Patricia Lockwood is a poet and essayist. Her new book is Priestdaddy: A Memoir.

“[Prose writing is] strange to me as a poet. I’m like, ‘Well I guess I’ll tell you just what happened then.’ But the humor has to be there as well. Because in my family household…the absurdity or the surrealism that we have is in reaction to the craziness of the household. So something like your underwear-clad father with his hand in a vat of pickles, sitting in a room full of $10,000 guitars and telling you that he can’t afford to send you to college—that’s bad. That’s a sad scene. But it’s also totally a lunatic scene. It’s, just the very fact of it, all these accoutrements, all the elements of the scene—they are funny.”

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@TriciaLockwood
Lockwood on Longform
[00:00] Stoner
[01:00] Priestdaddy: A Memoir (Riverhead Books • 2017)
[02:00] readthissummer.com
[02:30] How To Be a Person in the World (Heather Havrilesky • Doubleday • 2016)
[02:30] Heather Havrilesky on the Longform Podcast
[09:15] Balloon Pop Outlaw Black (Octopus Books • 2012)
[10:00] Wave Books
[10:00] Octopus Books
[10:15] Black Ocean
[11:30] "The Dark Mystery of Emily Dickinson’s ‘Master’ Letters" (Nicholas Rombes • The Rumpus • May 2011)
[12:00] Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (Penguin Poets • 2014)
[20:15] Lockwood’s Jonathan Franzen Tweet
[20:45] Lockwood’s Paris Review Tweet