Memoirist Priscilla Gilman Untangles Love, Loss and Flawed Fathers in “The Critic’s Daughter”
Show Snapshot:
Does getting to midlife allow us to see and accept our parents in their full, flawed humanity? Memoirist Priscilla Gilman, author of The Critic’s Daughter, captures a loving and gimlet-eyed look at a brilliant, mercurial father and the struggle to reconcile love and a tangled relationship with an exquisitely complex parent. We cover the impact of divorce, loss, grief, forgiveness, and explore the universality of Priscilla’s singular story.
Transcript:
Katie Fogarty 0:03
Welcome to A Certain Age, a show for women who are unafraid to age out loud. Getting to midlife often means recalibrating, or reconsidering our relationships, our romantic relationships, our relationships with friends, family, our relationship with ourselves. My guest today is the author Priscilla Gilman, who writes with uncommon beauty and insight about her relationship with her father in her latest memoir, The Critic's Daughter. Growing up on the Upper West Side of New York City in the 1970s in a home filled with dazzling literary and artistic characters, Priscilla worshipped her brilliant adoring and meruciral father, the writer, theater critic and Yale School of Drama Professor, Richard Gilman. When Priscilla was 10, her mother, the renowned literary agent, Lynn Nesbit, abruptly announced she was ending the marriage. In The Critic's Daughter, Priscilla captures an incandescent forum for exploration and evolving understanding of her parents double lives, the impact of divorce, loss, grief, forgiveness, and the struggle to reconcile love with the challenges of living with an exquisitely complex parent. Welcome, Priscilla.
Priscilla Gilman 1:09
Thank you so much, what a beautiful introduction.
Katie Fogarty 1:13
Well, some of it came from the flap of your book. But -
Priscilla Gilman 1:17
You did your own spin on it, though. You really did. I was listening and I was like, wow, I love this.
Katie Fogarty 1:22
I did.
Priscilla Gilman 1:23
You could have a career writing flap copy, wow.
Katie Fogarty 1:25
Oh, my gosh, well, incandescent was my word, because that's how I felt. Like this book was just lit up and glowed with so many wonderful components. Your writing is stunning and you surface your father's own writing throughout the book, and the writing of others. And it really was such a pleasure to read. It also made me nostalgic for a slice of New York, because New York is almost a secondary character in the book, you know?
Priscilla Gilman 1:56
Oh Katie, it is. It is. Doing that research was so much fun, wow. The stores, the restaurants, the fashion, everything.
Katie Fogarty 2:07
Everything. And it's, you know, unique New York, like everything, evolves, changes, and sort of morphs. But I would love to just sort of open by asking you, you know, to share with our listeners, why did you decide to write about your relationship with your father, and really grapple with his legacy to you?
Priscilla Gilman 2:25
Yeah, so my first book, The Anti-Romantic Child, which is about parenting my older son, who is autistic. My father was a kind of, I guess, I would say, an incandescent character in that book, in the sense that I did about four to five pages on the kind of magical, incredibly loving, playful, creative father that he was and how it gave me all these ideals about what it was going to be like to have my own children, as a result of being parented by him. And readers really responded to my portrait of him. And they wanted to know more. And so I think writing that book sort of teed me up to do this book, where I delved more deeply into my relationship with my father. But I also think Katie you know, for this podcast, in particular, I'll say that I think we all at a certain point have to reckon with the legacy of our parents and how, especially as I was getting into my 40s, and my later 40s, I felt like I had never really fully grieved the loss of my father, who died when I was in my mid 30s, and was very sick from my late 20s on. And I felt like if I was really going to grow and evolve and age, with the greatest amount of wisdom and grace, I needed to look back at that most central relationship with my very complicated father, and grieve my father and come to terms with his meaning for me.
Katie Fogarty 3:50
Priscilla, you, you say at some point in the book, quote, 'my father insisted that the highest form of love demands rigorous honesty.' And you're, you're talking there, and he's talking there about his professional work. He's a critic of theatre, books, culture, you know, but you wrote this book as a daughter. And I'm curious about how you straddle the gap between taking this honest unflinching look at somebody so central in your life, and yet preserving the tenderness that you so clearly feel for him on every page of this book.
