Patricia Lockwood c/d

feels awkward to stan a semi-phenomenon, but she puts words together so well. and then they combine logarithmically.

on updike (and foster wallace): https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n19/patricia-lockwood/malfunctioning-sex-robot

on ferrante: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n04/patricia-lockwood/i-hate-nadia-beyond-reason

the rape joke: https://www.theawl.com/2013/07/patricia-lockwood-rape-joke

second only to dril on twitter

new book/first novel this month

"Malfunctioning Sex Robot" is such a great piece. That's the kind of long-form, accessible, non-academic criticism I dream of being able to write, and it's just an amazing balancing act all the way through: she manages to be hilarious at Updike's expense in a way that's not mean-spirited and gives you genuine insight into his work.

I haven't read the Ferrante one; thanks for the link! Another reason to procrastinate on prepping for class tomorrow.

I believe that she's been quite extensively discussed on this thread.

Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

thanks for this, not read her before. Just noticed the Napoleon Dynamite reference in the Updike essay so that's sealed the deal for me

It is right and just that this thread focus mostly on her LRB and literary work but I do feel the need to say that the Miette jail for mother tweet is all time and frequently namechecked in my household when one of our cats is accidentally lightly touched.

jail for mother for 1000 years classic forever

her first book of poetry is one of the most brilliant things i've ever read

i am less spellbound by the lrb essays but the updike one is extremely fun

Daniel otm this is pure literature

me, lightly touching miette with the side of my foot: miette move out of the way please so I don’t trip on you

miette, her eyes enormous: you KICK miette? you kick her body like the football? oh! oh! jail for mother! jail for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!

— Patricia Lockwood (@TriciaLockwood) March 19, 2019

That's remarkably poor given the praise it had just been given.

you're remarkably poor, go away please

maybe we needed another patricia lockwood thread, off ilb, so the pinefox wouldn't sink it up with unreadably pedantic opinions

I dig the tweet, but I am a cat person so...

Hillary Clinton is co-writing a political thriller novel https://t.co/S7zFy7g9ya pic.twitter.com/h8Udry4AiP

— Forbes (@Forbes) February 23, 2021

Classic. My favourite chronicler of the Extremely Online Condition. I don’t normally laugh out loud while reading, but Priestdaddy made me do it several times. Her novel isn’t out until May here, but it’ll be a day 1 buy and read for sure.

I finished it last night, I thought the first half was very funny and entertaining, incredibly written, relatable (it me), but strangely ephemeral, as soon as I put it down I could barely remember anything about it - maybe because there's no narrative, it's just a series of fragments. It's not exactly shallow, it has the same glib profundity as a good Onion headline. It's worthwhile, not life changing. The second half though, wow. Yes there's a family tragedy, she logs off, she tries to transcend what's gone before, and succeeds with honours. I cried twice (the tears of a parent so ymmv), the second time at the end of the acknowledgements would you believe it.

Just finished this five minutes ago, and agree with every word of ledge's.

How does it compare to Priestdaddy?

Meaning should I get around to finishing that one or just jump right to this one?/pvmic

She also has a few books of poetry

/JackieHarvey

Okay, found the relevant passage in Priestdaddy that explains the, um, premise.

Here is how it works: when a married minister of another faith converts to Catholicism, he can apply to Rome for a dispensation to become a married Catholic priest. He is allowed, yes, to keep his wife. He is even allowed to keep his children, no matter how bad they might be. The Vatican must review his case and declare the man fit for duty. (My father’s paperwork was approved by Joseph Ratzinger, later to take the name Pope Benedict XVI, later to resign the papacy and become an enigma in fine elfin shoes wandering through private gardens, his eyes among the bushes like unblinking black roses.) Once he has received this approval, the man can enter training for the priesthood and be ordained, but only after every member of his immediate family passes the Psychopath Test.

Lockwood, Patricia. Priestdaddy (p. 12). Penguin Publishing Group.

new one is fantastic imo.

It is basically a sequel to Priestdaddy, very lightly fictionalised, and in the third person

That's technically true but seems somewhat misleading? It's very much its own thing in terms of style and content and definitely can be read on its own. I'd prob recommend it over Priestdaddy unless you're a huge fan of memoirs.

