Priestdaddy: A Memoir

by Patricia Lockwood

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. Sometimes, when the ceiling seems especially low and the past especially close, I think to myself, I did not make it out. I am still there in that place of diminishment, where that voice an octave deeper than mine is telling me what I am. Before I turned thirteen, I had never been part of the class that my father called empty-headed and addressed as “dollface,” that our church seemed to see as just bodies. I was simply myself, unique and irreducible. Suddenly I became female, and it was as if a telescope I had been looking through—with a clear eye, up at an unbounded night of stars—had been viciously turned on me. I went to a pinpoint. Does God exist was never a question for me then; do I exist took up the whole of my mind. I did not make it out, but this does. Art goes outside, even if we don’t; it fills the whole air, though we cannot raise our voices. This is the secret: when I encounter myself on the page, I am shocked at how forceful I seem. On the page I am strong, because that is where I put my strength. On the page I am everything that I am not, because that is where I put myself. I am no longer whispering through the small skirted shape of a keyhole: the door is knocked down and the roof is blown o...

I was the same as most girls who wished themselves in a convent: I wanted to be where I could think, and where not just anyone could look at me. I wanted to sleep in a bed that was just big enough for me and my own salvation. I wanted to choose constraint and be freed by it, after constraint was all that had ever been offered to me.