Priscilla Gilman 4:22
Oh, well, I'm so glad that you felt it because I felt it too. I really did channel the best of my father. And you're right, that he was writing about being a critic and he says, he quotes George Bernard Shaw, 'loyalty in a critic is corruption.' And I use that mantra, I say that I want to be loyal but I also want to be honest, and how can I be both loyal and honest to him? And to my mother, my parents had a very bitter split. How am I going to celebrate my father without in some way, criticizing my mother? And I really did feel, and I do feel, that the highest form of love is being able to see people in the round, in all their complexity, in all their complicated and flawed humanity and love them for all of it. And that's really what I was trying to do with this picture of my father.
Katie Fogarty 5:14
And define for me, you know, honesty too, because you know, we, you're bringing from it your, you know, your experience, your perspective, there are other people who share the story with you, your mother, as you referenced, you have siblings that appear in the book, you know, how, you know, you're bringing your own honest opinion, tell me a little bit more about this notion of honesty and how you grappled with it in this story.
Priscilla Gilman 5:45
Yeah, you know, it's, it's honest, in the sense that it's how I perceived and experience things on the one hand, absolutely. And I was really careful when I was talking about how the children, I have a brother from my father's first marriage, and my sister, who went to school with your sister, who is 14 months younger than I am, your amazing, wonderful sister, Jenny. Um, and I was very careful not to attribute opinions or perspectives to the kids as a unit, right, without checking with them. I did a lot of checking in, talking to my brother and my sister in email on the phone, you know, was it like this? Did we really think that they would never split up? Did you feel the same way that I did? So whenever I said anything that was about the children as a group that had been checked and vetted with them. I do think that the facts as I present them are honest. And I was very careful about that. I didn't say anything that anyone said or did that didn't actually happen. You know, and I think that might sound strange, you're writing a memoir, of course it should be true. But a lot of times that isn't true. People embroider, they change things around. It was very, very important to me. I mean I double and triple check dates, when the movie was playing on the Upper West Side that I talked about, making sure that I got it right, I did a ton of research for this book. So it wasn't just, I need to sit down and write my impressions, and my gauzy memories. It was very rigorously interrogated, the facts the perspectives of different people, checking in with everyone. That's why I think why it took such a long time to write.
Katie Fogarty 7:21
And how long, how long did it take you to write?
Priscilla Gilman 7:23
It took about seven years.
Katie Fogarty 7:25
Okay.
Priscilla Gilman 7:29
Now, I work full time doing all sorts of other things. And I was a mom, you know, raising two children, my older son autistic, and my younger son has special needs as well. So I was doing a lot of other things, this isn't full time work, I would go months without working on it. But it was from the conception to the submitting the final draft to my publisher was seven years.
Katie Fogarty 7:44
And your, your book actually uses a lot of, you know, material from your father's own writing. I am not sure if it's every chapter but you know, virtually every chapter has, you know, or throughout chapters -
Priscilla Gilman 7:58
Yeah.
Katie Fogarty 7:58
- you are using source material that comes directly from your father. And, you know, using it to, as kind of a filter, or as a jumping off point for part of your conversation. Your book is threaded with so many literary and cultural touchstones that you use to sort of assess and, and, you know, decode your relationship with your dad. And it really ranges. It's Mr. Darcy, it's the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, Johnny, the father in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which I love cause I love that book. And I would love for you to share with our listeners, why you chose to use these sort of literary and cultural figures to help you better understand and, and maybe, you know, ultimately accept your father as flawed and human, but also truly cement your affection for him.
Priscilla Gilman 8:44
Yes, oh thank you for asking about the characters. That was one of the most fun parts of the book. I originally had a list, Katie, of about 70 or 80 characters. And I ended, a lot of them ended up on the cutting room floor, I didn't end up actually writing them out in full and they ended up sort of, so in the beginning of the book, I have a little list of the characters, and it says, I think it ended up being 40 characters in search of my father. And that's a play on Pirandello's play Six Characters in Search of an Author, which was a play that my father taught the day that I came to visit Yale. My father was a very high, low, and middle type of person. You might think, Oh, he's just like august, eminent, illustrious theatre critic who writes about Brecht and Beckett and Pirandello, but he also watched The Jeffersons every day, watched Murder, She Wrote with me, loved sentimental musicals. I mean, I wouldn't even call them sentimental -moving, poignant musicals - right. And so, I think that and, you know, as I used to be, I was an English professor at Yale and at Vassar. And I did a lot of theater growing up, and I'm somebody who feels that we encounter versions of people in our real lives in art and in television, and in theater on the stage. And we can understand the people in our real lives a bit better by thinking about them in relationship to these characters. And we also come to the characters with our sense of people from our real lives. So I think it works both ways. But it definitely helped me to understand and represent my father better. For example, Johnny in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, that was one of the hardest parts to write Katie, because it's so, I mean, it's a killer, right? I mean, it's just so poignant. Johnny, you know, the charismatic, adoring father of Francie and, but he's an alcoholic, and he dies of TB and alcoholism at a young age. And so that sense of someone who's magical and gifted and creative and loving, but doomed in some way. And my father died of lung cancer, he was addicted to cigarettes, he was self medicating with cigarettes for depression. So Johnny allowed me to capture that sense of my father's playfulness and creativity and love for his daughter, but also my feeling from when I was a very little girl, Katie, that my father would die of addiction. And I just always had that feeling. Even though no one in the family had cancer, there are incredible genes on both sides in my family, I just always felt the compulsiveness of my father smoking and I feared that something terrible would happen to him the way Francie does with Johnny.
