THE THREE with Priscilla Gilman

An interview, a photo story, and pop-up questions.

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Priscilla Gilman is a former professor of English literature at both Yale University and Vassar College and the author of The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy (Harper), and The Critic's Daughter, to be published by Norton in February, 2023. She graduated from Yale summa cum laude, with exceptional distinction in the English major. She went on to earn her masters and Ph.D. in English and American literature at Yale and spent two years as an assistant professor of English at Yale and four years as an assistant professor of English at Vassar College before leaving academia in 2006. From 2006-2011, she worked as a literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit Associates, representing a wide range of literary fiction, inspirational memoir, wellness, and psychology/education books. During these years, she also taught poetry appreciation to inmates in a restorative justice program and to New York City public school students and spoke at numerous early childhood and education conferences and events.

The Anti-Romantic Child, Gilman’s first book, was excerpted in Newsweek magazine and featured on the cover of its international edition. It received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, was an NPR Morning Edition Must-Read, Slate‘s Book of the Week, selected as one of the year’s Best Books by the Leonard Lopate Show, and chosen as a Best Book of the year by The Chicago Tribune. The Anti-Romantic Child was one of five nominees for a Books for a Better Life Award for Best First Book and was awarded the Mom’s Choice Gold Award, rewarding the best in family-friendly media and literature. Andrew Solomon called it “rapturously beautiful and deeply moving, profound, and marvelous.” Gilman’s second book, The Critic’s Daughter, was published by W.W. Norton on February 7th, 2023; a memoir about her relationship with her brilliant and complicated father, the late drama and literary critic Richard Gilman, it is set in the heyday of intellectual culture in New York of the 1970s and 80s. The Critic's Daughter received starred reviews in Kirkus and Booklist; Nick Hornby called it “Beautiful: honest, raw, careful, soulful, brave and incredibly readable."

Gilman has written about literature, parenting, autism, and education and reviewed fiction and literary non-fiction for the Daily Beast, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times’ Motherlode, The Chicago Tribune, MORE, O: The Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Redbook, the Boston Globe, and Huff Post Parents. Her New York Times op-ed, “Don’t Blame Autism for Newtown,” was the most shared piece on the site for two days after its publication and her piece for Slate, “’My Spaceship Knows Which Way To Go’: How David Bowie Helped my Autistic Son Become Himself,” has been read by millions of people worldwide after being praised and shared by the official David Bowie website and social media accounts.

Since 2011, Gilman has taught literature in countless settings: private book groups, classes for Yale Alumni College, an Asian literature book group for the Asia Society in Manhattan, workshops in high schools and at non-profits for Humanities New York, graduate seminars for medical students at Mt Sinai Medical School, high school English classes at the Collegiate School and Grace Church School. She was the parenting/education advice columnist for #1 New York Times bestselling author Susan Cain’s Quiet Revolution website and since 2013, has been a regular book critic for the Boston Globe. She speaks frequently at schools, conferences, and organizations about parenting, education, autism, and the arts. She has received fellowships and grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Speranza Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the New York Council for the Humanities. In 1997, Gilman won the Yale College Graduate Prize Teaching Fellowship; in 2019, she won the Yale Alumni College Distinguished Teaching award. In 2018, she became a certified Mindfulness and Loving-Kindness meditation teacher.

Editor’s Note- A good memoir is one of my favorite categories of books to read, and Priscilla Gilman’s The Critic’s Daughter came through with flying colors. As the daughter of an immensely complicated and brilliant father, I read this looking back on a father-daughter relationship with great interest and quite a few flashes of recognition. Gilman captures a significant rendering of her father and her family life by negotiating honestly between the deep safety and joy and love her father brought her as well as the insecurities, fears, and disappointments. True to her father’s legacy, she does not shy away from presenting images and memories that critique but true to her heart, she deep dives into the ways that he was the person who made her feel most seen and loved in the world. The details of Gilman’s childhood environment have a particular zest as they include some of the most respected writers and artists of their time. A wonderful read.

POP UP QUESTIONS

The writer picks five out of ten pop-up questions and answers them.

What do you think about when you are awake at 3 am?

All the emails I need to respond to, my children's futures, what food items are missing or running low in my fridge, freezer, and cabinets and need to be ordered.

What book do you wish you could read again for the first time and why?

Great Expectations, one of my all-time favorite novels, and one whose plot is filled with twists and turns and huge surprises. I wish I could experience the shock of the revelations anew!

What is a quote that has endured in your mind?

This from the Romantic poet William Wordsworth; I use it in both of my memoirs and have taught the poem it comes from- The Intimations Ode- countless times: 

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight.
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it has been of yore: —
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day.
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

What music do you love on road trips? 

