on their own for the last ten years, moved back home with her parents. Lockwood's father, Greg, a Catholic priest, provides the catalyst for this raunchy yet poignant memoir. Converted by seeing The Exorcist while working on a submarine, Greg, who was already married, received special permission to join the priesthood. A loud, ultraconservative gun enthusiast who hates cats and lesbians, he, along with the church, dominates the family. Lockwood's mother, prone to eccentricity herself, once tried to call the police after finding semen on hotel sheets. What rescues this memoir from sheer craziness is Lockwood's beautiful prose and her ability to shift with ease from the comic to the serious, including alluding to a rape and suicide attempt, as well as the pervasive issues of priest abuse and an overzealous pro-life movement. Lockwood is a poet who is known for her clever sexualized images, which at times can seem over the top. Capturing just the right tone, the author performs her own narration. verdict Recommended for memoir and poetry enthusiasts who are not put off by some vulgarity. ["The title and topic will pique interest, and Lockwood's humor and humility make this a worthy purchase": LJ 4/15/17 review of the Riverhead hc.]-Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Excerpts

Somehow or other, the seminarian has heard about milfs and he is haunted by the concept. He fears hordes of milfs are roaming the plains of dating, simultaneously breastfeeding and trying to trick young men into having sex with them. "Are milfs something that's popular in secular culture for guys in their twenties to go after?" he asks. "Yes," I say gravely, signaling Jason across the room to write that quote down word for word. "Very, very popular. The most popular thing now." His eyes widen and he crosses his legs, as if to protect his holy jewels from the very notion of a milf. I consider other possible lies to tell him. In Britain they call them Nummy Mummies, and due to the gender imbalance left over from the Great War, there are two of them for every male. There's no way of telling whether your own mother is a milf, but if she likes to play bingo, it's almost certain. The wine of Italy is stomped out by milfs, so when you taste the wine, you are tasting their desire. During the full moon a milf lactates a powerful sex milk that is instantly addictive to any man who tries it. He interrupts my reverie to explore the subject further. "What's the difference between a milf and a cougar?" "Cougars are . . . hornier," I say, thinking fast. "A milf doesn't have to be horny at all, it just has to be a Mom You'd Like to F, but a cougar is horny, and it prowls." "So disordered," the seminarian breathes. Calling people "disordered" is practically his favorite thing to do, and a tawny animal woman who chases after tender cubs is about as disordered as it gets. "I hope I never meet one." I get very close to his face and fix him with my most feline expression. "Too late, buddy. You already have." * I want to take the Gay Inkblot Test so bad I can taste it. According to my father, they administer an inkblot test to all the men who are studying to become priests in order to determine whether they're possessed by the handsome little demon of Same Sex Attraction. (He refers to it as SSA, both for jauntiness and to save time.) I'm not sure whether the inkblots themselves have been somehow designed to be gay--balls everywhere, kaleidoscopic bursts of abs, the words "I'M GAY" doing backflips in the ink, a dong on the classic Rorschach butterfly--or whether they just expect people to see gay things in them. Either way, the test cannot be categorized as either scientific or sane, but my father places great faith in it. "It's foolproof," he tells me, with the self-satisfaction of a man who knows he would pass. If he took the test, he would see only Batmobiles, but these guys would see the naked body of Robin. His beliefs about homosexuality are in general keeping with those of the church, with a few small but distinctive flourishes of his own. Earlier this week, for instance, he informed me Elton John became gay because he was "raised by too many aunts." When the seminarian took the inkblot test, he saw bunnies. "You saw . . . bunnies?" I ask. "Bunnies are fine," he says with authority. "Bunnies are very wholesome. What you DON'T want to see is half- animal half-humans. That would show you were messed up." Regular bunnies are just evidence you love Easter, but woe to the one who looks into the ink and sees a rabbit with the luscious lower half of a man. Important: do you understand how badly I would fail this test? I would get something worse than an F. But my father refuses to even let me look at the Gay Inkblots. He's afraid of what he might find. He knows he was saved from ever seeing me bring home a girl named Boots with screws in her ears for one reason and one reason only: because I got married when I was twenty-one to a man I met in cyberspace. "We don't know if it works on women," they say cautiously, when I raise the subject amid the happy family clamor of the dinner table. "That's not . . . we haven't studied that yet." "In fact"--the seminarian sighs--"no one knows how lesbians work." "It's easy," I say. "You put one leg over her leg, and then she puts her other leg over your other leg, and then you brush each other's hair forever while not going to church." He rolls his eyes. "You're not a lesbian, Tricia," he tells me patiently. "You wear dresses." "If you're so determined to figure out who's gay and who's not," I say to my father, "then why don't you ask someone who has actually met some gay people, gay people who haven't had to pretend their whole lives not to be gay?" Gaydar is not real, and I hope never to be in the business of perpetuating crude stereotypes, but the priest who owns his own harp and gets ten different brown-bagged magazines about the Royal Family delivered to him each month? Is possibly not a straight man. But Dad assures me the Gay Inkblot Test is quite sufficient for their needs. So a word to my queer brothers who are longing for a life in the Church: you are safer than houses, for the time being. Go with God. * The seminarian talks frequently