The Critic's Daughter
A Memoir
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
“Beautiful: honest, raw, careful, soulful, brave, and incredibly readable.” —Nick Hornby
An exquisitely rendered portrait of a unique father-daughter relationship and a moving memoir of family and identity.
Growing up on the Upper West Side of New York City in the 1970s, in an apartment filled with dazzling literary and artistic characters, Priscilla Gilman worshiped her brilliant, adoring, and mercurial father, the writer, theater critic, and Yale School of Drama professor Richard Gilman. But when Priscilla was ten years old, her mother, renowned literary agent Lynn Nesbit, abruptly announced that she was ending the marriage. The resulting cascade of disturbing revelations—about her parents’ hollow marriage, her father’s double life and tortured sexual identity—fundamentally changed Priscilla’s perception of her father, as she attempted to protect him from the depression that had long shadowed him.
A wrenching story about what it means to be the daughter of a demanding parent, a revelatory window into the impact of divorce, and a searching reflection on the nature of art and criticism, The Critic’s Daughter is an unflinching account of loss and grief—and a radiant testament of forgiveness and love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I am haunted by my father," writes Gilman (The Anti-Romantic Child), daughter of literary power couple Richard Gilman and Lynn Nesbit, in this poignant memoir. As a Yale drama professor and critic at such publications as the Nation and Newsweek, the author's father "was the judge and they the judged," Gilman writes—they being the literati who swilled cocktails and debated books and politics in the Central Park West apartment he shared with Nesbit, a prominent literary agent. In 1980, Gilman's parents divorced, and for several years, her father struggled with depression and moved from one seedy apartment to another. Meanwhile, Nesbit disclosed to the preteen Gilman her father's erotic predilections and infidelities. As a result, Gilman writes, "she both turned me against my father and turned me toward him." Like her mother before her, Gilman began to feel "responsible for his stability." After his death and years into therapy, Gilman considers whether her father's adultery—described in his own memoir as prolific, and having included affairs with his students—was a result of her mother marrying him lovelessly, rebounding from "one of her first clients and her first great love," the writer Donald Barthelme. Bibliophiles will enjoy the literary cameos (Joan Didion, Toni Morrison) and reflections on literature, but Gilman's wrenching recollections of marital, and familial, dissolution are near-universal. This is an eye-opening testament to the lasting wounds of divorce.
