*Left, both:* The literary and theater critic Richard Gilman at work; *right,* at home with his daughters, Claire, left, and Priscilla, author of a new memoir about her father.

Growing Up Gilman

By Joanne Kaufman

The Critic’s Daughter: A Memoir by Priscilla Gilman

The bright, particular star of Priscilla Gilman’s very first memory was her father, the theater and literary critic Richard Gilman. It was a summer night in the early 1970s, and three-year-old Priscilla was jolted awake by terrifying claps of thunder. Cue Daddy.

“Framed by the window, the scene before us is like a little theater,” Gilman writes in her affecting if often cheerless memoir-biography The Critic’s Daughter. “With one arm wrapped around me, the other gesturing skyward, my father narrates what we’re seeing and hearing. ‘Look at the trees!’ he exclaims as the wind whips its branches. ‘And … thunder!’”