Review by Booklist Review
Drawing on her lifelong immersion in literature as the daughter of influential drama critic Richard Gilman and prominent literary agent Lynn Nesbit, Gilman writes with resplendent clarity, meticulous candor, and incandescent love forged in the fire of extraordinarily demanding family dynamics. After addressing her first son's developmental disorder in The Anti-Romantic Child (2011), she now looks back to her 1970s New York childhood when her brilliant, ebullient, and charismatic father was the go-to parent. Though profoundly committed to his calling--"he believed in the worth, the indispensability, the nobility, even, of the critical endeavor"--Richard positively reveled in fatherhood, while Nesbit focused on her career. Gilman describes an imagination-stoking household enlivened by such bookish family friends as Anatole Broyard, Anne Roiphe, Joan Didion, and Toni Morrison. But she sensed a widening gulf between her very different parents and sure enough they split up when she was ten. Her mother was liberated; her father devastated, and Gilman, abruptly made aware of her father's unnervingly dark side, committed herself to hiding her sorrow and playing the role of the "effervescent girl" to try to make things easier for her parents. 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.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"I am haunted by my father," writes Gilman (The Anti-Romantic Child), daughter of literary power couple Richard Gilman and Lynn Nesbit, in this poignant memoir. As a Yale drama professor and critic at such publications as the Nation and Newsweek, the author's father "was the judge and they the judged," Gilman writes--they being the literati who swilled cocktails and debated books and politics in the Central Park West apartment he shared with Nesbit, a prominent literary agent. In 1980, Gilman's parents divorced, and for several years, her father struggled with depression and moved from one seedy apartment to another. Meanwhile, Nesbit disclosed to the preteen Gilman her father's erotic predilections and infidelities. As a result, Gilman writes, "she both turned me against my father and turned me toward him." Like her mother before her, Gilman began to feel "responsible for his stability." After his death and years into therapy, Gilman considers whether her father's adultery--described in his own memoir as prolific, and having included affairs with his students--was a result of her mother marrying him lovelessly, rebounding from "one of her first clients and her first great love," the writer Donald Barthelme. 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. (Feb.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The daughter of drama critic Richard Gilman and literary agent Lynn Nesbit reckons with her father's bumpy life trajectory. "I lost my father for the first time when I was ten years old," writes Gilman, author of a previous memoir, The Anti-Romantic Child, referring to her parents' divorce. Their separation ended an idyllic early childhood among the New York literati of the 1970s, lit by her father's devotion to his two daughters and his love of make-believe, storytelling, and children's literature. His impersonation of Sesame Street's Grover was a beloved lifelong party trick, one of many endearing rituals of his "religion of childhood." "As his daughter, I have the privilege--or the burden--of making the final assessment of my father's life," Gilman writes, and then wonders, "Can I make an act of bracing honesty also an act of love?" She certainly has done so here. For those who don't know her father's work--as a critic and professor at Yale Drama School, he was a supporter of iconoclastic theater and the author of a landmark book on Chekhov--Gilman provides a detailed portrait of his career, including many quotes from his writing, which famously combined the personal and the academic in densely nested clauses. After her mother "bitterly divorced him and remained hardened against him," he went through a long period of personal and financial trials, through which the author and her sister bravely tried to buoy him, until his third wife, a wonderful Japanese woman, appeared to save the day. The cruelty of Gilman's still-very-much-alive mother during these decades is disturbingly evident, which makes the inclusion in the final pages of an exchange about the marriage that occurred during the writing of the memoir "a balm like no other." 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
