PRIESTDADDY – PATRICIA LOCKWOOD

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,