Katie Fogarty 11:25
First of all I wanted, that's such a heavy load to bear and that's sort of a theme in the book. When we come back from this break, I want to explore the fear that you had about your father's health and well being.
[AD BREAK]
Priscilla, we're back. You shared that you had fear when you were younger about your father's health. He, you know, was a chain smoker, he struggled with depression. In the book you reveal that there were bouts of self doubt, he had some reduced economic circumstances after your parents' divorce, you know, when economics change, and that you worried about him. And you worried about his mental wellbeing and his overall health. It's a through line of the book, you just shared that it was a major theme in your life. I'm curious, now that he's gone has this absence of the fear around his health and wellbeing reshaped your life in any way?
Priscilla Gilman 13:33
Oh, that's a fantastic question, Katie. I love that. What a great question. Um, yeah, you know, and I feared for his mental stability, you know, I write in the book that shortly after my mother announced that she wanted to split from my father, and he did not want it, he was absolutely devastated. He was very in love with my mother, and did not want to lose the family and his daily life. He told me that if it weren't for me and my sister, he might kill himself. So I feared about that as well. And I grew up from a very young age feeling that it was my responsibility and my duty really to buoy him, to cheer him up, to be in a sense his Prozac, to keep him from smoking or drinking too much. Although that was sort of futile. All of us kids tried to stop him and he would get very angry at us when we would try to get him to quit. You know that's such a great question that you're asking because I think, and if you remember I write in the later part of the book about how after he died I had a series of, I wouldn't describe them necessarily as relationships but, entanglements, attachments to, and a few relationships with men who struggled with depression, substance abuse, anger, insecurity, all these things. So in a way, it's very sad. You would think Oh, my father is gone, it's devastating, I'm gonna mourn him. But now I don't have that burden of that worry. But I actually knowingly took on that burden of worry with a series of men in my life. Because in a way, that's what I had been trained to think that love was, right, was me being the person who, when I walked into a room, that person would feel better. And that person would say to me, Oh, if it weren't for you, you know, I would be so worried and you cheer me up, and you do this. And that felt good, because I missed being able to be that for my father. And I felt that I had not been able to save my father but maybe I could save some of these other people.
Katie Fogarty 15:44
That is so powerful and being somebody's Prozac is such a burden.
Priscilla Gilman 15:52
Yeah.
Katie Fogarty 15:52
And I hear what you're saying about how you were sort of trained to look for love in a familiar way, you know, and that you felt that you could make a difference for somebody and that you could, you could buoy them up in ways. And I know a little bit, you talk in the book about doing some therapy. Was that what allowed you, and, or is it still an evolution? You know, are you still working on, on shifting how you see romance and support and how you want to be in the world now that you don't have to be this for your dad? Is it, is it getting easier? Or is it still an evolution? And by the way, it's like, I'm only 53, like, I hope I'm still growing and changing and evolving. So you may not be through the other side yet, but I'm just curious about, you know, has it, has the process of writing this book and sort of seeing this so clearly for yourself made a difference?
