"The Critic's Daughter: A Memoir," by Priscilla Gilman

As readers of this blog know, I love literature, especially fiction. I love memoirs and biographies. So of course I love the perfect combination of memoirs and biographies of writers and others involved in the world of literature – critics, editors, publishers, and more. “The Critic’s Daughter: A Memoir” (Norton, 2023), by Priscilla Gilman, like "Lives of the Wives” (see my post of 7/4/23), is a perfect mixture of the above preferences. Gilman writes about her life as the daughter of her late father, the eminent literary critic Richard Gilman. It is almost a dual (auto)biography, in that the author was extremely close to her father, and felt responsible for him in many ways, starting in her childhood and continuing until his death decades later. She admired him, even adored him, learned from him, and was extremely protective of him. Much of her own life and career was modelled on his. He was a very loving father. But he was also a complicated, sometimes insecure and difficult man, one with his own unhappy secrets, and not only Priscilla but her sister and others had to tiptoe around him, propitiate and try to shore him up and please him. It was too much (partly self-imposed) responsibility for his daughters, especially for Priscilla; she both welcomed the responsibility and sometimes felt overwhelmed and even angry about it. This is a loving but clear-eyed portrait of Gilman’s father, and of the dynamics of a literary family (the author's mother was the famous literary agent Lynn Nesbit) in the midst of the literary life in New York City in the mid-to-late twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Along the way, we readers learn much about the literary scene of that time period. The book features many famous writers and others in the worlds of literature and the arts. This memoir is fascinating for its psychological insights and for its literature-related portraits. It is also beautifully written.