Reading Priestdaddy on Father's Day

I finished reading Patricia Lockwood's memoir Priestdaddy in June, the night before Father's Day. When I awoke the next morning, I realized that the book had shifted shape while I slept. A few scattered details now stood out for me from the rest, and once I allowed them to cluster, they began to look like a completely different story about fathers than the comical one I thought I'd been reading.

I bought and read Priestdaddy as soon as I could because I think Lockwood is a scary brilliant linguistic magician who can reinvent your world with words. I first realized this when I read her report of the GOP primary race for The New Republic, in which, among other memorable moments, she described Ted Cruz's face as "fetal pig tissue grown inside a cowboy boot." That line is both funny and surgically accurate, but what I admire most about Lockwood's prose is her ability to select, break, and reassemble words into combinations that crack open a little bit of truth.

So I came to Priestdaddy for word magic, and I definitely got it. The book tells the story of the nine months Lockwood and her husband spent living with her parents--a Catholic priest and the wife with whom he has five children--in a rectory in Kansas. Her story begins by explaining exactly how a Catholic priest might end up married with five children. And it remains in this territory of the familial absurd, recounting anecdotes of this priest/daddy who manspreads on the couch in his underwear shouting at tv sports broadcasts when he's not upstairs playing badly and loudly on the electric guitar.

But there were nagging details that preoccupied me when I woke up on Father's Day. In Priestdaddy, there are pedophile priests and men who protect them, there are suicide attempts, there are children denied college educations when money is spent instead on electric guitars, there are pro-life gatherings and virginity pledges, there are rapes and their denials, there are subordinate women whose voices aren't heard, or who speak a language that is either a form of emotional gobbledygook or that perfectly expresses how they really feel if only we could translate it.

Lockwood's linguistic gift suddenly seemed instead to be outlining silence, her words carving elaborately gorgeous and chillingly precise borders around an inarticulable space occupied by fathers and the things they do because they can, because no one and nothing stops them. By fathers I don't mean only biological fathers, but also pastoral fathers, father figures, the Father, the system of patriarchy that authorizes what men say and feel and think and do even when it's wrong or harmful or illegal. If Lockwood's prose stops to laugh at the edge of that space, maybe it's because its interior is terrifying.

Researchers at Berkeley have recently discovered that power produces literal brain damage. The focus of the study were CEOs who slowly and irremediably lost the ability to hear or understand those they gained power over. No longer capable of empathy, their brains resembled those who had suffered a traumatic head injury. Except in this case, it is not the damaged ones but everybody else who suffers.

In an op-ed for the Washington Post headed by a photo of Ben Affleck embracing Harvey Weinstein, Alexandra Petri tells men that they are not the weather. In case this incredibly shrewd observation sounds like gobbledygook, let me translate: the world has been so shaped by and around men that the rest of us walk through it at a tilt. We're so used to the tilt that we most often don't even notice it, and when we do, we seldom complain. When we do complain, we take into careful consideration what that complaining sounds like from the position of the non-tilted, trying to balance the perspectives of the tilted and non-tilted (as absurd as that is really), hoping the result might be to lessen the degree of tilt because the idea of eliminating it altogether seems utopically hopeless. 

But it's exhausting, and also it hurts. It hurts to walk, day after day, month after month, year after year, at a tilt. It's not good for your body or your mind. You wonder what it would feel like to get up in the morning to an untilted world, to stand on an even floor as you walk upright through your house and out the door, into the street, into the office, still upright and balanced. But that's when people start looking at you funny and making observations about you to anyone who will listen. Look at that ridiculous hat she's wearing, or what's up with all the pantsuits, or let's send her a rape threat.

Near the end of Priestdaddy, Lockwood imagines Emily Dickinson dropping cakes and poems in a basket to children from the room she occupies alone on the second floor of her house. This is how Dickinson puts it:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

Until I read Priestdaddy, I'd always thought of Dickinson's "truth" in that poem in spiritual terms, as a kind of ecstasy that couldn't be articulated because words would always be insufficient to it. But what if it was a different kind of truth, a more mundane one that couldn't be said because it wouldn't be heard? It would sound like gobbledygook, and anyway, look at all those inexact rhymes, and what's up with all the whatever-the-antebellum-equivalent-to-a-pantsuit-is.