Priscilla Gilman 16:44
Yes. Absolutely. Um, Katie, you are, I so feel what you're asking. And I just so appreciate it. I think with everything in life, we're always evolving, we're never going to get to the other side and be completely healed, fixed, cured, etc. And we wouldn't want to, right. But I certainly do feel that when I started working on the book, I extricated from a relationship that was very dysfunctional in the way that I just described. And it was almost like, as soon as I started looking at my relationship with my father in a lot of depth, and, you know, I've been in therapy most of my adult life off and on. But there was a certain perspective that writing about it, and going back into it in detail, enabled me to see I can't be in this relationship anymore. And since then, I'm not, I'm not dating anyone now, I haven't been in a connection or an attachment like that in about six or seven years. So I think I'm doing a lot better. And I would say that, when I date people, if, if at the beginning of it, I sort of sense, like something that used to be seductive to me, like someone saying, oh, you know, I used to drink a lot but now that I've met you, or I'm starting to date you, I'm not going to need to drink anymore. And that would make me feel a little worried, but also sort of good. Now, if someone said that, I'd be like, lovely dinner, have a nice life. You know what I mean?
Katie Fogarty 18:12
That sounds like a very positive evolution. Priscilla, I love something that you shared a little bit earlier, which is that we all have different versions of ourselves, you know, that there is sort of evolution. And as I just said, like, I am not the person I was a few years ago, and I don't anticipate, you know, we are constantly evolving. And I'm wondering a little bit about this sort of understanding of our parents, and is this, is this a life's work, you know, and I'm thinking specifically now about your mom, because you shared in the book at different points, and when you were young, and you alluded to this as well, that you were enchanted by your father, he was a magic maker, he was somebody that had so much joy in life, joie de vivre, and he created this for you and your siblings. But you also at a young age sort of perceived his power. You saw how he was in the world and, there was sort of deference and excitement around you know, people would come up to you in the Broadway theater when they saw him.
Priscilla Gilman 19:08
Yes.
Katie Fogarty 19:08
And when your parents' marriage ended, you are at the age where you were surprised that your mom didn't maybe have the same level of enchantment. And in the book that, you share at some point, that you realize that she must have also, it was hard for her as an adult, maybe -
Priscilla Gilman 19:26
Yes, yeah.
Katie Fogarty 19:26
- to manage his depression and struggle. And so, you know, is it, can we ever truly understand our parents, because we are, the distance that we have from them, everything changes. I don't know, I'm not even asking a very good question. So I'm hoping -
Priscilla Gilman 19:42
Oh, you are.
Katie Fogarty 19:42
I'm hoping you're gonna pick the ball up and run with it, Priscilla.
Priscilla Gilman 19:48
I am, I am. I'm gonna do it, Katie.
Katie Fogarty 19:50
Good.
Priscilla Gilman 19:51
So yeah, I mean, I think it's, I would never really want to ever get to a point where I say I get my father, I've mastered him, I understand him completely, I've pinned him down, labeled him. You remember how I talk in the book about how he was very resistant to the idea of categorizing people or works of art, labeling them, reducing them to one thing or another. And I certainly wanted even as I was depicting him and representing him and attempting to capture him on the page for people who didn't know him, also constantly gesturing towards the aspects of him that exceed my ability to represent them. Right? This kind of, his own memoir was called Faith, Sex, Mystery. Wow, what a title. And it came out when I was in high school, no less. Faith, sex mystery, right. And mystery was extremely important to him. So I wouldn't want to, I say at one point, ever resolve my father into one thing or another or solve the mystery of my father. I want that sort of, you remember, my book is structured in terms of acts. I wanted to sort of nod to theatricality and I have five acts, with a prologue, and then I have an epilogue. And the epigraph to the epilogue is a line from my father, 'Something mysterious spills over.' And that's from his memoir. And, you know, I want to do that with my dad. And certainly, in terms of my mom, you know, my relationship with my, I, part of what I do in the book is show sort of the evolution of my understanding of my mom. And, you know, realizing how hard it was for her. And I think even as a little girl, part of, even before my parents split up, I sensed that my mother didn't love my father the way I did, that she wasn't able to make him feel as happy as I was. And so I almost, it wasn't just that I was protecting my father, I was protecting my mother, by going in and taking care of him. Because I was like, Oh, my gosh, I can see that, you know, she has to work really hard and she doesn't really want to deal with him, his kind of down mood right now. So I'll go in, and I'll take care of him, and I'll make it okay for him, right. So, yeah, and my, my mom, you know, over the course of the book, I find out all of this stuff about why she married my father, and how she had been heartbroken before she married my father. And I think, coming to understand my mother's choices, and my mother's struggle, and my mother's suffering her marriage to my father, she was never in love with my father. And, you know, there was one review that was so odd, and it was talking about how it was so terrible that my mother had told me that she was never in love with my father. And I personally, I was, that was helpful information for me. In other words, I didn't think, Oh, my God, this is so awful that, I knew my mother wasn't in love with my father, than I knew her. But it was helpful for me to understand, my mother is a human being. She's not just my mother, she's a human being in the world with her own history of heartbreak and loss, she'd had her heart broken before she met my father. And it gave me a greater compassion for her, and understanding of what happened with my father in their marriage.
