First post in nearly three years...

... and I am driven to it by Patricia Lockwood's 2017 completely hilarious and weird memoir, Priestdaddy, about her narcisstic rightwing nutjob of a Catholic priest father. (It turns out there is a papally-endorsed loophole by which priests of other denominations are allowed to keep their wives and families when they convert to Catholicism). There is not a single platitude in the book, and she nails the bittersweetness of her specific family and the bizarre unfairness of the religion at large, all in this slightly manic voice which still holds the echoes of what an excruciating (literally) adolescence she must have had. It's tempting to not try and describe this book, and instead just quote chunks of it... what the hell, Catholicism is all about giving in to temptation and subsequent redemption. Here's what she says when asked what exactly Catholics believe:
"First of all, blood. BLOOD. Second of all, thorns. Third of all, put dirt on your forehead. Do it right now. Fourth of all, Martin Luther was a pig in a cloak. Fifth of all, Jesus is alive, but he's also dead, and he's also immortal, but he's also made of clouds, and his face is a picture of infinite peace, but he also always looks like one of those men in a headache commercial, because you're causing him so much suffering whenever you cuss. He is so gentle that sheep seem like demented murderers in his presence, but also rays of sunlight shoot out of his face so hard they can kill people. In fact they do kill people, and one day they will kill you. He has a tattoo of a daisy on his lower back and he gets his hair permed every eight weeks. He's wearing a flowing white dress, but only because people didn't know about jeans back then. He's holding up two fingers because his dad won't let him have a gun. If he lived on earth, he would have a white truck, plastered with bumper stickers of Calvin peeing on a smaller Calvin who is not a Catholic."
She wrote the book when she and her writer-husband had to move back in with her parents when they ran out of money, and reading it made me spend two hours online researching local MFA creative writing programs in the hopes that someone somewhere might be able to teach me to write like her (fat chance), so parental units, be warned: I might be needing my old room back again one of these days.

The other Catholicism-related book I have been slowly, slowly picking my way through recently is Jack Miles' God: A Biography, which purports to analyse the Old Testament God as a literary character. Miles is described in Wikipedia as having been raised Catholic, and he was a Jesuit seminarian from age 18-28, and I am dying, dying to know whether he is still a True Believer, because he is deliciously eye-rollingly parental about the very bad behavior that the Old Testament God engages in, which makes me think he can't possibly be, right? except all his books are about Christianity and he teaches religion, so ?? Anyway. His thesis, broadly speaking, is that the O.T. God can be seen as a literary character who develops over the course of the Bible, but it's bit of a hard sell, to be honest, because frankly God is extraordinarily inconsistent depending on which bit of the Bible you're in, as approximately billions of people have noticed. BUT I did learn some very interesting things about some of the mistranslations of the King James version from the original Hebrew, and how God has different names depending on whether he's in lawgiver mode, loving father mode, creator mode, vengeful crazy mode, etc. I was also struck by Miles' point that the Old Testament God is unusual in his (a) asexuality - most other universe-creating characters have some sort of sexual element to their story, (b) his consequent solitude - the essential problem of monotheism is that you have no one to talk to unless you create humans, and (c) his consequent dependence on humans for his power (if there are no humans to boss around, what's the point of being God?). I haven't finished the book yet, but I will. I also read (a while ago now) Kathleen Norris' book The Cloister Walk, about a year she spent as a writer-in-residence at a monastery, and it sounded great except for all the conversations about God one is presumably expected to have.

I've read other books in the last three years (ones I remember: Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionists; Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette; Three Junes and The Whole World Over, by Julia Glass; Mark Sullivan's Beneath a Scarlet Sky (terrible prose, interesting story); um um um a lot of others. Goal: at least write down when I finish a book so I have a chance of remembering that I read it, if not remembering anything about the book...