In 2014, Aaron Belz interviewed Lockwood for stlmag.com about her second poetry collection, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. At the time, she was often described as “the Twitter poet,” with 10,000 followers and rising, venerated for the way she balloon-twisted 140 characters into mind-blowing little packets of humor, word image, and taboo.
She was also known for a viral prose poem, “Rape Joke,” that is as challenging as the title would imply—and just as funny and scarring. But the first subject that the two discussed was Lockwood’s St. Louis roots, including her days at Rosati-Kain High School.
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The city makes a vivid appearance in Lockwood’s new memoir, Priestdaddy, whose title alludes to the fact that the author’s father is, indeed, a married Catholic priest with kids. (This happened because he had his family while he was still Lutheran clergy, then converted. It was a big deal; the pope got involved.)
But don’t read Priestdaddy just to be a St. Louis literary patriot. Read it because The Guardian is correct in labeling it “a dazzling comic memoir.” Read it because the also dazzling Mary Karr described it as an “effervescent joy.” Joss Whedon, Andy Richter, Booklist, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, VICE, Elle, and the Los Angeles Times (that’s a partial list) also had nice things to say. They’ve praised the inventiveness of Lockwood’s language, her sharp and absurd sense of humor, the way she evokes her John Irving–esque family in prose.
This book will definitely make you laugh. Depending on your constitution, it may also make you blush. It will probably have you Googling a few things. What’s truly remarkable about it, though, is the depth of feeling that unexpectedly flashes through all the outrageousness. And in the end, what may shock you most are not the funny, smutty bits but instead the way this book pulls to the surface all those buried flashes of feeling hiding in your own outrageous heart.