Katie Fogarty 23:12
That makes so much sense to me. And I disagree with that review, or whoever said that you shouldn't have been told. I mean I think that there, I feel that kids are so smart, and intuit so many things that, you know, we're so wise at such a young age, and especially about the dynamics that occur in our own home. And my own parents separated when I, my daughter is 22, when she was...1. And I remember my mom saying, this is gonna come as a big surprise but we're separating. And I'm like, I'm surprised that you think I'm surprised, you know. That's the only surprise here. And I love my mother and, you know, and I think that they, my parents really centered their children in, as the sort of the core of the family and they were together to, you know, in their mind to, to, you know, be the nucleus for us.
Priscilla Gilman 23:27
Yes.
Katie Fogarty 23:27
But, you know, and so maybe they thought that they were keeping this from us, that that was sort of the reason they're together and kids are very, very knowing. And we're onto things. And that's why, to me, it was so interesting, your book is very specifically about your personal father-daughter relationship and, and your very unique father. But as I said, when I was reading it, it made me think about my own parents and, and I think that's really the hallmark of such a powerful, well-told story. That the reader can see themselves in the pages, even if the book is ostensibly about something else entirely. And -
Priscilla Gilman 25:27
Yeah.
Katie Fogarty 24:41
I found myself nodding throughout and just having insights based on just my own circumstances, even though my life is different than yours. And I'm wondering for a listener right now, who has not yet read the book - and I'm gonna really encourage you if you're, if you like amazing writing, if you want to, it's really like, it's sort of like a romp through like, the literary world of America, this book is so many things, it's a powerful memoir about family, it's a great excavation of a snapshot of New York's history - but for a listener right now, who is thinking, so much of what Priscilla said is making me think about my own family and my sort of evolution of the understanding of my relationship, what might be a prompt or an idea you could offer to a listener now that might help them you know, better reckon with their own legacy?
Priscilla Gilman 25:31
I think, I'm so, everything you said is so gratifying, Katie, because that's exactly what I was hoping to do with the book, is that I really do think my father's obviously a very idiosyncratic, you know, the more I researched his life and read about him, wow. I mean, he's, you know, he ends up married to a Japanese woman and living in Kyoto from being a first generation Brooklyn immigrant in Flatbush. I mean, it's fascinating. But it really is a universal story in the sense that all of us at some point in our lives have to reckon with the fact that our parents are not, you know, we have them on a pedestal, or we see them as all powerful, and we see them only in their really, in terms of their relationship to us. Right, they are our parents. And that's how we relate to them. Learning to see your parent as a complicated human with his or her own history, his or her own family that they grew up in, right, his or her own losses, sufferings, struggles, triumphs, all of those things, I think really can bring peace. And whether you have a fraught relationship with a parent, or, you know, an incredibly adoring one when you're little, that relationship is continually going to evolve. And I think it shaped me in so many ways in terms of my career choices, my romantic choices, how I was as a parent to my own children. And I can't emphasize enough how helpful looking at that relationship was for me in terms of growing in all those areas.
Katie Fogarty 27:00
This is such a great segue into something that I wanted to ask you about. I mean, I know you, you share that you were an academic, that you taught at Yale and Vassar, you have a PhD, but you did at some point, make a major pivot in your career. And, you know, switch lanes, you're doing different work now, and you're obviously a writer, you've written two memoirs to date, and there's probably more in you. What, you know, walk us through a little bit about your decision to leave academia, you know, what role if any, did your relationship with your father play in that or not? And what helped you say, Yes, I'm ready to make this leap, because leaping is scary.