It is, but all the characters of her family are in it, with just a few tiny changes.

new novel is nanette

damn that was good stuff.

made me hate babies slightly less and twitter slightly more

it's the way she renders The Portal as this terrible place where we all feel driven to go to get our Maslovian pyramid needs met that's the genius of the first half -- anybody terminally online (raises hand) can't help but see themselves there, and then see a better possibility of themselves in the second half

yes it's complex and ambitious, taking a shot at answering the hardest questions, while at the same time being very funny and fizzy. i couldn't put it down tbh. a lot of standout moments but i was surprisingly moved by the thom yorke description. like i expected to cringe since there is so, so much bad writing about radiohead but it was really excellent and summed up the appeal of the band in two paragraphs better than anything i've seen.

i have some disconnected thoughts at this point. she is very good at inhabiting men, i think she really gets them, pins them down and somehow still loves them. of course the book is overflowing with love. it's also taking a stab at what it means to be american in now-ish times. surprisingly old-fashioned while still being very current.

honestly it might be a little too .. mainstream? .. to really feed my unicorn soul but her writing is just so delicious it's hard to deny.

The Ferrante piece is getting into "overpleased with itself" zones for me, but the Updike one is fantastic

Also agree with ledge.

It's cool how the "it me" quality very quickly goes from being funny/relatable/flattering (I think like Patricia Lockwood? Patricia Lockwood thinks like me?) to being scary, as you realize that the reason it's all so relatable is that we are all responding in much the same predictable ways to precisely the same stimuli, and that there's something intensely creepy, and directly traceable to the addictive quality of the internet, about our minds having this much overlap.

Okay, took out both the ebook and the audiobook from the library.

I've been thinking more about this book, because I actually liked the first half better than the second half, and I've been trying to figure out why. I like the idea of it - the first half disconnected, fragmented, internet-influenced, suffused with a kind of vague, fuzzed-out pain that never quite breaks through the narcotic effect of the Portal, and then the second half looking straight at a very specific, very human, very painful real-world experience. I found the acknowledgements very moving, and there are moments when the second half really works for me, when it taps into a kind of transcendent humanism that I associate with some of my favorite writers from a century or so ago. The nail tech painting her nails "with infinite gentleness" before the funeral makes me think of Kipling; her realization that every suburban house could be hiding its own private glory reminds me intensely of Capek. These moments are gorgeous. But for a lot of it I felt - I don't know - distanced, maybe? It felt weird, I guess, to still not really know any of the characters, to have this shift in subject matter without a corresponding shift in style. It felt like she was describing an experience that was deeply meaningful to her, and I could appreciate that it was meaningful, but I also felt like I was being held at a remove from this private family grief. This isn't necessarily a knock on the book - I'm not saying she should have written it differently - but it was how I experienced it.

My reading of it was...somewhat similar to yours.

Really? tell me more!

Let me see. I really liked the second part - it was the emotional payoff, there wouldn't be a book with out it - but the first part, which initially seemed kind of inconsequential was something that only she could right or so it seems. Listening to the audiobook helped me let it sink in a little better, I think.

She's a fan of Lucia Berlin, which makes sense.

just started Priestdaddy and got the new one reserved.

she could right
Oops

I actually put off reading this or learning anything about it because i felt so keenly the possibility of being disappointed by it; I didn't think the memoir was very good, and that was after liking both of the poetry collections and er her general persona / Online Presence, also the criticism, though maybe that came after the book?

Anyway, god, this is a fucking remarkable book

all through the first half i was amazed that someone had gotten the thing right; the second half i was amazed that it didn't collapse, that it maintained a clinical distance. I'd been worried it would turn mawkish or invoncincing or rote, but no, it does not; it brings home a lot of what's been set up in the first part in ways i would not have thought possible, surviving the big shift into I-hate-this-word 'autofiction' (pace claims upthread, the 'she' of part one is fairly clearly Not Patricia Lockwood Exactly while the 'she' of part two is Pretty Much Patricia Lockwood).

it nibbles at the feet of age-old bromides about the role of art in ways that feel real and specific and but also i was really worried that someone would ask why i was crying in the coffee shop and i would have to explain I was reading a novel about memes

I find Lockwood fascinating. She somehow manages to dance between critique of the 'extremely online' world she represents (and I think it's the closest thing to representing it ontologically I've come across) while making it seem, I don't know, that it's something I might desire and might be missing out on. Sure, there's self-loathing but there's also a fizzing ecstasy.

I've heard her say somewhere that she doesn't experience having a body in the way she feels she ought - that it feels alien and discomfiting - but she does enjoy being a mind, and the internet is the perfect (non)place for her to enjoy the slide of being. It was like a light coming on - not only an 'oh, I see' but an 'I have elements of this, why has it taken me so long to acknowledge it/be seen?'

