Bonded by books
Gilman writes what it's like to be a `Critic's Daughter'
When Priscilla Gilman and her younger sister Claire were growing up as the only daughters of Lynn Nesbit, a high-powered literary agent, and Richard Gilman, an exacting drama critic and Yale University professor, their bedtime stories were often read by publishing world superstars: Uncle Bern (Bernard Malamud), Aunt Ann (Ann Beattie) and Aunt Toni (Toni Morrison).
They introduced their stuffed animals to Jerzy Kosinski. At cocktail parties at the family's rambling New York City apartment in Manhattan's Upper West Side, they passed the deviled eggs to Anatole Broyard, a charismatic critic and editor at the New York Times Book Review.
Nesbit was the driven breadwinner, not one for engaging in make-believe or rolling around on the floor with her children. Richard Gilman, who died in 2006, was a champion of avantgarde theater, known to the world as a fearsome critic — John Leonard, of the Times, once described his writing as “confrontation criticism.” But at home, he was benevolent and forgiving, at least to his daughters.
As Priscilla Gilman, his eldest daughter, has written in her new book, “The Critic's Daughter: A Memoir,” he was the kindly priest who presided over the cathedral of their childhood. With his professor's hours, he was the more present, playful and engaged parent, taking the girls out for pizza and to the library so their mother could work through the weekends. He delighted in reading aloud to them, never broke the third wall in the imaginative games at which he excelled, and often spoke in the gruff voice of his favorite alter ego, Grover the Muppet.
Gilman was 10 when her parents separated. Her father was left undone and adrift, sleeping on friend's couches, bedeviled by depression and darker urges that caused him shame. The book, out Feb. 7, is Priscilla Gilman's attempt to make sense of his fall from grace.
With it, she has joined the ranks of literary daughters who embarked on the same mission. That includes Bliss Broyard, daughter of Anatole, who investigated her father's not-so-secret secret — that he was a Black man passing as White in the monolithically white publishing world — in
“One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life — a Story of Race and Family Secrets,” out in 2007. “Reading My Father,” out in 2011 by Alexandra Styron, William Styron's youngest child, was another bracing rendition of life with a mighty, troubled man.
More recently, Ada Calhoun, daughter of art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who died last fall, took on her father in her 2022 memoir, “Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me.” Calhoun was still clamoring to be seen by her distant and often catastrophically neglectful parent; her lifelong efforts to distinguish herself — notably, changing her surname at 22 — now include her entry into this particular memoir-writer's club. Schjeldahl lived long enough to read the book, and praise her work.
`A universal story'
“It's a universal story,” said Gilman, now 52, who was on a recent Sunday at home in the bright, book-filled apartment she shares with her two sons in New York City's Washington Heights neighborhood. She was warm and solicitous, a petite figure in a pale blue Icelandic sweater and bluejeans. Her ex, her sons' father, lives in the same building. “I always loved my father deeply, but the book was about finding a deeper sense of love, where you see the person for who they really are, rather than your projection of them or their most positive face.”
After her parents split, Gilman, the family cheerleader and her father's favorite, made herself a list of “Things Not to Do When With Daddy: Don't Cry. Don't Complain. Don't Be Difficult. Don't Tell Him Anything but Good News. Don't Mention Mommy. Don't Expect Him to Be the Daddy of Old.”
With his adjunct professor's
salary, her father was unable to afford an apartment for some time. When he did, sleepovers with Dad were scenes of penury: treats were Fritos divvied up, 10 for each daughter, and one Coke, split between them, all served on plastic dishware from the family's former weekend house. “On the bright side,” said Gilman, grinning, “we got Fritos!” (The snack was verboten in her mother's household.) He fought with his more successful ex over their assets, enraging Nesbit and shocking some of her friends, who made no attempt to hide their contempt for Gilman from his children.
In the aftermath of the separation, Gilman learned her father had had many affairs. He struggled with sexual urges of bondage and abasement, which he described in a letter he imprudently left lying around. A few years later, he wrote of his sexual alienation and a youthful, brief conversion to Catholicism — Gilman was a Jewish atheist — in “Faith, Sex, Mystery: A Memoir,” out in 1987. His daughters were teenagers at the time. They read the reviews, but avoided the book.
Both parents were overly forthcoming with their eldest. “I was never in love with your father,” Nesbit told her. “Sometimes I think I'd kill myself if it weren't for you girls,” her father said.
“There was no discourse about how to talk to children about divorce in those days,” Gilman said, still the peacemaker. “We all make mistakes as parents.”
Tortured relationships
But oh, the fallout. After her own divorce and her father's death, Gilman writes, she fell in love with a rogue's gallery of tortured men “who teetered on the edge of in