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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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Priestdaddies
An evangelical Christian childhood is one long, unbroken game of The Floor Is Lava, but one in which the adults are playing too. You fall from the womb and the doctor sets you on a piece of outdated living room furniture and tells you not to touch the floor. You are told your every urge will be to touch the floor, that you were born wanting to jump headfirst into that floor, and that left to your own devices that’s exactly what you would do. Luckily, the very God who created that lava floor made a way for you to avoid this: walk all over his kid, instead.
Talking about childhood with people who didn’t grow up this way can be a bit surreal, and finding a voice who did can make those memories feel more real than they have in years.
Patricia Lockwood, acclaimed author of Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, and perverted patron saint of poetic weirdos on Twitter, relates her own strange and wondrous religious childhood in her new memoir Priestdaddy, and her story will resonate for anyone who grew up with a dad who found a friend in Jesus but counted few other peers. Lockwood’s father is a Catholic priest, and her childhood was spent in one church rectory or another in “all the worst cities of the Midwest,” as she is fond of saying in her author bios. Father Lockwood found Jesus at the bottom of the ocean while stationed on a nuclear submarine, after several dozen viewings of The Exorcist. When your salvation occurs on a warship at the hands of the director of The French Connection, you inherit a brash faith that is as likely to carry a gun as a Bible. Her father, who first spent time as a Lutheran priest before converting to Catholicism, has an affinity for both accessories, and Lockwood patiently and often hilariously sketches this singular patriarch in Priestdaddy.
My own father was a minister as well—one cut from the same colorful cloth at Lockwood’s—and the echoes of my upbringing I found in her story brought back all the old comforts and confusions of my childhood.
I grew up the son of a traveling preacher. He didn’t want to be the traveling kind. He dreamed of nothing more than having a small, country church to shepherd week after unchanging week, shaking the same wrinkled hands at the back of the sanctuary every Sunday as men gave him approving nods and widows placed both palms around his, looked up at him with damp eyes, and told him they could see glory the way he described it, and Jesus in the midst of it. It never worked out. A few churches took him on, but each engagement ended in unmitigated disaster after a few months. The search never really ended, it only wayfared longer in some forgotten corn and coal towns than others. We loaded into a puke-yellow camper van that was always spitting up some small but critical part—a fuel pump, a fan belt—and crisscrossed the eastern half of the country. Corning, N.Y. Mt. Morris, Mich. Port St. Lucie, Fla.
None of these engagements paid much, if at all, so he worked full time through the week, and we would set out on the weekends in search of the promised land. We would generally find upon arrival that the promised land had lost half its businesses when the interstate had come in and bypassed it 10 miles away. These towns felt dusty in even the heaviest rain. My father would pull out a feisty sermon from his arsenal, deliver it to the echoing, half-empty pews, and then we would sample six variations on green bean casserole in the fellowship hall during the potluck dinner in his honor, which was often as not the only payment. He was the non-denominational preacher equivalent of a college band, spending a weekend on the road for just a few minutes on a stage, hoping to be discovered. He wasn’t part of a world-wide, millennia-spanning denomination like Lockwood’s father was; he wouldn’t have fit well within one. If there was a reward waiting from him, he would have to hack down his own trail to get to it. He saw himself as a voice crying in the wilderness, and it’s no coincidence the actual, geographical wilderness is where he most often found himself.
The churches blur in my mind. The first to actually hire him was in southern Florida, and we left our life in northern Indiana behind only to discover it had been a fool’s errand. The church met in the living room of a house, and it didn’t take long for problems to emerge. They found out I was taking communion without being baptized, so a few days later my family and I entered the warm waters of Bathtub Beach and I received the spirit, spluttering in the salty wash, while my mom jumped above the waves to take pictures. After a few more weeks, my dad, never able to pick his theological battles, split from the elders over some hermeneutic minutiae and there we were on the Atlantic coast of Florida, an hour north of the Keys, with no more church than we’d had when we’d left the Midwest.
We joined and parted with two more churches in the year we were in the Sunshine State before moving back to the flat table of Ohio farm country, where my dad pastored a dying, white clapboard church for less than a year before some conflict ruined the union. The situation got so bad we feared physical violence. I remember sitting in a booth at McDonalds while my parents and a pastor from a neighboring church drafted an escape plan to get the family out of the sanctuary in case we were attacked on the Sunday my dad was to make the announcement we were leaving. No violence occurred, but we drove into the woods in our camper van the next day to hide out for a week anyway.