I started the book and felt immediately at home: the voice, the episodic, fragmented nature of the narrative, the humour. I enjoyed the voice enough that I could have read a book twice as long. The feat of the book is to carry that voice across into the second half; not to lose any of the lightness, the humour but to incorporate the enormity of a real-world event and render it with the same quality of lightness and confusion. It's like a form of forgiveness in that regard, even something like a map for how to navigate the ridiculous present. It felt like a disembodied voice saying 'it'll be OK even when you know it won't. It's a comfort all the same.

I cried like a, well, like an overgrown baby.I don't know if I think it's 'great' yet, or any of that stuff, but I can think of a half-a-dozen people I need to press it on, urgently, which will do for me as an endorsement.

Might help if I mentioned that was about 'No One is Talking About This'.

Figured

I still need to finish Priestdaddy.

thomp & chinaski have nailed the effect of this novel for me & make me want to go back & actually have some time with it as I took it in 2 big gulps first time (part 1 one night, part 2 the next, then straight back to the library) and this was before I experienced something similar to the events of pt 2

Just pulling off “novel about Twitter” is enough of a challenge that I feel like Lockwood gets props just for a respectable effort but I’d go further & say it’s one of the few works that get to what it feels like to be in the current era (the main one being twin peaks s3 obv)

i read this simultaneously enjoying the online insight and humor and thinking 'i wish the internet did this for me' and kind of marveling at how it apparently does for someone else. i think i liked how it all merges with the birth of the child, and i was very impressed by it but strangely not moved.

i was reading her big piece on knausgaard in the lrb, got about halfway through and because i'm not familiar with knausgaard so was having some trouble following it. it seemed to me like maybe they're similar in some deadly ways but that's just an impression.

I just finished Priestdaddy. Thoroughly enjoyed it and found myself laughing frequently and frequently pulling the book away from my eyes at yet another fantastic metaphor or madly overripe description.

There's a remarkable passage where she's describing her perception of the world and her perception of language. It's like an origin story and one of the best passages I've ever read about the creative process. It also makes me idly wonder if, at some level, all art is a function of our neurology and nervous systems.

"Is it ADD?" she asks me. "Your father gave you all ADD, you know." Sensing that this is not entirely fair, she adds graciously, "And then I gave you ADD as well." "Maybe," I say, laughing again. It was true I always had trouble listening and remembering, trouble hearing people when they explained simple facts to me. When I read, my head seemed to go diagonal, and I swore I saw things in the sentences- not what I was supposed to see. When I read the words "moonlit swim," I saw the moonlight slicked all over the bare skin. The word "sunshine" had a washed look, with the sweep of a rag in the middle of it. The word "violinist" was a fig cut in half. "String quartet" was a cat's cradle held between two hands. "Penniless" was an empty copper outline and "prettiness" seemed to glitter. "Calamity" was alarm bells, and in "aristocrat" there was the sharp triangle of a cravat, and in "sea serpent" one loop of the green muscle. It was as if I could read the surfaces of words, and their real hearts, but not their information. Even "word" had a picture-I saw a blond hostess in a spangled dress turning black and white letters over one by one. When I read, the meaning swam and the images leaped out and the words gave up their doubles. When I wrote, the same thing happened with the paper.

"You start by thinking sideways," I tell her. "First you sit in a sunlit room, and you look at the wall but really look through it, and your book but really read past it." you read

"Sounds like a recipe for insanity," she interrupts, tipping back her head and pouring a barrage of chocolate-covered blueberries down her throat, all the while holding the wheel with one wrist.

"Then pretend you're washing your hair with warm water, and unfocus your vision like you're trying to see a Magic Eye and loosen up your hearing like you're trying to understand Donald Duck".

Cocking my ear to her, I don't honestly hear that many other writers. Fitzgerald in her noun phrases (I think often of his description of a telephone's 'shrill metallic urgency'; that cadence is apparent in many of her close descriptions), Lorrie Moore somehow, Ashbery perhaps. What do others think about that? I'll be happy to be proved wrong but fwiw, I don't know that she'll ever be a classical novelist as such. I think her primary skill is noticing - that, coupled with her own particular facility with language, is where the alchemy takes place and she may find if she exhausts her autobiography she doesn't have anything to write about. That said, I bet her journals are extraordinary.

Some of that quote is mangled! Hopefully, you get the idea.

Still need to read that/pvmic

all real good writers are huge word perverts

recall don delillo saying he liked to compose sentences based on their shape

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wy7SvZQfeBM

‘Can I ask you something?’ I asked the members of my Updike Support Group one by one. ‘Do you remember Rabbit Redux? Like, at all?’ What I really meant was: ‘Am I insane?’ Had I alone been entrusted with the burden of this book’s contents? Had we forgotten, as a society, that the 1971 sequel to Rabbit, Run contains a scene of Rabbit reading The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass out loud while a black man rapes a hippy girl who, earlier, spent several pages speaking entirely in rhyme? Don’t worry: she likes it, and then dies in a fire at the end.