I am not a big road trip girl, but when I'm on a long car ride, I alternate between classic 60s and 70s folk or rock- The Band, Joni Mitchell, The Who- and galvanizing 80s pop like Duran Duran, the Go Gos, or Men At Work.

What philosophy, religion or school of thought has given you something real, and what is that real thing?

The Stoics (Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius) have given me the ability to be more present and mindful and less attached to outcome and the capacity for protecting myself from unfair criticisms or unjust attacks.

PHOTO ROLL STORY

The writer picks a photo from her phone and tells us about it.

In The Critic's Daughter, I describe my father taking me and my sister to Tony's Italian Kitchen in the early 80s and his making me and my sister split a dish so that he could conserve money. Tony's, on 79th Street between Amsterdam and Broadway, was a neighborhood legend, an Upper West Side institution, but sadly closed for good in the 1990s. When Erica Heller, daughter of Joseph Heller, read an interview with me in the West Side Rag, she reached out to me via email and sent me this photo of a Tony's menu from back in the day!

THE INTERVIEW

The writer answers questions about her life and work.

You wrote this wonderful memoir, The Critic’s Daughter, about the span of your relationship with respected critic and your father, Richard Gilman. Included in this are your sister and your mother, an influential literary agent, Lynn Nesbit.  People are always curious about family responses to memoir writing- has your (younger) sister or your mother read your book, and if so, what were their responses? Was it hard for you to write this book without worrying about the impact on your private life?

My mom has not yet read the book; she just doesn't want to go back into all the painful stuff from her past. I get it. My ex-husband was the same way with my first memoir, in which he was a central character. Claire's husband and daughter read the book immediately on publication and loved it, but Claire herself only just finished it.  I'm so pleased to report that Claire absolutely loved the book. She told me it was a gift to her to get to relive so many of the wonderful experiences we had with our father, to see my father anew and afresh through my recapturing of him, and to read excerpts from his pieces and books, many of which neither of us had read before I began work on my book. She used the word "beautiful" over and over to describe my book and also "I love you so much" appeared at least three times in her brief email to me. We are very close and tell each other we love each other often but this felt especially meaningful!

You open the book with a prologue about your thoughts on writing a memoir about your family of origin, and what obligations you had morally. "As his daughter I have the privilege -or the burden- of making the final assessment of my father's life. And my loyalty is at stake." You then segue into George Bernard Shaw's quote, "Loyalty is corruption." Do you feel satisfied that in this book, you reached a compromise between those two ideas?

Yes, I realized that telling the full truth was the best way to honor my father and his critical precepts. He believed that love demanded rigorous honesty. That to whitewash or sanitize would be disloyal to the truth and to the person described.

Throughout The Critic’s Daughter, you look at your family life through the lens of characters in movies and plays. I thought this brilliantly reflected your father's work as a critic, as well as highlighted the importance of art in our lives as a vehicle to better understand ourselves and the people around us. Was this purposeful or instinctual?

Oh Maggie, I love it that you highlighted this aspect of the book, which was very important to me! I didn't set out to do the characters in search of my father, but as one after another popped up and I found myself expatiating on how he or she related to my father, I realized that this was a great way to enrich and complicate and deepen my depiction of my father but also a cool vehicle for reflecting on how art shapes life and vice versa.  So I suppose it was both purposeful and instinctual! :)

As I read your memoir, I thought of the quote attributed often to Maya Angelou, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Your father made you extremely happy in the first ten years of your life, and I get the impression that this is what has lasted longest for you. Is this true?

It absolutely is! That happiness will never ever die. And the grief, sadness, loneliness etc- they are all the gladly assumed costs of that happiness and love.

The Critic’s Daughter takes a wonderful look back at New York City as a hub of intellectual bohemian activity in which your parents were fixtures. What of that lifestyle and environment have you tried to pass on to your children?

Seeing as much live music and theater as possible, spending lots of time in the city's parks and museums, getting to know people like Joan Didion (my boys would sing for her and Benj would give her guitar concerts till shortly before she died) and Gordon Rogoff and Bob Gottlieb, becoming well acquainted with the Strand!

Since this is a book primarily about your father, I thought I would ask, what -aside from the piece he wrote about your shared love for sports- is your favorite of your father's books and essays?

The sports piece is it, Maggie- you're right! Other than that, his Chekhov book, his chapter on Beckett in The Making of Modern Drama, the NYT piece he wrote about Hamlets, his piece about falling in love with Yasuko, "To The Noodle Shop."