Poet Patricia Lockwood just published an autobiography called Priestdaddy. Focusing on her closest relationships—including an bawdy-yet-chaste flirtation with a young seminarian living with her family—the book is smart, weird, and funny as hell. Preparatory to an upcoming performance together at Joe’s Pub in New York City, Patricia and I spoke for the first time on the phone. In a homage to her notorious sexting tweets, and in a misguided attempt to make her publicity duties more interesting, I offered to prompt Patricia’s reflections on Priestdaddy by reading her relevant quotations from the epistolary novel Dangerous Liaisons.

—Ben Arthur

PATRICIA LOCKWOOD: You’re going to read me quotes from Dangerous Liaisons?

BEN ARTHUR: I am.

PL: And then what do I say?

BA: Whatever you want. Here: “Madame de Merteuil, though indeed a woman highly regarded, has perhaps only one fault: she overestimates her ability; she’s a skillful driver who enjoys guiding her chariot between rocks and precipices and whose sole justification is that she remains unscathed.”

PL: This mostly reminds me of the game “Oregon Trail.” I always chose to potentially kill the whole team but hopefully achieve glory. That’s what my dad would do, too.

BA: Yeah, I thought of your hunting trip with him.

PL: Call it his hunting trip. It was not mine.

BA: And you didn’t shit yourself, so: glory.

PL: But in a way my brother won for shitting himself because it so gilded the day that we never forgot it. Now I’m wishing I had read Dangerous Liaisons.

BA: Your father is both an electric guitar-wailing, semi-nudist, hardcore Republican, and a dedicated priest with a sacramental go-bag by the door, ready to run give succor to his flock at a moment’s notice. It seemed like there was a through-line in these contradictory impulses.

PL: It’s the only kind of existence that’s possible for him, an existence that lives at the two poles. If you told him he is contradictory he wouldn’t believe you. To him it all exists perfectly harmoniously within his system.  You wish for just a moment the man would appear in the flesh and you could talk to him for five minutes.

BA: “The man” here meaning Our Heavenly Father, or your dad coming out of his room?

PL: It would be just as surprising if Jesus came down and was like, “Hey, I’m also very much semi-nude and living at the edge.” Which he certainly was. But to my dad the guitar playing, the motorcycles, the fast cars, the...