I've never read more than fifty consecutive words written by John Updike for some reason. Hmmm. Now that I think about it, the reason I've never read more than fifty consecutive words is that each time I reached that threshold I put the book back on the shelf, knowing this was the wisest choice.

Might be worth trying his essays. His writing is about plot about as much as Vermeer's painting is.

her recent one about meeting the pope was possibly her best ever in my opinion, though the updike is hard to top.

i like the ashbery comparison upthread though it would not have directly occurred to me it definitely makes a lot of sense in a very internet way

Just started Priestdaddy yesterday, great stuff

Bonus: cover illustration by Lisa Hanawalt!

Patricia Lockwood Goes Viral (unpaywalled)

The writer’s new novel, “Will There Ever Be Another You,” is a singular account of losing her mind, body, and art to COVID—and of trying to get them back.

also

Arrayed in Shining Scales (a review of The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath)

I like pretty much everything I've read by Lockwood, but unfortunately the new one is a disaster and I had to DNF it. There's probably a case to be made that its loose, messy narrative is intended to mirror what it feels like to 'lose your mind' to COVID or whatever, but it all adds up to a very unpleasant and alienating reading experience. I also normally like her 'voice', but her flippant Very Internet tone really started to grate on me here too.

I want to give it a go, some radio reviewers said it's more like a series of essays so maybe I'll treat it like that. Also their general take was "knuckle down and write a real book plz", not every writer can bash out a novel though.

her DFW review a few years ago re: an excerpt of the Pale King (also in the LRB) really helped me understand some stuff about DFW I hadn't before, and is among the best things I've read about him, but I don't know if I could hang with her for a whole novel.

It sounds properly abysmal. There was an enjoyably scathing review in the Irish Times.

i read through a bit of the sylvia plath piece but it just reminded me why i always peace out with plath. too trve cvlt for me. also it all felt a little strained. dunno if this was snarky? "Karen Kukil, who in the acknowledgments thanks her acupuncturist for keeping her healthy." maybe it was in good faith, idk. just kinda turned me off. not my thing anymore. definitely feel like 'very internet' voice is undesirable right now at least for me.

I haven’t read any of her books but the New Yorker magazine profile of her from a couple months ago was fascinating to me, especially as it concerned the dynamic of her marriage.

Oh I see that was linked in the revive.

I feel like she's the new Anthony Lane (ish), at least in her criticism. Original, vivid, funny - at first - and now it's still good but it's shtick.

wonder if she’ll ever go back to poetry

lockwood critiques updike

Nothing much happens, and what does happen is reliably transcribed into the work. He stutters and has psoriasis; his characters stutter and have psoriasis.

i critique lockwood

Nothing much happens and what does happen is reliably transcribed (as filtered through internet-speak) into the work. She gets covid,etc; her "character" gets covid, etc etc

her first poetry book balloon pop outlaw black is imo a formally inventive masterpiece, her internettier work has always been kinda lost on me but i love her she was very supportive of and sweet to me back in the weird twitter days

That NYer article implies she is making up scenes/facts in her purportedly non-fiction reviews. NB: I could not finish the article.

Also, the second half of No One Is Talking About This seemed like conservative twaddle.

her first poetry book balloon pop outlaw black is imo a formally inventive masterpiece, her internettier work has always been kinda lost on me but i love her she was very supportive of and sweet to me back in the weird twitter days

― ivy., Tuesday, October 21, 2025 10:02 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i like some of the poems in motherland fatherland homelandsexual too but the ones in the first book are amazing. i still see her described as a poet all the time (i guess once a poet always a poet?) but it's been a decade of nothing but essays, memoirs, novel

i found motherland fatherland homelandsexual pretty trite (curious to read others think the first one much better. i haven't read it but remember enjoying individual poems i read online more). I have enjoyed her writing about other writers a lot, particularly in the LRB where it can be refreshing and where I suspect she has benefitted from good and sympathetic editing.

'scathing review in the irish times' is all the encouragement i need to try and attempt to love the new one.

I mean, their literary reviews pretty much never criticise anything. It's a huge step forward to have some that occasionally do.

Also, the second half of No One Is Talking About This seemed like conservative twaddle.

Did not get this from it at all fwiw.

All people should get to enjoy the brief wonderful life of that baby and more people will if abortion gets completely banned in the US.