Priscilla Gilman 27:40
Leaping is scary and I've leaped a lot, actually, Katie. So I, I went into, I wanted to be an actress and a singer when I was young, and or a writer. Those were the things I wanted to do. And my parents, my mom, literary agent for everybody from Toni Morrison, to Joan Didion, to Michael Crichton, Anne Rice, right, all the - and I grew up with these people, and they were my parents' close friends - and my dad taught actors at Yale Drama School. And they were like, No, you're not doing those things. And I was very dutiful. And it was one of the few things that they agreed on. And in giving up acting and singing when I went to Yale as an undergraduate, because I had done some like off Broadway stuff when I was a little kid and I was in a lot of musical theater when I was in high school, I could please both of my parents, and that was a rare thing. And going into a PhD program straight out of undergraduate, they were both over the moon about that. And it was one of the few things that I would hear them discussing in a reasonably polite supportive tone of voice with each other. And I think I felt at that time that I needed a career that was going to enable me to be more involved with my two children. My younger son is dyslexic and dysgraphic. And Benjamin, my older son, is autistic. And they were both in special education, Benj all the way through high school and James through to high school. And I went to work at my mother's literary agency and I worked there for five years as an agent, and I really liked a lot of it. I liked editing people's work. I liked being an advocate for literary fiction and for meaningful nonfiction that I found a kinship with. The first book that I represented was actually a book by Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who's now an eminent classic scholar of Princeton. And it was a memoir called Undocumented. He was an illegal alien from the from the Dominican Republic. And the second book was called Dreams From the Monster Factory, by a woman who runs a restorative justice program in the prisons of San Francisco. So I really loved that and it was just a very different way of thinking about writing and not writing for 10 people, right, but writing in academia. And then my first book came out and when my book came out, which was sold while I was an agent by my friend who was working as an agent on my mother's agency, I just, this whole new world opened up to me of being an advocate. So I've done tons of speaking about educatation, at schools and all over at conferences, about autism and education and special education and the arts. And I became a book critic, and I started running book groups and I teach book groups in New York City, and I teach literature classes for Yale Alumni College, and I'm a book critic for The Boston Globe, I do speaking, and then I got certified as a meditation teacher, Katie. So you know, it's all about continually evolving, as my mother would say, you know, adding, you know, arrows to the quiver. Um, just having a rich, interesting life where I've got, I'm doing a different thing every day. And yes, I hopefully have many more books in me, although it's hard to fit in time for writing my own work when I'm doing so much teaching. But I will, I will, and I want to write children's books one day too.
Katie Fogarty 30:55
I love this portfolio career that you've created for yourself, because, you know, we can often, what I remember coming out of college, it was an era where people got slotted in a lane, you know.
Priscilla Gilman 31:06
Yes.
Katie Fogarty 31:07
You, you were doing one thing, and it was very hard to switch lanes. And a big theme of this show is that this is what we get to do in midlife, you know, we get to the point where we have so much different, you know, experience and lived wisdom and interests that change and morph and I love that you're exploring them in all these different ways. I would love to see you write a children's book.
Priscilla Gilman 31:30
Oh, yay, I will do it. I will do it one day.
Katie Fogarty 31:34
I have young nieces and nephews in my, in my family. And we just have boxes and boxes and boxes of books that we've bought through the years for our three children. So this is actually my last question for you that I had before we move into our speed lane. And because we're talking about children, this seems like a good transition. I know you have two kids of your own. If one of them were to write a memoir about you one day, you know, and what do you think that they might share? Especially if they were to read The Critic's Daughter and see your, you know, sort of excavation about love and identity and parenting and forgiveness? You know, how do you think the work that you've been doing in the latter part of your life to date would shape what they might write about?
Priscilla Gilman 32:22
Oh, someone asked me this question actually. I'd never been asked this question before an event I did in Connecticut this past weekend, and my younger son was in the audience, and he looked absolutely aghast and waved his arms in the air like no, I'm never gonna do that. And my older son who is my autistic son who graduated from Vassar top of his class and is going to go and get a PhD in computer science and is a musician, would never ever do it either. So it's really, I don't, neither of my kids will ever do it, I can be sure if that. My niece might do it, my niece is more of a writer type. But I think that they would, if anyone, if any of them ever did it you know there's so much material my gosh, for them to use. Talk about my dad threading, you know threading my dad's work through my book. My dad only wrote one memoir, I've written so many memoir pieces in addition to my books. So I, but I really, I you know, the answer really, is that neither of my kids would ever. I am so certain of like, more certain of that than almost anything I'm certain of.
