“Priestdaddy” a memoir by Patricia Lockwood (post 1): Biblical reference, father’s shorts, “Bit” could not go to college, felt her body was not her own

Biblical Reference

Family photo: “There is my father on a five-week ‘biblical archaeological dig,’ wearing white short shorts…There he is standing on the spot where the herd of demon swine were driven squealing into the Sea of Galilee” (1, p. 4).

The biblical reference is to the story in Mark 5, which, from a purely psychological perspective, is about Jesus’s exorcism of a man who contained multitudes, a man who had multiple personality, with about two thousand alternate personalities:

“For [Jesus] had said to him, ‘Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!’ And Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He replied, ‘My name is Legion; for we are many’…Now a great herd of swine was feeding there on the hillside…And the unclean spirits came out, and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and were drowned in the sea.”

Shorts, “Bit,” Body

“At nineteen, I ought to have been in college along with the rest of my high school class…I had applied and been accepted…He [her father] was wearing his most formal boxer shorts, the ones you could almost not see through. He patted a spot next to him on the overstuffed leather sofa…

“ ‘We can’t do it, Bit,’ he said…as if it couldn’t be helped. ‘The money just isn’t there’ he explained, which made me think of a smoke-and-mirrors trick: poof, and the pile of money is gone…

“ ‘Okay,’ I said, automatic, from a body that didn’t seem to be mine. I didn’t ask a single question…” (1, pp. 15-16).

Comment

The biblical reference to multiple personality could be pure chance.

Her father’s habit of wearing see-through shorts might not imply anything sexual.

The nickname “Bit” could be a term of endearment, not the name of an alternate personality connected to her feeling that her body wasn’t hers.

1. Patricia Lockwood. Priestdaddy. A memoir. New York, Riverhead Books, 2017.