Like military brats, a preacher’s kids learn to make friends quickly and to lose them again without a thought. The wind stirs the branches in the grown-up world and suddenly the kids are packing up their rooms again, looking up a new town name in a Rand McNally road atlas, wondering if it’ll have a Dairy Queen.
We carried “home” with us wherever we went—spongy pink hermit crabs who could recite scripture. We knew words in Greek and Hebrew but didn’t always have time to learn our neighbors’ names.
To cope with this permanent sense of displacement, my sister, seven years my senior, invented wild origin stories to explain why we had no roots. She surmised she’d been rescued by our parents from bad people in Detroit and ferried away to northern Indiana. She thought my grandfather might have been a spy, or maybe a Nazi (the truth: a telephone repairman). She spent hours digging through the drawers of an old wooden desk in a storage room in our trailer—the desk I’m sitting at now—to find secret documents to corroborate these theories. There had to be something to explain why we knew fewer than a dozen living relatives, why we rarely saw any of them, why my parents never bought a house, why we spent more time on the road in a camper than we did in our neighbors' homes, why we were homeschooled, why we never had time to make permanent friends. I’ve never been to the gravesite of anyone I share blood with; I don’t even know where those graves are.
Lockwood’s dad moved her family from place to place as well, filling new openings in parishes in Cincinnati, St. Louis, Kansas City, and elsewhere. When you grow up this way, your family is your village, and Lockwood’s father was her family’s self-appointed Chief. He is nothing you expect when you hear the words “Catholic priest.” He is married with children, for one thing, taking advantage of a Vatican loophole that allows men who are already married when they join the priesthood to maintain families. He lets off steam by playing shrieking, wall-melting electric guitar solos in his office, walks around in front of family and strangers in his briefs, and loves nothing more than a good testosterone-drenched action film. He is stubborn, at times brutish, and arrogant, but he loves fiercely.
My father, like Lockwood’s, converted himself to Christianity as a young man, not long after meeting my mother. He grew up on the streets of Detroit, fatherless and socially awkward, and as a young adult decided (for a reason now lost to me, though at one time essential to family mythology) to read the Bible cover to cover. Somewhere around Isaiah he realized he believed in God. When your conversion comes at the pen of an Old Testament prophet, you inherit a faith that spits fire from a whirlwind, and you get a sense for where your life is headed right away. He married my mom, conceived my sister, moved the family to Indiana, and had me, all the while dreaming floating visions of a wooden lectern and a humble congregation.
Like C.S. Lewis (sort of the Malcolm Gladwell of Christian theologians), my dad had a knack for breaking complex theological arguments down into simple logical puzzles in which only one answer could be right and one could be wrong. This had the effect of making these complicated ideas much easier for a layman—or a six-year-old—to understand, but it also stripped away the essential nuances of these concepts and presented them as false binaries. When we were children, we thought my dad a paragon of wisdom and higher thinking. His logic and discernment were unassailable.
Like Lockwood’s guitar-wielding, brief-wearing priest of a father, my dad could be both magnetically charismatic and an unknowable enigma, impossible to explain to the uninitiated. He was an uncommonly gentle man whose calm composure could be as frightening as an alcoholic’s rage. He was an affectionate playmate whose spankings bruised our souls more than our asses. He was a man of wild imagination, crafting fantastical stories of outer space and prehistoric adventures, all the while instilling in us a conviction that all the fantasies of scripture were incontrovertibly true.
And convicted we were, all through our childhoods and teen years. My sister dreamed of a martyr’s death, surrendering her life for the sake of the gospel like Nate Saint or Jim Elliot. I fell asleep at night to the horror stories of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. As teens, we shimmered with holy fervor, beautiful and bleak. Late in Priestdaddy, Lockwood perfectly encapsulates what it felt like in those days to live every moment vibrating along the taut strings of eternity:
Everything signified. Everything I looked at was designed for my eyes. The fabric of existence was cut to fit me; all ceilings were as tall as I was high; each book in the library fell open and let the word ‘rapture’ leap toward me. The greatest gift of rapture was that it existed independent of the intellect; I needed no education to feel it. It was a capability, and born in the body when I was born—a reflex that sprang back gold against the hammer. We held hands and closed our eyes and felt our bones glow, and when there was pain, we offered it up.
