"The 43-year-old grew up as one of five children of a Catholic priest in the American midwest, an eccentric upbringing documented, famously, in Priestdaddy, her hit memoir of 2017, and a wellspring of comic material that just keeps giving. Priests in the wild amuse and comfort her, a reminder of home and the superiority that comes with niche expertise. Sometimes, as she's passing, she'll whisper, encyclical."
"This is Lockwood: elfin, fast-talking, determinedly idiosyncratic, with the uniform irony of a writer who came up through social media and for whom life online is a primary subject. If Priestdaddy documented her unconventional upbringing in more or less conventional comic style, her novels and poems since then have worked in more fragmentary modes that mimic the disjointed experience of processing information in bite-size non sequiturs."
"A danger of Lockwood's writing is that it traps her in a persona that makes sincerity any statement not hedged and flattened by sarcasm almost impossible. But Lockwood, it seems to me, has a bouncy energy closer to an Elizabeth Gilbert than a Lauren Oyler or an Ottessa Moshfegh, say, so that no matter how glib her one-liners, you tend to come away from reading her with a general feeling of warmth."
Patricia Lockwood grew up as one of five children of a Catholic priest in the American Midwest, an upbringing that supplies comic material. She habitually notices priests in public and greets them with an intimate, whispered encyclical. Priestdaddy memorializes that eccentric childhood in comic style. Subsequent novels and poems adopt fragmentary modes that mimic disjointed, bite-size online information. No One Is Talking About This portrays disorienting grief after the death of an infant niece. Will There Ever Be Another You fuses that grief with a Covid-induced mania, blending terror and sharp humor. Lockwood's persona risks flattening sincerity, but her energetic voice often yields warmth.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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