Can we ever really know our parents? That’s the project to which Priscilla Gilman has devoted herself in her compassionate, bracingly candid memoir, THE CRITIC’S DAUGHTER. In her case the task is a formidable one, reflecting on life with her father --- noted drama critic and teacher Richard Gilman. He was a complex man, and Priscilla has honored him with a nuanced portrait that’s both deeply affectionate and profoundly revealing.

Gilman --- who wrote widely for publications that included Commonweal, Newsweek and The Nation, and taught at the Yale School of Drama for some 30 years --- died in 2006 at age 83. But it wasn’t until 2015 that Priscilla, the elder of two daughters from his marriage to prominent literary agent Lynn Nesbit, realized, as she was moved to tears during a performance of “The King and I,” that “I had never been allowed --- and in some ways had never allowed myself --- to truly grieve my father or reckon with his legacy to me. And now I knew I must.”

In truth, as she reveals him, there were two Richard Gilmans. One was the often-unsparing man of letters and champion of avant-garde theater “whose elegant, contentious voice resonated through four decades in American letters, earning him both admirers and enemies of partisan fierceness,” as the New York Times wrote in his obituary. She writes that he was “famous for his ruthless, implacable judgments: No pity, no sympathy, no partiality at all.”

"In capturing the essence of its challenging subject, THE CRITIC’S DAUGHTER is a rare combination of honesty, warmheartedness and exquisite writing.... Richard Gilman would be proud of the eloquence and grace with which [Priscilla] has done it."

The other was the attentive, playful father who introduced his daughters to the pleasures of classic Broadway musicals (and Priscilla to the mixed blessing of New York Giants football fandom) and could produce a spot-on version of the “Sesame Street” character Super Grover, but also was prone to periods of depression and anger. Life with father could be riotously funny one moment and trying the next. This book is a fully rounded portrayal of what one might consider the public and private Gilman, someone who seemed to don the armor of the fearsome critic to conceal the tenderhearted and often needy human being beneath it.

The tension between these two personalities was at the heart of the demise of the Gilman-Nesbit marriage. To all appearances, theirs was a glittering, successful pairing in the world of New York culture of the 1970s. They counted among their close friends writers like Bernard Malamud, Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison, Joan Didion and her husband, John Dunne, and were part of the active social life in their circle.

Married in 1966, they separated in 1980, when Priscilla was 10, after Nesbit abruptly decided to end their union. Their bitter fight over financial issues (Nesbit had money, and Gilman badly needed it) dragged on for nine years. In his 1986 memoir, FAITH, SEX, MYSTERY --- one of his seven books --- in addition to describing his conversion from Judaism to Catholicism, which he abandoned after only eight years, Gilman details some of the marital transgressions, including multiple affairs (some with his Yale students), that contributed to Nesbit’s action, as well as describing his unusual sexual proclivities. But above all, it seems, she had grown weary of supporting a man who, for all the attention he showered on his daughters (and a son from his first marriage), she’d never truly loved. She viewed him as dependent on her success and an impediment to advancing the burgeoning literary career to which she single-mindedly devoted her energy.

Out of the divorce, as Priscilla Gilman describes it, the task of sustaining her father fell to her, a young girl who did her best --- and largely succeeded --- in carrying it off. In heartrending scenes, she describes the visits that she and her sister, Claire, would pay to her father in one dreary sublet after another on the Upper West Side after he was banished from the family apartment and a country home in Weston, Connecticut, that had been the scene of countless joyful weekend and holiday visits.

At one point Gilman told Priscilla and Claire that if it were not for them, he would consider killing himself. Priscilla never took that as an idle comment. “My father’s survival was my responsibility,” she writes. “And I would do any and everything in my power, use every ounce of my energy and ingenuity and love, to make sure he survived.”

But her unstinting support came at a considerable price that she only began to reckon with years later, after she entered college at Yale, pursued a PhD in English literature that she eventually abandoned, married (later divorcing, though much more amicably than her parents), and gave birth to two sons. The book provides an excruciating textbook on the damage that an acrimonious divorce can inflict on innocent children. In that regard it’s no coincidence that the film Kramer vs. Kramer, whose co-star Meryl Streep had been a student of Gilman’s at Yale, became for her “a kind of sacred text that I studied, immersed myself in, for solace, catharsis, wisdom, validation.”

After his divorce was finalized, as he approached his 70th birthday, Gilman improbably found the love of his life, Yasuko Shiojiri, an English professor who served as his guide on a teaching trip to Japan. They overcame significant obstacles to marry in 1992, and Gilman spent a good portion of his final years with his soul mate in their apartment in Kyoto, especially after he received a terminal cancer diagnosis in 1997 that he somehow defied for nine years.

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.