Katie Fogarty 33:29
I love this image of your son waving his hands, like in protest, like no, no, don't do it mom. I'm not doing that, mom. It's hysterical. But you know, when we look at, we look at our own children and you know, I've made conscious choices about the way I raise my children that are in juxtaposition to the way I was raised. You know, Priscilla, you and I both went to small, you know, private girls schools in Manhattan which are very expensive, you know. I, my husband and I deliberately moved ourselves out of that kind of rarefied space because one, it was very, you know, sort of unaffordable and we wanted to choose to have more freedom and just sort of more of expansive worldview. So we, you know, we make choices and we, I've given our kids a lot of running room and a lot of freedom to sort of explore the world. My daughter did a gap year after, before college and is now, she goes to university abroad in Scotland, and she's you know, moving to Australia when she graduates to work.
Priscilla Gilman 34:25
Katie, I love this. Katie, gap years are very important. Both of my kids did gap years before they started college.
Katie Fogarty 34:31
Yeah, it's so, it's so, it was wonderful for her, it was the right choice. I don't know if, my second didn't do it and I don't know about my third but, you know, I think that, you know, my father who I love and adore endlessly, you know, he is uncomfortable with adventure, you know. And we definitely did not encourage that. So sometimes we, we choose to make choices that are in direct contrast to how our experiences are. So I'm always just sort of curious, you know, as to you know, whether or not, you know, what your children might think about your own work and etc. But we're gonna end with a visual of your son waving his hands going 'Not for me mom, not for me mom.' This has been such a treat Priscilla, I could talk to you all day long. We're going to -
Priscilla Gilman 35:15
Oh, Katie, wonderful.
Katie Fogarty 35:16
- wrap with our speed round though, because our time does and which is sad. But for people who want more of Priscilla's beautiful thinking and writing, and just this kind of interesting excavation and also just a wonderful, wonderful snapshot of New York during a particular slice in history, The Critic's Daughter is something that you should be adding to cart. You can do it wherever you find books, I like bookshop.org which is a online, you know, sort of collection of independent bookstores. But wherever you buy it, make sure that you write a review because I know reviews matter.
Priscilla Gilman 35:50
They do.
Katie Fogarty 35:50
Alright, that's my, that's my sales pitch. But we're moving into our quick speed round.
Priscilla Gilman 35:56
Yay! I'm excited.
Katie Fogarty 35:58
One or two word answers.
Priscilla Gilman 35:59
Okay.
Katie Fogarty 36:01
Writing The Critic's Daughter was:
Priscilla Gilman 36:04
Grueling.
Katie Fogarty 36:05
Grueling. We like honest answers. How might your father review this book?
Priscilla Gilman 36:13
Oh, rhapsodically.
Katie Fogarty 36:15
Nice. A writer that you think gets the complex parent-child relationship right:
Priscilla Gilman 36:22
Danny Shapiro.
Katie Fogarty 36:24
Nice. Okay, a favorite memoir that you've read recently? I'm sure you have many.
Priscilla Gilman 36:28
Favorite memoir that I've read recently? Wow, so hard. Ah, Will Schwalbe's We Should Not be Friends.
Katie Fogarty 36:38
Oh, you are the second person to recommend that to me recently. So that is going in the shownotes and I am adding to cart. Or, though, my mother's a librarian so I could also check it out of my local library. Something that you let go of in midlife:
Priscilla Gilman 36:58
That's a hard one. Something that I let go of? Um, my, my attachment to difficult men? Let's just say that.
Katie Fogarty 37:10
I love it. I love it. Okay, finally, your one word answer to complete the sentence, as I age I feel:
Priscilla Gilman 37:18
Wise.
Katie Fogarty 37:19
Nice. Thank you, Priscilla. This has been so incredibly fun. Before we say goodbye though, how can our listeners find you, your writing, and your books?
Speaker 1 37:27
My website is my name, Priscillagilman.com. One L in Gilman. I'm on Instagram @priscillagilman, Twitter, I was the first Priscilla Gilman to get on all these places so it's pretty easy. Facebook, it's Priscilla Gilman Author. And yeah, I'm on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
Katie Fogarty 37:44
Love it. All right. Thank you, Priscilla. This wraps A Certain Age, a show for women who are aging without apology. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to write an Apple Podcast review. I see and appreciate you. Reviews really do matter since they help other women find the show. Special thanks to Michael Mancini who composed and produced our theme music. See you next time and until then, age boldly beauties.