I'm the daughter of a charismatic and complicated father, the late theater and literary critic and Yale School of Drama professor Richard Gilman. My memoir, The Critic's Daughter, tells the story of how I lost him for the first time when I was ten years old and over and over in the ensuing months and years; the book is my attempt to find him. I'm a former professor of English literature at Yale and Vassar, the mother of two boys, a book critic for the Boston Globe, and a literature, writing, and meditation teacher.
An exquisitely rendered portrait of a unique father-daughter relationship and a moving memoir of family and identity.
Growing up on the Upper West Side of New York City in the 1970s, in an apartment filled with dazzling literary and artistic characters, Priscilla Gilman worshiped her brilliant, adoring, and mercurial father, the writer, theater critic, and Yale School of Drama professor Richard Gilman. But when Priscilla was ten years old, her mother, renowned literary agent Lynn Nesbit, abruptly announced that she was ending the marriage. The resulting cascade of disturbing revelations fundamentally changed Priscilla’s perception of her father, as she attempted to protect him from the depression that had long shadowed him. The Critic’s Daughter is an unflinching account of loss and grief―and a radiant testament of forgiveness and love.
Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father is a gorgeous, poetic memoir first published in 2013; it was recently turned into a film produced by Sofia Coppola that will be in theaters in late 2023.
Alysia is the only child of Steve Abbott, a bisexual writer, activist, and poet who raises her on his own after her mother dies in a car accident when Alysia is just a toddler.
Fairyland tells the story of Steve and Alysia's vibrant, bohemian life in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury in the 1970s and 80s, Alysia's grappling with the challenges of being raised by a queer man when few if any of the kids she knew were, Steve's illness and death from AIDS.
Alysia's clear-eyed depiction of her father as both abundantly loving and somewhat unreliable, exciting and dangerous but also steadfast and loyal, is a model for how to represent a complicated human being with sensitivity and nuance.
In this vibrant memoir, Alysia Abbott recounts growing up in 1970s San Francisco with Steve Abbott, a gay, single father during an era when that was rare. Reconstructing their time together from a remarkable cache of Steve's writings, Alysia gives us an unforgettable portrait of a tumultuous, historic period in San Francisco as well as an exquisitely moving account of a father's legacy and a daughter's love.
This book is a luminously honest, unflinching, and brave memoir by the marvelous Dani Shapiro, whose most recent memoir, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love, caused a sensation when it was published in 2019.
When Slow Motion begins, Dani is in her early 20s, adrift, rebelling against her Jewish heritage, dabbling in acting and modeling, involved in a dead-end affair with a married man.
Then one night, a phone call changes everything- her parents have been in a dreadful car accident. Her father dies a few weeks later, and her mother requires months of intensive rehab.
Dani's tragic loss of the father she idolized and adored prompts a reckoning with her choices and a reevaluation of her life. Slow Motion is beautifully written, wrenching, and unwaveringly candid.
From one of the most gifted writers of her generation comes the harrowing and exqui-sitely written true story of how a family tragedy saved her life. Dani Shapiro was a young girl from a deeply religious home who became the girlfriend of a famous and flamboyant married attorney--her best friend's stepfather. The moment Lenny Klein entered her life, everything changed: she dropped out of college, began to drink heavily, and became estranged from her family and friends. But then the phone call came. There had been an accident on a snowy road near her family's home in New Jersey, and…
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the semi-autobiographical novel by Betty Smith, gives us one of the most vivid and endearing, appealing yet vulnerable fathers in all of literature.
Johnny Nolan is handsome, debonair, a talented singer, and a terrible alcoholic. His bond with his only daughter, Francie, is at once playful and profound. Francie adores her charming and doting father, worries incessantly about his well-being, delights in his exuberance and gallantry, and fears his inevitable demise.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was first published in 1943; the 1945 film version, directed by Elia Kazan, won the best supporting actor for the actor who played Johnny and a special Juvenile Oscar for the actress who played Francie.
Johnny is one of the 40 Characters In Search of My Father that flit through the pages of my memoir.
