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58
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
49/100Critics
67/100Scholars
Author:
Priscilla Gilman
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
Date:
February 7, 2023
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 revelationsâabout her parents' hollow marriage, her father's double life and tortured sexual identityâfundamentally changed Priscilla's perception of her father, as she attempted to protect him from the depression that had long shadowed him.
What The Reviewers Say
In the end, The Critic’s Daughter is about the complex love between a parent and a child. It’s not just a book for literary gossips.
Throughout the book, Gilman delightfully weaves the television shows, plays, and movies of her childhood into the story....Gilman also addresses the contradictions and shortcomings of dramatic criticism, suggesting that people should be free to love what they love, in all senses, not just the theatrical.
This revealing and clearly heartfelt memoir — a love letter to her father that doesn’t obscure the difficult and frustrating aspects of their relationship—works precisely because Gilman delivers a detailed portrait of her father, proverbial warts and all.
Nesbit, the super agent whose clients have included Joan Didion... is portrayed so coolly in this book that the pages about her almost shatter as you turn them. It’s a devastating portrait.
