I don’t see any reason to read only books that are vibrating with the latest buzz. In fact, I’m happy to let them rumble around out there and pick them up later if I feel the need—something that worked brilliantly recently when I came across an off-kilter, eight-year-old memoir that got me thinking.

American writer Patricia Lockwood has a new novel out this fall, Will There Ever Be Another You, the story of a woman whose life fragments after she contracts a chronic illness. The review I read didn’t hook me, even though the book would go on to be named one of The New Yorker’s Essential Reads of 2025. Instead, I had a Wait-A-Minute moment when the writer mentioned Lockwood’s earlier success, Priestdaddy, a comic memoir of her life as the daughter of a married Catholic priest. 

Married Catholic priest. I read that a couple of times, not having any idea they existed. I ordered the book, meanwhile asking myself that useful question: Why am I drawn to Priestdaddy instead of any one of a million other books out there? 

Patricia’s father, Greg Lockwood—already married at 21—was an atheist serving on a nuclear submarine who experienced a religious conversion after watching The Exorcist 72 times during one underwater tour of duty. After surfacing, he became a Lutheran minister, and he and his wife Karen had five children. Tricia, as her family calls her, was in the middle. 

Feeling doubts about the Lutheran faith, Greg eventually decided to become a Catholic priest, and to bring his wife and children into the church with him. As someone raised a Protestant, I had no idea any of this could happen, although I learned from Lockwood that the Vatican sometimes grants a dispensation. In this case Greg was accepted into the priesthood by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, and his family situation was approved.

Father Greg went on to serve in cities across the American Midwest, wearing his respectable black suit and clerical collar outside the rectory and nothing but his boxer shorts inside it. It turns out Lockwood’s father is a MAGA-supporting, Democrat-hating, gun-toting, electric-guitar playing, semi-nude eccentric. 

At different points, Father Greg is proudly arrested for taking part in an anti-abortion protest, chows down on homemade pickles straight from a Tupperware container—the only vegetables he’ll eat—and denies Tricia and her sister the financial help they need to go to college. Two weeks before she’s due to leave for campus, Greg tells Tricia he can’t afford to send her. She accepts it numbly, unable to argue.

“I lingered a bit longer,” she writes, “in a room filled with gleaming guitars on stands, candy-apple red, spruce green, lake blue and carapace black. They wailed a little in the silence. Soon he would acquire another guitar, more costly than all of these, a lefty that had originally been made for Paul McCartney. When Paul decided he didn’t want it, my father snapped it up and showed it to us with the lavish, loving gaze he reserved for colorful, well-oiled and obedient machines. Later, I would take a detached, literary pleasure in the notion that higher education had been unwittingly robbed from me by a Beatle.”

Daddy issues, well earned. Looking up from Lockwood’s book, I glanced over at my copy of Featherhood, a memoir by Charlie Gilmour that I’d recently reviewed which features a magpie and Charlie’s two fathers, rock star David Gilmour (step) and poet Heathcote Williams (birth). Next to it, on my to-read pile, is a new book about army veterans with undiagnosed PTSD. 

Dad, I thought. You’re not going to try to muscle your way into my new book, are you? I’ve just finished writing a novel in which I gave my protagonist a single mother, since my long-dead, decent and painfully troubled dad has a habit of showing up in my fiction when there’s a father character. Now I’m researching the next book, which means doing some targeted reading, but also buying books that catch my eye.

Writing tip: It’s valuable to notice which books you pick up casually. They can provide a clue to the thoughts and obsessions burbling under the surface ready to inform your new piece of writing. 

Readers can do it, too. Last week I was chatting with an in-law who’s recently retired and wondering what comes next. Are the books she picks up clues to what she wants to do, as opposed to what she thinks she ought to? It’s worth considering—just as I need to spend time mulling over the themes of damage and eccentricity that surface in both Priestdaddy and Featherhood.

(You’re not going to be in there, Dad, I insist. Probably in vain.)

Lockwood’s memoir centres on the nine months she and her husband spend living with her parents. Patricia and Jason are in their early thirties, unhappily childless, married for more than a decade. Jason has had an operation to correct a rare eye condition, and his vision is taking so long to correct itself that they’ve run through their savings. He can’t work. Patricia tends not to take paying jobs, which leaves Jason, as he says, to play Leonard Woolf to her Virginia. Lockwood’s mother Helen is happy to take care of them, having spent her life as a housewife. At once constrained by her role and thoroughly unedited, Helen leaps off the page, another Lockwood eccentric, who compares herself to the dogs her husband Greg adores.

Writes Patricia: “’Oh yeah, he married me because I’m a human terrier,’ she told me once, with admirable equanimity. ‘I’m excitable, I’m hairy, I have a great sense of smell, and I’m a bitch.’”

Priestdaddy is often hilarious, but it has its darker side, one that soon raises other questions. At times, Lockwood veers from the present-day narrative into her difficult past, writing about a cult-like Catholic youth group she belonged to, and a suicide attempt she made as a teenager. We learn that she began writing this memoir while she and Jason were living in the rectory, scribbling openly in a notebook and admitting to her family that she was writing down everything they said so she could use it in her book. 

No one seemed to object, at least not strenuously. I started wondering why.

