Author Talk: Priscilla Gilman, “The Critic’s Daughter”

JUST IN: Click below to read Alexander Wilburn’s revealing interview with Priscilla Gilman in the Lakeville Journal:

https://tricornernews.com/compass-ae-books/have-we-lost-our-taste-literary-criticism

The Critic’s Daughter, just published, is an unflinching account of loss and grief and a wrenching story about the impact of divorce. Priscilla Gilman, also the author of the memoir The Anti-Romantic Child and a former professor of English literature at Yale University and Vassar College, presents an exquisitely rendered portrait of a unique father-daughter relationship and a moving memoir of family and identity.

The book has received dazzling reviews and this will be the author’s first appearance in Connecticut, where she will present a talk and reading at the Cornwall Library to be followed by a book signing.

Growing up on the Upper West Side of New York City in the 1970s, in an apartment filled with dazzling literary and artistic characters, Gilman worshiped her brilliant, adoring, and mercurial father, the writer, theater critic, and Yale School of Drama professor Richard Gilman. But when she was ten years old, her mother, renowned literary agent Lynn Nesbit, abruptly announced that she was ending the marriage. The ensuing cascade of disturbing revelations―about her parents’ hollow marriage, and 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. Gilman superbly recounts growing up in her ambitious and demanding literary family and coming to terms with the painful reality of her parents’ divorce.

“The Critic’s Daughter is an exquisite love song, a riveting story, a book for our time. Any daughter with a father, anyone who has been part of a family, anyone who has struggled with loving, anyone interested in literary criticism, or the theater, or life, this is a book for you.”

—Andre Gregory, theater director, writer, and star of My Dinner with Andre

“Poignant, resonant, and beautifully written…Evokes both a uniquely brilliant and troubled man and the poignantly relatable essence of the father-daughter connection.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“The Critic’s Daughter” is an account of a love that’s neither takeoff strip nor landing pad, a child’s confounding adoration for her parent that’s neither ever really resolved nor extinguished.”— Eve Fairbanks, The Washington Post

Beautiful: honest, raw, careful, soulful, brave and incredibly readable.”— Nick Hornby