We spoke back then of being on fire for god, of burning with sacred passion and fealty. It would be another decade before I realized it was the unsaved sinners in hell who really fit that description best, who blazed involuntarily for the glory of a fickle deity. My faith crumbled under the weight of the very logical arguments that had built it. My sister, too, quit those walls. But while we believed, oh, how we shined.
For reasons best saved for another time, I decided to leave college after only one year and get married at 19. Neither part of that decision worked out in the long run. For very different reasons, Lockwood too missed out on higher education and got married while still a teenager. While the circumstances were profoundly different, it’s hard to shake the feeling there’s something unique about growing up in a weird religious home in middle America that predisposes one to both choices. Why get an education when revelation is free? Why delay marriage when you’ve already given your whole self away once to God? There was no guidance against these choices. Recklessness was baptized as maturity.
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I miss belief, as often as not. I miss when “everything signified,” when I was part of a heavenly army, when my soul was written in a golden book outside time and I knew my faith would echo through eternity. I miss answers. Sometimes, I miss the hope that any of this means anything. In Priestdaddy, Lockwood writes about how easy it would be to fall back into belief as an adult, how “just a gentle push and I would fall back into the old faith; I would believe it all again, everything.” I feel that propensity less than I do the ongoing saturation of my imagination and vocabulary with the glossary of belief. The floor was lava for the first two and a half decades of my life, and I jumped from Christological sofa to soteriological foot stool to eschatological easy chair so many times my language and thought structure warped permanently around that lexicon, heated from below. Lockwood, a poet many know for her irreverent blend of religious and sexual imagery, explains it thus:
People do sometimes accuse me of blasphemy, which is understandable and which is their right. But to me, it is not blasphemy, it is my idiom. It’s my way of still participating in the language I was raised inside, which despite all renunciation will always be mine. The word ‘God’ does not fall out of the vocabulary, as the sun does not fall out of the sky; the shapes of the stories remain, as do their revelations. I was never fluent in tongues back when it mattered, but when I am left to myself, out come all the old worshipped words, those fondled verses tumbling on verses, onto the page which can hold and forgive them.
I trembled at those same words for so many years. I’m not sure I’ve learned to forgive those verses that shaped and blistered so much of my childhood, that do still in reverberations so many years later. Twisting them, as Lockwood describes, is not only a way of “still participating in the language,” but also of exorcising the hurts that language inflicted. When my wife and I joke about “Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ beneath me, Christ bent over the back of my couch,” it isn’t blasphemy for blasphemy’s sake. It’s a child wearing a mask at Halloween of the very monster that’s kept it up at night in terror. And, of course, it is, as Lockwood indicates, a way to peek back in the windows, a way to assure yourself your home is still there, even if you’ve run away from it, even if you don’t want to go back.
My parents never really did find home. They never found the church my dad had dreamed up. He rested from his search after the fiasco with the escape plan, and we stayed in one place for the next decade. He was always restless, and jumped at sounds in the night more than once, hoping his patience had paid off. Instead, after my sister and I were both married off (and before we both divorced), they became foreign missionaries. That fit. The missionaries who would visit our churches growing up were always a bit odd. They wore clothes that didn’t really fit, long flowered dresses and shirts tucked into pleated dress pants, and they never seemed to get our jokes. We looked at their kids a little warily and their kids looked at us a little warily till we inevitably discovered Freeze Tag is a language that transcends cultures. For the first two decades of my life we were that weird missionary family anywhere we went, even if we didn’t know it at the time. We just thought we were marked by God in some way. Everything signified, even rejection, even suspicion. And so, with the kids gone and no family graves to tend, my parents took a few months of Spanish and boarded a plane and went somewhere they’d have been outsiders anyway. My sister and I stayed here, wondering what it had all meant, what our origin story said about us, what fearfully and wonderfully encompassed in the context of our childhoods. I have washed the feet of businessmen in a church basement and I have carried a casket through city streets in a pro-life rally and I have wept through the night, imploring the Almighty on behalf of a lost soul, and now I don’t believe a word of it. Oh the depths of the riches. Everything signifies.
Image Credit: Pexels/John-Mark Smith.
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