I would give this 2.5 stars and I didn't finish this book because I didn't care to. Everything felt too shiny and funny and ironic and clever and weirdly watered down. Every page felt like it had a pun or a punchline. the book also jumped around a lot and felt disjointed, more like individual essays that didn't quite fit together. I don't like memoirs to be tied up with bows. At the start this book had so much promise but now I'm not sure I could recommend to anyone.

Oh, this book! I was not prepared to be so blown away.The author and her husband leave their home in Savannah after a medical setback that took every cent they owned, and then some. She goes home to stay with her parents until they can get back on their feet again. This happens all the time, right? But suppose your father is a Catholic priest, with a wife and five children? Suppose your father was an atheist who found religion in a submarine, became a Lutheran minister who converted to Catholici...

DNF. This book started off with a laugh, but by page 70 I was over it. Every sentence was so grossly exaggerated and the characters were so cartoonish that the actual story got lost and it was difficult to follow or care about what was going on.

There were times during this book that I was actually laughing out loud, I loved the authors sense of humor. Overall though I was really bored, the chapters ran on and there were some stories that just seemed random and didn't seems to fit. Honestly I'm the kind of person who has to finish a book once I start it, but towards the end I just wanted it to be over.

I'm kicking off 2018 by reading some of the best of 2017. Here are the maybes; here's Digg's aggregate top ten list."I emerged from my own mother in the form of a tiny psychic covered with tits," says Patricia Lockwood, so you know it's going to be that kind of a memoir. Lockwood comes off as some unholy bastard child of bloggers and poets; she carries the Wonder Woman bracelets of sarcasm and the invisible jet of metaphor. She describes her cat's inexplicable love for her father's horrendous gu...

"My dad despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun."This book was fucking ridiculous, in the best way. I've never read anything like it. It would have been a wild ride of a (true!) story had it not been told by Patricia Lockwood -- I mean, it's about having a priest for a dad who plays sick guitar riffs, and growing...

*kool-aid man voice* OHHHH YEAHHHHHH

Patricia Lockwood is some kind of word-witch, and I cannot emphasize enough how lucky we all are to live in this era with her.

[2.4] The parts of this memoir are greater than the whole. Lockwood uses her poetic sensibility to write about her offbeat life - including growing up with a "Priestdaddy." (Her father is a Catholic priest, allowed to stay in the priesthood after converting from Lutheranism). She writes spectacular, carefully polished sentences and paragraphs - then scatters them and lets them fall where they may. There is no flow to this choppy memoir. It is a hodgepodge of anecdotes and memories and painstakin...

Papa Don't PreachBy Judge Nina SankovitchPatricia Lockwood is the daughter of a Catholic priest—and that is actually the blandest fact about her. She is one in a million, a fresh and honest and hilarious observer of life. And Father Lockwood is one in a million as well—a priest who takes the Lord seriously, even though he’s most comfortable when half nude and jamming on his electric guitar in the living room.In her memoir Priestdaddy, Lockwood explains not only how her father entered the priesth...

Warning: this book will blow your mind. (It did mine, anyway.) When you’re not snorting, sniggering or guffawing, you’ll be marveling at how Patricia Lockwood is incapable of producing a dull sentence. Every paragraph, if not every line, of Priestdaddy contains a turn of phrase so fresh and surprising that wouldn’t have occurred to the average reader in years of pondering. Yet it reads as utterly natural, even effortless. This is evidence of a poet’s mind sparking at high voltage and taking an i...

Most of this memoir reads like episodes of a sitcom with the central situation being Patricia growing up with a Catholic priest as a father. Seminarians, moving around a lot, some of the strangeness of being super conservative in the 80s and 90s, it's all in there. A lot of the book could be dipped in and out of without feeling lost, because it isn't really told chronologically (this might bother some people though.) Many of the stories are just that - self-contained stories, often funny. (Peopl...

I kind of suffered through this book. It was too...smug? At times, I felt like I was watching a stand up comic stumble through a bit and it made me want to turn away. Other times, it was genuinely funny and charming. I think it was just too much of one person for me.

One reads Lockwood's memoir and can't help but think, "oh man, the Catholics are going to have a field day with this." I mean that is the most literal sense - they will race through it, they will kick it about, they will pick teams, some will over analyze, some will out right reject it, some will feel they have triumphed and some will be bitter with defeat. And they will all go home weary, not knowing precisely why anyone does field days anymore. Except that perhaps they will look back on Priest...

I really liked Patricia Lockwood's second book of poetry ("Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals), but this memoir was a big disappointment -- sloppily and perhaps hastily written (a 1990s computer monitor is described as "capacious" on page 18; five pages later, a living room in a rectory is also "capacious"). The book is disorganized and immature in an off-putting way that made me wonder if the author is 15 or 35. You say your dad's a Catholic priest? Do tell. (My mother became a Catholic nun

My review from the Chicago Tribune: http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifesty...Last summer, the Pew Research Center released a study showing that for the first time, more 18- to 34-year-olds live at home with their parents than in any other arrangement.So Patricia Lockwood's decision to move with her husband, in the face of medical and financial hardship, back in with her parents in Kansas City "after twelve long years away" is hardly exceptional unto itself. No, what makes it exceptional is that t...

Part of what you have to figure out in this life is, Who would I be if I hadn't been frightened? What hurt me, and what would I be if it hadn't? shortly after starting priestdaddy, i had the delightful realization that i will adore anything patricia lockwood writes. no one is talking about this blew my mind a few months ago, and while this is a very different memoir (& perhaps more conventional), it glitters in a similar way.lockwood's writing is magnificent. it paints such a picture, and eve

Funny, melancholy, moving. This was a treat from start to finish.

“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. Then, turning his attention back to the football game, he bellows, “C’MON ANDY!” and kicks a meaty leg in the air. He refers to all athletes by their first names, as if they are his sons.Fast on the heels of reading No One Is Talking About This, the Man Booker-shortlisted novel based...

I identified with quite a lot of this dazzling memoir, much more than I had expected. Sure it addresses universal themes like family and identity, but it is Patricia Lockwood's memories of her Catholic upbringing that really struck a chord with me. Like her, the major milestones of my formative years often revolved around the Church, First Communion and Confirmation being the big ones. I rose blearily on Sunday mornings to carry out altar boy duties at First Mass, and because I could kind of pla...