'Priestdaddy caused a sensation when it hit bookshelves in 2017' Vogue
'Glorious' Sunday Times
'Laugh-out-loud funny' The Times
'Extraordinary' Observer
'Exceptional' Telegraph
'Electric' New York Times
'Snort-out-loud' Financial Times
'Dazzling' Guardian
'Do yourself a favour and read this memoir!' BookPage

WINNER OF THE THURBER PRIZE FOR AMERICAN HUMOUR

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 arnings 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.

When an unexpected crisis forces Lockwood and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, she must learn to live again with the family's simmering madness, and to reckon with the dark side of her religious upbringing. Pivoting from the raunchy to the sublime, from the comic to the serious, Priestdaddy is an unforgettable 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.

'Destined to be a classic . . . this year's must-read memoir' Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club

'Irrepressible . . . joyous, funny and filthy . . . Lockwood blows the roof off every paragraph' Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine

'Beautiful, funny and poignant. I wish I'd written this book' Jenny Lawson, author of Furiously Happy

'A revelatory debut . . . Lockwood's prose is nothing short of ecstatic . . . her portrait of her epically eccentric family is funny, warm, and stuffed to bursting with emotional insight' Joss Whedon

'Praise God, this is why books were invented' Emily Berry, author of Dear Boy and Stranger, Baby

The hilarious and universally lauded memoir of life as the daughter of a gun-toting, all-American Catholic priest.

About the Author
Patricia Lockwood was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA and raised in all the worst cities of the Midwest. Her debut collection, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, was released in 2012 by Octopus Books; her second collection, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, was published by Penguin Books in 2017. Her poems have appeared widely, including in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Tin House and Poetry, and her writing on politics and literature has appeared in New Republic and The London Review of Books.

Reviews
Glorious * Sunday Times *
Extraordinary * Observer *
Electric * New York Times *
Exceptional * Telegraph *
Snort-out-loud * Financial Times *
Dazzling * Guardian *



Book Information
ISBN 9780141984599
Author Patricia Lockwood
Format Paperback
Page Count 352
Imprint Penguin Books Ltd
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Weight(grams) 258g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 20mm