about his "celibate powers," which mainly consist of being able to get up extremely early. No, it doesn't sound good to me either, though it's plausible my extreme deficiency of celibacy is the reason I often sleep till noon. To protect and strengthen these celibate powers, he has developed a move called the celibacy block, where he holds up both arms in front of himself in the shape of a cross to ward off the person who's trying to seduce him-- mainly women, as he explains to me, who are "wearing volleyball shorts when there isn't even any volleyball going on." "You know what would be a better idea," I tell him. "To just point a gun at any girl who's cute and yell 'I DON'T THINK SO' at the top of your lungs." The celibacy block is necessary, it seems, because the woods are full of women who lust after men of the cloth. "We call them chalice chippers," the seminarian explains one Sunday, piling his plate with the cold cuts and pickles my mother always sets out after the last Mass. "They're everywhere," my father adds, vengefully forking a slice of roast beef, and goes on to tell us the story of a woman who once gave him "a teddy bear soaked with your mother's perfume, to try and tempt me." How would that even work ? Has any man who ever drew breath been seduced according to this method? Also, I would love to date a woman who soaks teddy bears in perfume and sexually gives them to priests, because she has got to be crazier in bed than any atheist ever dreamed of being. Maybe once you got back to her apartment you would see an even bigger teddy propped up against her pillow, soaked in holy water and waiting for you, with a Bible between its legs opened up to the Song of Songs. Maybe it's for the best, after all, that the seminarian knows what a furry is. If they ever come for him, he'll be ready. * I am not sure what the seminarian wants, exactly. He acts with admirable propriety at all times, despite the fact that all the chairs in this house are upholstered with velvet and leave perfect impressions of your hindquarters whenever you sit down on them. My mother obliterates the prints with the palm of her hand whenever she encounters them, but I sneak back in and sit on the chairs again when she's not looking. The seminarian is unaffected by this campaign, however. His sights are set on something higher. The firmest desire I ever hear him assert is that he would like to have a lady wash his clothes, perhaps in a river . "Why a river, specifically?" I probe further, carrying two mugs of tea in from the kitchen to fortify us against the doldrums of four o'clock. "I want to watch her rub my clothes on the stones," he responds. I look down at him for a long moment, wondering if I should tip the tea out into his lap so he doesn't get too turned on by my gesture of servitude, and he shrugs. "I like domestic stuff," he tells me, his voice falling to a sudden romance-novel huskiness. So fuck a butler. Men, it bears repeating, are so weird. This is so far outside my area of sexual expertise it's not even funny. Tell me you want to role-play a butlerfuck while pretending to serve your penis on a big silver tray and I will nod with understanding, and perhaps even offer to film it. But you want a woman to wash your clothes in a river? What are you, some kind of pervert? * A priest 's uniform includes the following: a white collar, either cloth or celluloid. A black short-sleeved shirt, black slacks and black belt, black shoes. Black Gold Toe socks. No other kind of sock is even considered. Underwear, I think . They buy these items from a special Sacred Clothing catalog, which for some reason is illustrated with pictures of priests laughing insanely, raising crunk cups to Christ, and posing in close embraces. No one knows what they're doing, but they appear to be having just as good a time as the Victoria's Secret models. Pillowfights do not seem far away. When my father started saying the Latin Mass, he gave up the short-sleeved shirts and slacks and took to wearing a cassock, which is just a long black dress for a man that everyone refuses to call a dress. ("It is a dress," I have reiterated many times, trying to open people's eyes to the truth. "And the pope wears what a baby would wear to the prom.") The seminarian wears a cassock too, because he's traditional, and he asked for thirty-three buttons on his: one for each year of Jesus' life . On formal occasions, both of them affect a pompom hat, which has no utility as far as I can tell and which no one has ever been able to explain to my satisfaction. "Really, a pompom hat?" I ask one day, when the seminarian and my dad are both sitting across the table from me decked out in their full regalia, looking like two dark Muppets from the realms of hell. "It's not a pompom, it's a tuft," the seminarian tells me. "A pompom would be silly." "We don't call it a hat, we call it a biretta, " my father adds, his tuft going absolutely wild. Ah. Why wear a regular hat, when you can wear a hat that sounds like a firearm. I begin flipping through the latest Sacred Clothing catalog and pause at a picture of a hundred-year-old priest and a twenty-five-year-old priest spooning each other in front of a stained-glass window. "Look at these incredible fantasy scenarios," I say, turning the picture sideways. "I'm taking this upstairs with me. This is my Playboy now." A few pages on, a photo of a female minister wearing vestments in all colors of the rainbow catches my attention. "Wait a minute, there are women in this?" My father screws his eyes up very tinily, as if to cause the female minister and all others like her to disappear. "Those goofy Anglicans," he says, and then makes the distressing moo-cow noise he always makes when imitating the communications of feminists, who lurk in his imagination in rabid, milk-spurting, man-stampeding herds. "MooOOooo, we all gotta be equal, don't we?" he mocks, with such perfect assurance of my agreement that I wonder if he has ever really looked at me, or heard a single word I've ever said. Perhaps, when all is said and done, I am more like a son to him than a daughter. Excerpted from Priestdaddy: A Memoir by Patricia Lockwood All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.