A special 75th anniversary edition of the beloved American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the twentieth century.
From the moment she entered the world, Francie Nolan needed to be made of stern stuff, for growing up in the Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn, New York demanded fortitude, precocity, and strength of spirit. Often scorned by neighbors for her family’s erratic and eccentric behavior―such as her father Johnny’s taste for alcohol and Aunt Sissy’s habit of marrying serially without the formality of divorce―no one, least of all Francie, could…
Manhattan Beach is less experimental and more conventional than Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad and The Candy House, but it is every bit as moving, rich, and textured as those justly celebrated novels, and it contains one of the most touching father/daughter relationships that I've ever encountered in fiction.
A historical novel set in Depression and World War II-era New York City, Manhattan Beach begins with almost 12-year-old Anna Kerrigan accompanying her rakish father, Eddie, on a mission to a wealthy gangster. A few years later, Eddie disappears after abruptly walking out on his family with no warning or explanation.
Has he been killed? Is he in hiding? Why did he abandon a family he ostensibly loved? Plucky, brave Anna devotes herself to the search for her missing father with the ingenuity and zeal of the detectives she reads about in fiction.
I reviewed Manhattan Beach for the Boston Globe and I quote from it in my own memoir.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
The daring and magnificent novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author.
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, Esquire, Vogue, The Washington Post, The Guardian, USA TODAY, and Time
Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to visit Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. She is mesmerized by the sea beyond the house and by some charged mystery between the two men.…
Bliss's father, New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard, revealed to his children two months before he died of cancer that he was black.
My father, Richard Gilman, and Anatole were old buddies and literary compatriots (check out Anatole's vibrant memoir of life in Bohemian New York City in the 1950s, Kafka Was The Rage, for more on their exploits together) and my father had actually known about Anatole's race before his children did!
Bliss grew up in tony Westport, CT, living a life of what she considered to be WASP privilege. The shocking secret of her father's racial identity leads her into a quest for her ancestors, her lost family, and her own identity as a mixed-race woman.
One Drop is both an intimate family story and a window onto large questions of race, identity, and family.
Two months before he died of cancer, renowned literary critic Anatole Broyard called his grown son and daughter to his side, intending to reveal a secret he'd kept all their lives and most of his own: he was black. But even as he lay dying, the truth was too diffi cult for him to share, and it was his wife who told Bliss Broyard that her WASPy, privileged Connecticut childhood had come at a price. Ever since his own parents, New Orleans Creoles, had moved to Brooklyn and begun to 'pass' in order to get work, Anatole had learned to…
I grew up on a family farm surrounded by larger vegetable and dairy operations that used migrant labor. From an early age, my siblings and I were acquainted with the children of these workers, children whom we shared a school desk with one day and were gone the next. On summer vacations, our parents hauled us around in a station wagon with a popup camper, which they parked in out-of-the-way hayfields and on mountainous plateaus, shunning, much to our chagrin, normal campgrounds, and swimming pools. Thus, I grew up exposed to different cultures and environments. My writing reflects my parents’ curiosity, love of books and travel, and devotion to the natural world.
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken in temporarily by Sadie’s aunt, a human rights activist who heads a cultural exchange program.
Stefan promptly runs afoul of local authority, but Sadie, intrigued by him and captivated by his story, has grown sympathetic to his cause and complicit in his pushback against prejudiced accusations. Their mutual attraction is stymied when Stefan’s older brother, Joachim, who stayed behind, becomes embroiled in the resistance, and Stefan is compelled to return to Canada. Sadie, concerned for his safety, impulsively follows on a trajectory doomed by cultural misunderstanding and oncoming winter.
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through the pitfalls of young adulthood. Hundreds of miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are forced off their land by multinational energy companies and flawed treaties. They are taken in temporarily by Sadie's aunt, a human rights activist who heads a cultural exchange program. Stefan, whose own father died in prison while on a hunger strike, promptly runs afoul of local authority, but Sadie, intrigued by him and captivated by his…
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