Remembrance of Slings Past

Priscilla Gilman found her voice mining a past rich with her parents' famous friends, haunted by their divorce, and marked by both her father's love for his daughters and his BDSM secrets.

Gilman discusses this photo in her memoir. L to R: Claire Gilman, Lynn Nesbit, Priscilla Gilman, Richard Gilman

Right around the time Kramer v. Kramer hit the zeitgeist, Priscilla Gilman—age 10, family peacekeeper—suddenly found herself having to navigate the roiling seas of Gilman v. Gilman. This was confusing enough, given that her mother, uber-successful literary agent and family breadwinner, Lynn Nesbit, did not use her married name professionally, and her father, the well-known theater critic and adjunct Yale professor Richard Gilman, did not want a divorce. Never mind the magical dinner parties the couple threw in their giant, rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment at 333 Central Park West or later at 44 West 77th Street, star-studded with the boldfaced literary names of that bygone golden era: Susan Sontag, Jerzy Kozinski, Bernard Malamud, Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Ann Beatie (just to name a few), many of whom found their way into Priscilla’s and her sister Claire’s bedroom to read them bedtime stories.

Why were her parents at war? And how could she keep them both happy? Bit by by, Gilman, child detective of both clues and the heart, discovers the truth. Her mother, once lover of and then agent for Donald Barthelme, had had enough of her husband’s BDSM proclivities. Gilman’s father, unable to convince his wife to debase him in bed, sought out such pleasures elsewhere.

In other words, your basic marital shit show, but Gilman’s superpower, in her new memoir, The Critic’s Daughter, is that she does not dwell on the more sordid aspects of her tale so much as she works hard (if seemingly effortlessly) on the page to process their truths and meanings. I found myself underlining passage after passage: prompts for conversations I’d like to maybe one day have with my own kids about the far-reaching emotional scars and thorny tentacles of being the children of divorce.

Gilman does not shy away from the ways in which that long ago rupture has affected her own choices as an adult in both love and work. Choosing men who were wrong for her. Choosing careers to please her parents instead of herself. Silencing her voice too often in both domains, both to keep the peace at home and to keep everyone else happy but herself.

Nor does she shy away from the hard truths of her father’s life, post-divorce. Richard Gilman, once set loose from the bonds of marriage and family life, fell into both a deep depression and the kind of downward mobility that had him sleeping on friends’ couches and counting out Fritos, one by one, to quell his daughters’ hungers while splitting one Coke between them. Scenes of Priscilla and her sister trying to fall asleep on the hardwood floor of his apartment—he couldn’t afford beds for them—are expertly interspersed with the love and support shown to him by Herman and Anne Roiphe, for one example, as well as the love and support he, in turn, was able to show to his daughters, even in the midst of his downward spiral.

As I told Gilman, in our Zoom interview below, I gobbled up this book in two days flat while simultaneously caring for my mother, post-surgery and rehab, in the house in which I grew up: a particularly poignant place and time to read a family memoir as well as a milestone for me, reading-wise. No book has grabbed me this hard by the throat since the beginning of Covid. For the first time in nearly three years, I was able to tune out everything but the words on the page.

And to think Gilman nearly silenced her voice, to keep pleasing everyone but herself, instead of quitting her job as a professor at Yale and venturing forth to tell her difficult, unusual, but also highly universal story? Unthinkable.

May her courage to speak hard truths—artfully, generously, and without shame—be as much an inspiration to you as it was to me.