Photo: Pari Dukovic for New York Magazine The internet deprogrammed Patricia Lockwood. It didn’t happen all at once. Raised in the Catholic Church, Lockwood spent the early years of her life absorbing her parents’ anti-abortion beliefs and activist language about the “Holocaust of infants.
The book features a Lockwood-like character who travels the world giving lectures, having found fame from a single post to a social network: “Can a dog be twins?” In its second half, the novel takes a left turn, as social media’s glittery absurdity is put in contrast with the offline demands of a family crisis. Throughout, Lockwood articulates her ambivalence about the internet while owning its influence on her life.
She dreamed of being a writer from an early age, and in her teens and 20s, poetry forums became a major part of her life — the closest she would come to a formal writing education. These websites were not exclusive; in 2001, you could find them by typing “poetry” into a search engine. The users she met in communities with names like Eratosphere and the Gazebo were international and intergenerational, hobbyists and ambitious poets.
In 2011, double-cross-tier publications started to open their gates, and The New Yorker published one of her unsolicited poems. She considered writing a book of sexts, a bit she began after moving on from the poetry forums to Twitter. But the sext-writing process — outside of the instant feedback from Twitter — didn’t translate well into the composition of a manuscript.
These have often included writing about health crises, a through line in Lockwood’s recent work and in her life. Priestdaddy begins with events that unfolded after Kendall was diagnosed with a rare type of cataract; the couple managed to raise funds for eye surgery online but still ran out of money and moved in with her parents in Kansas City in 2013. Priestdaddy was a critical and commercial success, but the years after its publication were painful.
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