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. 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.
Tell me your mystic and I will tell you who you are. The Little Flower, she of the astonishing self-love? Hildegard of Bingen, glowing like rock crystal, or Simone Weil, picking herself like a scab? Teresa of Avila, a chilly forehead and a warm thigh, or St Simeon, being written by the tip of his stylus? You may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black...
We had been watching The X-Files at a rate of about two episodes a year; I expected to be finished when I was approximately 114 and living in a small fishing village in Japan. But ever since my husband lost half of his blood volume after a bowel resection in 2022, after the 47 days in the desert during which I personally tended his wound, the calendar had become meaningless, as had numbers....
An eldest sister was born in the North, daughter of a judge who never lied and a scholar who always did. That was A.S. Byatt. Christened Susan, what on earth, she was later known as Dame Antonia. Byatt wrote about sugar and snails and sex cults and the dead children of children’s book authors. She wrote about William Morris and Mariano Fortuny. She wrote about Cambridge, where she and...
Molly Brodak stood at the side of my bed, unscrolling her long life like a nightgown. Nearly forty years was long. She had died on 8 March 2020, and now her husband, the novelist Blake Butler, had written a book about her. I had just spent the night reading it on my phone, squinting at the long scroll turned sideways until one of the headaches started. They were the geniuses of...
The invitation said ‘black dress for Ladies’. ‘You’re not allowed to be whiter than him,’ my husband, Jason, instructs. ‘He has to be the whitest. And you cannot wear a hat because that is his thing.’
We are discussing the pope, who has woken one morning, at the age of 86, with a sudden craving to meet artists. An event has been proposed: a...
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.
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