“Mom sees the notebook sitting next to me on the table and asks where I’m at now,” she writes. “’I’m writing about all your babies,’ I say, and read from my latest paragraph.

“How many kids should a priest have? One? Two? Three, if he’s Irish? Not even close. How about five. How else will anybody know he’s balls-deep in his hot wife all the time?

“I glance up from the page. ‘Am I allowed to say that last part?’

“’Well…’ She weighs the pros and cons. ‘Balls-deep is very bad. But I like the part where you say hot wife.’”

Their exchange prompts Patricia to look for her father. She finds him in his bedroom “spread out like an outsize pinup model. ‘Dad, I’m writing… well, I’m writing a book about you.’

“’Hahahaha,’ he says, throwing back his half-cherubic, half-satyric head. His angel and his demon aren’t even posted on opposite shoulders. They’re standing on top of his neck, making out. ‘Hahahaha, I’ll murder you.’

“’Don’t say you’ll murder her!’ my mother calls. ‘Not nurturing.’

“’The working title is Priestdaddy,’ I say, determined to make a totally clean breast of it.

“Not that my father believes a breast can ever be clean. ‘Wait till The New York Times gets a load of that,’ he says evilly.”

In fact, the Times named Priestdaddy one of the ten best books of 2017, as did The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Atlantic and a half dozen other prestige publications. A couple of years later, the Times went even further, calling Lockwood’s book one of the 50 best memoirs of the past 50 years. It also won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. 

No serious caveats were raised, although Slate magazine put a subhead on a gently critical review saying “Patricia Lockwood’s writerly touch in her family memoir is almost too light.” Writer Katy Waldman’s complaint? “Lockwood seems undecided about how much she wants to expose.” About her decision to step away from the Catholic Church, about her father. Writes Waldman: “Lockwood… allows her dad to remain a silhouette, a blazing and symbolic force of nature. (After all, as she notes, it can be tricky to sort out the terrestrial father from the divine.)”   

Maybe this is what happens when you read a book several years after its release. Lockwood’s memoir struck me not as an evasion but as a confrontation with both her father and his church—maybe even revenge for the pain both caused her. That’s why I wonder why her parents didn’t object. Christian charity? Guilt? We’re not told. Instead we learn about her father’s unkind decision to abort Lockwood’s college career, get repeated references to his “near-transparent boxer shorts,” and hear the story of the night Father Greg terrified Tricia and her sister by showing them his favorite film, The Exorcist. 

“As the glow of tween possession began to warm my father’s face, he said, with every appearance of perfect happiness, ‘Now here’s what you need to know. This story is absolutely true, it happened right here, right in St. Louis, and it will one day happen again. Maybe to one of you, or to one of your friends.’” 

The girls spend the rest of the night clutching each other and trying to pray. 

Lockwood’s book sometimes made me laugh out loud, which I don’t do very often when I’m reading. At the same time, I had the strangest feeling that I was reading it inside a crowd. Around me were the invisible forms of Father Greg’s parishioners, devouring the memoir, wide-eyed, whispering to each other, gossiping, pointing fingers and laughing at him. 

There was also the ghostly form of Father Greg’s boss, the bishop. He couldn’t have been pleased by homely details Lockwood reveals about her father’s most intimate habits, including the way he bathes with dish soap and greying rags that he leaves in the bathroom sink. The dignity of the church comes into question—even before the chapter about Tricia and her mother taking a road trip, when Helen finds what she believes to be semen-stained sheets in their hotel room. 

The chapter is titled The Cum Queens of Hyatt Place.

“’Touch it!’ (Helen) commands. ‘Touch it and tell me what it is!’

“’Mom, I’m not going to touch cum.’

“’Just touch the cum and tell me if it’s cum.’

“’Please don’t make me touch the cum.’

“’If I hadn’t touched cum… then you would never have been born.’”

The sound you just heard was the phantom bishop fainting. In real life, I imagine Father Greg might have been called in for a talk, and possibly faced a reprimand. Which is why I bring up revenge.

Considerations of the Church’s dignity, not to mention morality, haven’t stopped bishops from shielding priests known to be pedophiles. I’m not too concerned about the image of the Catholic Church. Let them clean it up themselves. Nor do I feel any sympathy for a sexist, gun-toting MAGA priest, and I can’t criticize people who write so candidly about their abusive childhoods that their families are embarrassed or enraged, and sometimes cut off contact. 

Yet there’s this. We all know we need to shout very loudly these days to be heard. Pull out some kink, deploy the cringe. In Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood portrays herself as a naif, and maybe she is. But all the writers I know understand very well that you need to blurt your way onto the best-seller lists. Unlike the Slate reviewer, I never felt Lockwood was undecided about how much she wanted to expose. It was all out there. And it worked, didn’t it? 

So here are the questions I was left with. How much should you expose? When does intimate become too intimate, and when do homely details become unnecessary? Sure, it sells. Maybe it’s revenge. In Lockwood’s case, it’s brilliantly written. But what does it add?

On balance, I enjoyed Lockwood’s book. It’s good to be disturbed and to end up with questions, even if you don’t know the answers. I don’t, anyhow. 

If you do, please let me know. Comments are welcome.