Shirley Temple in The Little Princess, a 1939 MGM release was just one of many pictures she made as an orphaned or abandoned waif.
Moppet Shirley Temple was the biggest star in Hollywood in the 1930’s. She sang, danced, and wept herself in the hearts of Depression Era American as an orphan, a foundling, abandoned, or misplaced by circumstances. What primal fears of abandonment did she strike in insecure lives? And what about real children—the talented tot herself or tattered girls barefoot in the Dust Bowl? Poet Patricia Lockwood considers it all.
Patricia Lockwood was born April 27, 1982 in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. She is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. Her 2021 debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, won the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Her poetry collections include Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a 2014 New York Times Notable Book. Since 2019, she has been a contributing editor for London Review of Books.
She is notable for working across and between a variety of genres. “Your work can flow into the shape that people make for you,” she told Slate in an interview in 2020. “Or you can try to break that shape.” In 2022, she received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for her contributions to the field of experimental writing.
Kirkus Reviews called her “our guide to moving beyond thinking of the internet as a thing apart from real lives and real art,” and Garden & Gun, “goddess of the avant-garde.”
Lockwood was the daughter of a former Lutheran minister who converted to Catholicism and ordained a Priest under a special pastoral provision issued by Pope John Paul II in 1980. She grew up in the unusual circumstances of a nuclear family in a rectory and returned to live with her father for a while in adulthood.
She graduated from Parochial school but never attended college. Instead, after a traumatic rape experience at age 19, she married when she was 21 and became a mother. She never really held a job but spent hours everyday writing.
Lockwood is still recovering from long-term Covid contracted in March 2029 and lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her family.
The Fake Tears of Shirley Temple
How many sets of her parents are dead. How many times over is she an orphan. A plane, a crosswalk, a Boer war. A childbirth, of course, her childbirth. When she, Shirley Temple, came out of her mother, plump even at her corners like a bag of goldfish, and one pinhole just one pinhole necessary. Shirley Temple, cry for us, and Shirley Temple cried. The first word of no baby is “Hello,” how strange. The baby believes, “I was here before you, learning to wave just
like the Atlantic.” Alone in the world just like the Atlantic, and left on a doorstep just like the Atlantic, wrapped in the grayest, roughest blanket. Shirley Temple gurgled and her first words were, “Your father is lost at sea.” “Your mother was thrown by a foam-colored horse.” “Your father’s round face is a round set of ripples.” “Every gull has a chunk
of your mom in its beak.” Shirley Temple what makes you cry. What do you think of to make you cry. Mommies stand in a circle and whisper to her. “Shirley Temple there will be war. Shirley Temple you’ll get no lunch.” Dry, and dry, and a perfect desert. Then:
“Shirley Temple your goldfish are dead, they are swimming toward the ocean even now,"
and her tears they fall in black
and white, and her tears they star in the movie.
She cries so wet her hair uncurls, and then the rag
is in the ringlet and the curl is in the wave, she thinks of dimples tearing out of her cheeks and just running, out of cheeks knees and elbows and running hard back to the little creamy waves where they belong, and the ocean. Her first
glimpse of the ocean was a fake tear for dad.
A completely filled eye for her unseen dead father,
who when he isn’t dead he is gone across the water.
—Patricia Lockwood
From Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood, copyright © 2014 by Patricia Lockwood.
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