It is easy to forget that once upon a time, before the internet was the strip-mined, litter-strewn Ground Zero of unreason that it is today, it was beautiful – or at least still had the potential to be. For Patricia Lockwood – who spent her formative years in a zany household in the American midwest, dominated by her semi-naked, gun-toting, staunchly Catholic father – the internet was not only a place of escape; it was a place of self-actualisation. There’s a moment in her sublimely lewd memoir, Priestdaddy (2017), when her husband points at a pair of her father’s underpants and marvels that that’s where she sprang from. “‘I like to think I sprang from a head; I like to think the head was mine’,” she counters.
The internet was where Lockwood discovered that voice; where she found her people; met her husband; wrote perhaps the greatest ever tweet (“@ParisReview so is Paris any good then”); saw her poems go viral; and, unable to afford university fees, scratched together an education of sorts. Lockwood is, among other things, a great argument for writers not going on to higher education; hers is an intelligence shaped online. She is a true inhabitant of the internet, someone who sees herself as a “monstrous hybrid of high and low”. She can participate in its discourse about Updike, Nabokov, Didion and Ferrante; she can also appreciate dinosaur porn.
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