THE CRITIC'S DAUGHTER

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.