Listen:
Sometimes you meet someone and feel instantly connected. That was the case with meeting Priscilla Gilman, even if it was only via Zoom. She covers themes in her work that I’m fascinated with, like the deployment of power –in life and writing, and the vulnerability of the childhood psyche and how that is expressed later in adulthood. We had an engaging and in-depth discussion of these subjects and more.
In This Episode:
- Priscilla’s search for her father as the genesis for ‘The Critic’s Daughter’
- Outlining the ways she lost her father throughout her life
- Her hypervigilance as a result of a childhood spent with famous and powerful parents
- Crafting an elegy for a lost New York
- “Streaks of love” and loss as throughlines of her book
- Setting up the book as a series of acts straight from the theater
- Reflecting on the brilliance of her father’s writing and power as a critic while writing her own story
- The challenges of navigating a personal and public persona
- Priscilla’s journey to processing grief and healing as she “brought her father back” and gained clarity on his life through research and writing his story
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About Priscilla Gilman
Priscilla Gilman is the author of two memoirs, The Anti-Romantic Child (Harper, 2011) and The Critic’s Daughter (Norton, 2023) and a former professor of English literature at Yale University and Vassar College. The Critic’s Daughter was a Washington Post Best Book of 2023, a New York Times Book Critics’ Favorite Book of 2023, a Good Morning America Must-Read, one of the Los Angeles Times’ book critic and Book Maven Bethanne Patrick’s Top 10 Non-Fiction Books of 2023, one of the “18 Books Lilith magazine Loved in 2023,” and 3rd on Bookreporter’s Harvey Freedenburg’s Favorite Books of 2023. Nick Hornby called The Critic’s Daughter “beautiful: honest, raw, careful, soulful, brave and incredibly readable,” and Kiese Laymon declared: “The Critic’s Daughter is an exquisite and rare example of how the memoir needs as much inventiveness in scope and form as our most lush fiction and poetry…I’ve read few books in my life as skillfully executed and willfully conceived as The Critic’s Daughter.” Gilman’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, O, the Oprah Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.
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Episode Mentioned in this podcast
#52 A Conversation with Claire Dederer About Monsters
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