“What I love about this book was the way it feels suffused with love – of literature, nature and the English language; for her family . . . one of the pleasures of this memoir is its particularly tender mother-daughter bond . . . Lockwood’s voice is wonderfully grounded and authentic . . .she proves herself a formidably gifted writer who can do pretty much anything she pleases.”
– Gemma Sieff, The New York Times Book Review
“Priestdaddy roars from the gate. . . it’s not just that Lockwood has fresh eyes and quick wits, but that in her father she’s lucked upon one of the great characters of this nonfiction decade. . . There is lovely writing in “Priestdaddy” about social class. . . a flyway companion to Hillbilly Elegy. . . I suspect it may mean a lot to many people, especially the lapsed Catholics among us. It is, for sure, like no book I have read.”
–Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“Wildly entertaining…[Lockwood’s] humor and poetic descriptions are both impressively prolific, every sentence somehow funnier than the one you just read.” —New York Magazine’s The Cut
“[A] vivid, unrelentingly funny memoir… [Lockwood’s] stories . . . are both savage and tender, shot through with surprises and revelations.”—New Yorker
“Gives ‘confessional memoir’ a new layer of meaning. From its hilariously irreverent first sentence, this daughter’s story of her guitar-jamming, abortion-protesting, God-fearing father will grab you by the clerical collar and won’t let go.”—Vanity Fair
“Remarkable . . . Lockwood proceeds with a near unflagging sense of ironic exuberance and verbal inventiveness . . . this superabundance of comic energy and literary vigor is a measure of Lockwood’s seriousness.”—Washington Post
“With this ferocious, bodacious memoir, Lockwood finally mounts her own pulpit, reclaiming a story that all along was hers alone to tell.”—O, The Oprah Magazine
“A sharply written and (I can’t overstate this) relentlessly funny family history . . .Lockwood’s language swerves into sumptuous poetry several times per chapter.”—Boston Globe
“A memoir about growing up different and Catholic, but unlike any you’ve read before. Poet and writer Patricia Lockwood brings her uniquely bracing yet humorous prose to the story of where it all began: home.”—Glamour Magazine
“Here, using the same offbeat intelligence, comic timing, gimlet skill for observation and verbal dexterity that she uses in both her poetry and her tweets, [Lockwood] delivers an unsparing yet ultimately affectionate portrait of faith and family… Priestdaddy gives both believers and nonbelievers a great deal to contemplate.”—Chicago Tribune
“Funny and gorgeously written, with scenes so witty and zany they could be lifted from a Broadway show, Priestdaddy will be one of the major prose debuts of the year.” —The Huffington Post
“Priestdaddy is a revelatory debut, a meditation on family and art that finds poetry in the unlikeliest things, including poetry. Patricia Lockwood’s prose is nothing short of ecstatic; every sentence hums with vibrant, anarchic delight, and her portrait of her epically eccentric family life is funny, warm, and stuffed to bursting with emotional insight. If I could write like this, I would.” —Joss Whedon
“Lockwood is antic, deadpan, heartbreaking. . . each sentence shimmies with wonderful, obscene life.”
–npr.org
“Lockwood’s humor can shape-shift into something else entirely, something quite moving. . . Priestdaddy is a book necessary for 2017—a meditation on living in the house of an unabashed patriarch, of asserting one’s humanity and continuing to take up space.”
– The Rumpus
“Lockwood is one of the great original voices of this new century and she is in total control of it here.”
—The Awl
“The story of a very loving and eccentric family, full of American contradictions and dense with brilliant sentences that Lockwood seems to toss off as if she were brushing lint from her sweater.”
– Vulture.com
“Patricia Lockwood’s side-splitting Priestdaddy puts the poetry back in memoir. Her verbal verve creates a reading experience of effervescent joy, even as Lockwood takes you through some of her life’s darker passages. Destined to be a classic, Priestdaddy is this year’s must-read memoir.” —Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club
“Beautiful, funny and poignant. I wish I’d written this book.” —Jenny Lawson, author of Furiously Happy
“Lockwood has the singular ability to sear you with its often comical, but rarely less than sublime beauty. Her words work as lightning; they devastate with extreme efficiency, you continue to see them in front of you even when you’ve closed your eyes.”—Nylon
“This is a story about all kinds of sacred things… Lockwood’s estrangement is born of intimacy, and she chronicles it with clear eyes.”
—Guernica
“A sidesplittingly funny, and simply gorgeously written reflection on her father’s decision to become a Catholic priest. As poignantly self-reflective as it is authoritative and enlightening about the state of the Catholic Church—and modern religion—today, PRIESTDADDY’s buzz is sure to sustain us all summer long.”—Harper’s Bazaar
“A powerful true story from one of America’s most relevant and funniest writers. . . the commandingly written Priestdaddy—about family, religion, identity and trauma—will certainly make you laugh out loud. But it may also move you to tears.”
—Playboy
“Irreverently reverent . . . It is easy to be distracted and delighted by [Lockwood’s] strange, phosphorescent prose, but the wisp of an idea brushes against you, and before you know it, there’s a welt.”
—New Republic
“These vignettes of growing up as the daughter of a married Catholic priest (rare but possible) are so darkly funny that I found myself hooting with laugher and highlighting passages like crazy.”
—Omnivoracious
“Lockwood’s book is really a rather deliciously old-school, big-R Romantic endeavor: a chronicle of the growth of a mind, the evolution of an imagination.”
—The Atlantic
“I’m an agnostic, but I truly believe that we are all blessed by Patricia Lockwood’s decision to lend her amazing facility for language to prose with Priestdaddy. It’s a hilarious book full of heavy truths; a wonderful study of one of life’s most precious resources – beautiful weirdos.” —Andy Richter
