Priestdaddy: A Memoir

by Patricia Lockwood

The feeling of getting an email! As if the ghost of a passenger pigeon had flown into your home and delivered it directly into your head, so swooping and unexpected and feathered was the feeling. How suddenly full you felt of white vapor. How you set your fingers on the keyboard to write back, and your fingers disappeared almost up to the first knuckle in those clattering beige keys—so much more satisfying than the shallow keys that came later, or the touchscreens that came even after that.

Writers like being bodiless. Two people who have collectively lived in twenty different cities across the world don’t consider their feet rooted to any particular ground.

It was 2002, and back then, everyone believed the internet was a country where murderers lived.

The words rang with meaning, because I had been raised that way. That is the vestigial organ of religion—the voice that speaks, the hand that reaches out to hold.

“Of course,” he says, and I feel the jolt you feel when alternate universes, which usually run parallel and unseen alongside you, leap out of black water and crisscross like dolphins over your trajectory. When you realize it might have been different.

When I look at them, I think: to prize traditionalism above all else in a church that began in revolution is to do a great violence to it. But I feel that same ache for the past in myself: to uphold the columns of literature, grammar, the Western tradition. The English language began as an upheaval; I am not protecting it when I try to guard it against change. The Jesus Christ of it, Chaucer, walked across the water telling dirty jokes, made twenty stories stretch to feed a million people, spelled the word “cunt” five ways, performed miracles. Any innovation I put down on paper is an attempt to remind myself of this. I am not modern. I was not born to blaze new paths or bring down walls. I break form against my nature to tell myself that revolution, too, is a tradition that must be upheld.

A trick I often use, when I feel overwhelming shame or regret, or brokenness beyond repair, is to think of a line I especially love, or a poem that arrived like lightning, and remember that it wouldn’t have come to me if anything in my life had happened differently. Not that way. Not in those words.

People do give us things. They always have. They give us buttery homemade caramels and free haircuts. They send over plates of gnocchi at the local Italian restaurant, where the owner nurtures a fervent love for the Virgin. Once someone gave us half a cow—first when it was living, and then when it was dead. The steaks of this cow tasted like they had been stockpiled for the end of the world, but what else could we do? We ate them. It is steaks like these that have sustained me throughout my life, no matter what I believed.

It is probably the last conversation like this the seminarian and I will have. After his ordination, particular friendships with women will be discouraged. I understand why, but in a wider sense, it is frightening. If you are not friends with women, they are theoretical to you.

When you cannot pinpoint a pain in your body, the whole world seems to throb with it. Trees in pain, lit windows in pain, Wednesday nights in pain. Pianos flaming with pain, and the scale sliding up into a cry.

The air of a subculture is a different air; it has words in it, even messages. It is harder to breathe, but it gives purpose to every part of you, every cell. It propels you forward, it works through you, your eyes produce a spotlight wherever they fall—a hot white beam of accusing clarity—and everything you look at is bathed in it.

The desire to describe voice, gesture, skin color, is a desire to eat, take over, make into part of the pattern. I am happy every time to see a writer fail at this. I am happy every time to see real personhood resist our tricks. I am happy to see bodies insist that they are not shut up in this book, they are elsewhere. The tomb is empty, rejoice, he is not here.

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 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.