In the end, The Critic’s Daughter is about the complex love between a parent and a child. It’s not just a book for literary gossips ... Most childhood memoirs depict the author as an adult in child’s clothing ... This one is sometimes childlike, still earnest and effusive. The memoir genre also pumps out innumerable rote tales of becoming, of breaking free, of learning to 'direct' one’s own life. It offers few stories of being and remaining entangled ... 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 really resolved nor extinguished.
Throughout the book, Gilman delightfully weaves the television shows, plays, and movies of her childhood into the story....Gilman also addresses the contradictions and shortcomings of dramatic criticism, suggesting that people should be free to love what they love, in all senses, not just the theatrical ... While the questions raised about the nature and value of criticism are worthwhile, the heart of this memoir is the unusually powerful, fraught, and enduring father-daughter relationship. Gilman creates an emotional map of the catastrophic disruption of divorce and the devotion of a child for her parent despite his failings.
This revealing and clearly heartfelt memoir — a love letter to her father that doesn’t obscure the difficult and frustrating aspects of their relationship—works precisely because Gilman delivers a detailed portrait of her father, proverbial warts and all ... She certainly provides the rest of us with a daughter’s thoughtful and empathetic profile of her dad.
Nesbit, the super agent whose clients have included Joan Didion... is portrayed so coolly in this book that the pages about her almost shatter as you turn them. It’s a devastating portrait ... At its best, this memoir evokes a shaggy lost world.
The urgency of Gilman’s mission is palpable ... The Critic’s Daughter, which is laced with quotes from Richard’s articles and books, hits its terminus a good bit before the last page. Gilman can’t let go ... Readers will be sympathetic but weary.
One of the reasons I loved Gilman’s book is that through her father she makes a case for criticism as a worthwhile practice. If you’ve been on the receiving end of a kicking, as everyone in the arts has if they live long enough professionally, it’s easy to forget that critics love the arts as much as their practitioners do. And it’s easy to forget, too, that the best criticism can be as illuminating as any other form of writing ... The Critic’s Daughter is a book about a lot of things, but one of them is this: that a fierce and powerful voice, a voice that some people were afraid to hear, can disguise an awful lot of trouble and pain. The critic’s daughter—the writer, as opposed to the book—has the tenderness, the acuity, and the facility to explore her father and her relationship to him in ways that cannot help but resonate. Maybe this is because all of us are the children of critics, in one way or another.
...a captivating and heartfelt memoir exploring the life of a woman raised by an esteemed literary critic. Through her vivid prose, Gilman takes readers on a journey of self-discovery as she pieces together her father’s complex and sometimes contradictory character while simultaneously facing her own identity crisis ... Gilman’s writing is both beautiful and heartbreaking, and her story is something readers of any age can relate to. The Critic’s Daughter is an honest and moving exploration of family, identity, and the human experience. It is a must-read for anyone looking for an intimate and honest look into the life of a literary family.
This memoir read as a rare confluence of things—not so much a "Daddy Dearest" settling of scores, but a sincere attempt to untangle a father-daughter knot of love, hurt, and grief.
Gilman writes with resplendent clarity, meticulous candor, and incandescent love forged in the fire of extraordinarily demanding family dynamics ... Gilman incisively charts her remarkable father’s intense ups-and-downs and lucidly analyzes her own struggles in a richly involving chronicle gracefully laced with literary allusions, compassion, and wisdom.
In capturing the essence of its challenging subject, The Critic's Daughter is a rare combination of honesty, warmheartedness and exquisite writing. As both fair-minded prosecutor and tenacious defense attorney, Priscilla Gilman scrupulously placed her father’s manifold strengths and obvious flaws on the balance scale and finds that the weight of the evidence tips decidedly in his favor. The audience for this drama can be grateful that she has chosen to share so many scenes of his painful, beautiful life with us. What’s undeniable is that Richard Gilman would be proud of the eloquence and grace with which she has done it.
Poignant ... Bibliophiles will enjoy the literary cameos (Joan Didion, Toni Morrison) and reflections on literature, but Gilman’s wrenching recollections of marital, and familial, dissolution are near-universal. This is an eye-opening testament to the lasting wounds of divorce.
The narrative is passionate, resonant, and beautifully written, with just a few forgivably maudlin moments ... Evokes both a uniquely brilliant and troubled man and the poignantly relatable essence of the father-daughter connection.