Ok I'm gonna assume that take is informed by some online Lockwood statements or rumors that I am not aware of because within the text itself that's a gigantic reach.

No. My recollection is that there was little to no discussion or interrogation of the decision making process not to abort the child, or what little there was got swept away by the narrator's gushing over how transformative her experience was watching the child die.

The narrator wasn't the child's parent, it wasn't her call whether to have an abortion or not.

The New Yorker profile says that it would have been illegal in Missouri by the time she knew about the condition, and that Lockwood was horrified by the role her parents had played in anti-abortion activism.

Not even a whiff of that was in the book, to it's detriment, imo.

There's a chapter on how horrific the anti abortion movement is in Priestdaddy, I now recall.

Anyway I don't think we get much psychological insight into the sister in general, it's all about being at a slight remove, the narrator does not have the agency in this scenario.

I read the Irish Times review, which seems reasonable enough tbh. The book does sound boringly about lockwood's internet-famousness, which i would also find very offputting. I had a look at the writer's other pieces, he seems to have his knives sharpened for buzzy american writers. The last hatchet job seems to be of ocean vuong (who i've see on a centre table in every waterstones-type shop for about five years maybe). while i suspect that i would find the writing in vuong's most recent book pointless and vague for the same reasons the reviewer does, a contrarian sensibility long nurtured in venues like ilxor dot com means that as soon as it is articulated i disagree with it! This section:

"The prose alternates between a flat accounting (“Back in the kitchen, he picked up her rotary phone”) and a shockingly ham-fisted lyricism. “Look how the birches, blackened all night by starlings, shatter when dawn’s first sparks touch their beaks.” Dawn, of course, does not spark. And Vuong does not appear to know that the subject of this sentence is the birches and not the starlings; so his grammar gives the birches beaks. "

e.g. i think the writer is probably correct that this is lazy (and the other bits that he quotes sound fairly tedious as well) but also isn't there a sense in which the birches and the starlings have become one? a thing that shatters in the light. it doesn't matter to me whether or not this is 'intentional' in this case. This is not a defense or otherwise of vuong.

it's a clumsy metaphor at best--the tree itself is not shattering, the object that contains the starlings and the birches is shattered. and yes the subject of the sentence is birches so yes it would seem gramatically that the trees have beaks. I get what he's saying, sure, but it's a total shit sentence

But the trees do have beaks? The trees are black, covered with starlings. They appear as black solid shapes but when the sun hits the birds spill away. I don’t know whether it’s great poetry
or not, but the imagery is nice and the reviewer seems to be trying to take things pretty literally. He can’t make sense of that sentence?

It makes me want to draw trees with beaks. It reminds me of James Surls drawings.

ah it's just shit tbh, we don't need to do this, lol

Whether or not the reviewer has a point (I don't care) the point evaporates when he writes it. I will chuckle along to a Patricia Lockwood review where she's like 'the parts of the book where Flaubert is essentially doom scrolling' and usually not care that it basically means nothing. The rules are annoying.

They aren't rules he's citing, nor is he trying to establish any, it's just personal taste. Again, the Irish Times more regularly praises such work, it's not some whiskey-soaked archetype of tradition, it hasn't been in living memory.

And anyway, in my experience the "rules" and dominant techniques are currently exemplified by Patricia Lockwood. All my syllabus at university was stuff like this and it was what everyone was doing. Doesn't mean it's bad but it's not challenging any status quo, it is the status quo.

I think what you're not really appreciating here is how much I hate the Irish times

I know I'm belaboring a point here but he's saying the book should work syntactically at a sentence level - follow basic grammatical rules. I would agree but become ambivalent when the Irish times says it. I found the vuong review by scrolling through recent articles by the same reviewer - praise for people he might meet at a party, rude reviews for big stars in America. Obnoxious in its own way. I'll definitely concede the point that both of these books are probably bad so I have no idea why I'm organising I don't want to respond to an email at work.

I think I see your hatred of the IT just I also think the literary section doesn't really reflect the paper, mostly for the better I guess. Both Kevin Power's novels are an indictment of the classic Irish Times reader and that world, give or take, so he probably hates the rest of it also, fwiw. Gotta earn money somehow.

I still think his criticism above is more about a horrible crap sentence as a matter of personal taste even if it does a drive-by on grammar along the way but that's prob based on the rest of the review also.

Never read the positive ones as I don't go seeking reviews but I might do now, haha.

I'm not positioning myself as a fan of the paper either, or the literature section, I just sense from who writes for it and edits it that it's not like the rest.