Patricia Lockwood is a contributing editor at the LRB. Her books include two poetry collections, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals; a memoir, Priestdaddy; and a novel, No One Is Talking about This, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her second novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, was published in September. She has written for the LRB on subjects including David Foster Wallace, John Updike, the internet, in a piece originally delivered as an LRB Winter Lecture, and meeting the pope. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.
On Election Day, as soon as the polls closed, I had to watch the three-hour-long 1972 movie musical 1776. You almost certainly haven’t seen it, so I’ll summarise it for you. The year is – well, you know that part – and the flies of patriotism are buzzing in the room in colonial Philadelphia where the Second Continental Congress is refusing to debate a proposal for...
Strong Opinions, a collection of Nabokov’s interviews, reviews and essays published in 1973, contains an interview with the great man so brazenly bad, so shocking in each successive clause, that as long as you’re reading it, you’re dreaming of the movie version. Picture Benedict Cumberbatch hunched over a legal pad, sweating lightly, pressing Vladimir Vladimirovich...
My story will be that John Harvard gave it to me. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked, pointing at a bronze bust in the reading room where I had arrived to give my lecture, and was told that it was the university’s founder, John Harvard. ‘Damn,’ I said. ‘It never even occurred to me that Harvard was a guy.’ It was the night of 3 March, and travelling...
A typical Edna O’Brien story begins on a square of green. A stone farmhouse looms behind, with a slick spot on the flagstones where the same tin can is emptied every morning by the hired man. Pigs are somewhere in the mix, as are sheep and cows. Around and above and within the green floats another colour, that of deep velvet, the sacred heart, a dog’s tongue. This is the austere plush of the Catholic Church, which is everywhere. A road skips like a ribbon past the front door, punctuated by one of the few unbeautiful things in the landscape: men who lie in wait to do pooly in you. Your father is drunk, or trying not to be, and your mother is ‘the sideboard with everything in it’. If you are not in Ireland, you’ve gone somewhere to get away from Ireland. So. ‘Hold on a minute,’ I said, when her latest novel arrived in the mail, ‘this book is about Boko Haram???’
When he is in flight you are glad to be alive. When he comes down wrong – which is often – you feel the sickening turn of an ankle, a real nausea. All the flaws that will become fatal later are present at the beginning. He has a three-panel cartoonist’s sense of plot. The dialogue is a weakness: in terms of pitch, it’s half a step sharp, too nervily and jumpily tuned to the tics and italics and slang of the era. And yes, there are his women. He paints and paints them, but the proportions are wrong.
Patricia Lockwood talks to Joanne O’Leary about how she became possessed by Vladimir Nabokov, what it’s like to read Lolita as a teenage girl, the diagnostic value of Bend Sinister, and her anxiety...
Patricia Lockwood reads her diary about catching and recovering from Covid-19.
Patricia Lockwood travels through the internet and wonders why we're talking like this.
Patricia Lockwood is a generous writer. She seems incapable of resentment and has a Rabelaisian appreciation for the bawdy. She can describe America’s corporate restaurant chains and their blooming onions...
For all its dirty jokes and baby talk, Priestdaddy is an angry book, and Patricia Lockwood’s use of childhood idiom is a way of exposing the irrationality of institutional authority.
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.