The Critic’s Daughter is an exquisitely rendered portrait of a unique father-daughter relationship and a moving revelation of family and identity. Author Priscilla Gilman joins to talk about her memoir, a candid account of loss and grief, forgiveness, and love.
Priscilla Gilman:
I am haunted by my father. He has made me the thinker, writer, parent, human that I am. Brought me to my knees, led me into dangerous romantic entanglements. Buoyed me during times of crisis. Informed my reading and writing and parenting in ways I am only now realizing. I am both drawn to and wary of places, people, works of art that will touch that sore spot in me. Unleash that tide of sadness.
My father insisted that the highest form of love demands rigorous honesty. He never whitewashed, never tiptoed around, never equivocated or resorted to euphemism when giving his opinion, or rendering his judgments. Can I attain that level of truth telling and rigor in my own reflection on my father? Can I see him clearly, but with compassion? How can I be at once truthful and loyal, both to him and to my mother, who bitterly divorced him and remained hardened against him until his death?
Debbie Millman:
Priscilla Gilman grew up in 1970s Manhattan in an apartment filled with dazzling literary luminaries. She adored her brilliant father, the writer, critic, and professor, Richard Gilman. When Priscilla was 10 years old, her mother, the renowned literary agent, Lynn Nesbit, decided to end their marriage. This was followed by a cascade of unexpected revelations that fundamentally changed Priscilla’s perception of her father and her family.
Her recent memoir, The Critic’s Daughter, is all about what it means to be the child of a demanding parent, and is a candid account of loss and grief, forgiveness, and love. Priscilla Gilman, welcome to Design Matters.
Priscilla Gilman:
Debbie. Oh, thank you for that beautiful introduction. It is such a joy to be here. I’m so excited. Thank you for having me.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Thank you. Priscilla, in The Critic’s Daughter, you recount how when you were a little girl, you were read bedtime stories from your Aunt Anne, your Uncle Bern, and your Aunt Toni. Can you share a bit more about them and what made this storytelling so special?
Priscilla Gilman:
So Aunt Ann is Ann Beattie, still my mother’s client and dear friend. Uncle Bern, who is Bernard Malamud, who was one of my father’s closest friends and preceded my father as the President of PEN America actually. Bern handed it over to my father. And Aunt Toni, my mother’s client. My mother had worked with her when Toni was an editor, and then Toni gave her the bluest eye and she sold it, and it came out the year that I was born. And my mother was her agent for her first five books through Beloved. And Toni was a second mom to me, a godmother figure. We called her Aunt Toni.
All three of these characters, two of them sadly gone, one of them still on this earth, were magical tutelary spirits of my childhood. And it didn’t seem special to me, it just seemed like these were the people that walked through the apartment door, or came to the house in Connecticut, or we went to their houses. And they were just endless founts of fascinating tales and stories, and they loved me and my sister, Claire, dearly, and they would always indulge us when we asked for more.
Debbie Millman:
Other frequent visitors were Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Jerzy Kosiński. And I understand that Jerzy Kosiński greeted your many stuffed animals with exclamations of delight, and I love that about him.
Priscilla Gilman:
He did. He did. Debbie, one of the things that I realized in going back and recalling all of this about my childhood and then researching a little bit more about who these luminaries actually were in the world, was realizing the discrepancy between a lot of these peoples’ public persona, and what they were like when they were with me and my sister.
And Jerzy Kosiński, he had a mad cap energy and I just remember feeling so happy that I could thrill him and bring a smile to his face. And Susan Sontag was always very kind and very approving of all the terrible drawings that I showed her that I had done. She was not at all the austere, rigorous critic that strode through the world at that time. To me, she was just this cool looking lady, who really liked to look at our drawings and gave us good feedback on them.
Debbie Millman:
I also understand that there was a time when another one of the visitors to the apartment, Martha Stewart, got into a heated debate with your mother. And you don’t actually talk about what the debate was about in your book, and I’m dying to know.
Priscilla Gilman:
No, that debate, I actually found that story in a memoir by Jill Robinson, the writer, and she was writing about, we all hung out in Weston and Westport Connecticut in the ’70s. My parents had a country house there and Martha catered my parents’ parties. And she used to sell her baked goods at this amazing market called Hay Day.
So that’s how I grew up, like this beautiful blonde woman who made incredible baked goods that my sister and I craved. And we were like, “Let’s go buy some of Martha’s baked goods.” I believe that particular debate was about the rising real estate prices in the area, and how much they were going to go up and when it was the right time to sell in Weston or Westport.
Debbie Millman:
I was hoping it would be something about sourdough starters or the…
Priscilla Gilman:
I know, I wish it had been. I wish it had been. My mother was actually surprisingly, Debbie, my mother is a really, really good cook. She doesn’t cook anymore, but in the ’70s when she was married to my dad, she would cook after coming home from ICM where she was the Senior Vice President of the Literary Division, representing everybody from Tom Wolfe, to Michael Crichton, and Anne Rice, all the people that you’ve already mentioned. But she cooked too. She really wanted to have it all and do it all. My poor mom, she exhausted herself though.
Debbie Millman:
Well, your dad, Richard Gilman, he was an author. He was a drama critic for The Nation, for Newsweek, and many other publications. He was the author of five books. He also wrote for the New York Times. He taught at Yale School of Drama for three decades. As you mentioned, he was the President of PEN America. And your mom, Liz Nesbit came to, I love this. She came to New York from a tiny town in Illinois. She got a job as an editorial apprentice at Lady’s Home Journal. Then a $75 a week job as the assistant to literary agent Sterling Lord.
She rose through the ranks to become a literary agent of epic proportions, as we’ve discussed. She’s actually considered one of the most successful literary agents in the world. You share many of the details and more in your memoir, The Critic’s Daughter, which was released last year and just came out in paperback. What made you decide to write this book?
Priscilla Gilman:
My literary agent, Tina Bennett, who was my close friend in Yale grad school, dropped out after a year, went to talk to my mom about working in publishing, and my mom and Mort Janklow hired her. She became a big agent. She’s a character in both of my memoirs. She’s one of my best friends as well as my agent. Had always wanted me to write a book about the intellectual milieu of the 1970s in New York City.
And she knew my father. Obviously she came to my wedding. She’s the agent in the book who reads my father’s writing about Japan and tries to help him. She was like, “You need to write about this generation of critics. You need to write about Stanley Kauffmann, and Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, and Anatole Broyard,” all very close friends of my father’s, “And what criticism meant to them.”
And over time it evolved into something far more personal, as you know, Debbie, and became a book about the break-down of my parents’ marriage, the effects of their split on me, and my very charged, fraught, but deeply loving relationship with my father. And in that transition, there was a lot of fear involved in moving from a more, I wouldn’t say academic, but more intellectual take on this cohort, and making it a more raw, personal memoir.
But she helped me every step of the way encouraging me to do that. And I think having published a prior memoir about my experience parenting my son, who has later got an autism diagnosis in the book, we don’t use the word autism, because he didn’t have the diagnosis then. I was an academic. I got a PhD in English and American Literature. I was an English professor. I didn’t put myself into my work. I wrote objective analyses of literature.
So it was a big transition. But I think my father inspired me, Debbie, because my father wrote a very raw, personal memoir after having written books about modern drama, the word decadence. I love that book too, you should check that out. All about the word decadence. And for his fifth book, he wrote an incredibly honest, revelatory, vulnerable memoir.
And I think that doing that, he grew more as a man and finally came to terms with a lot of shame and guilt that he’d been carrying around. And met the love of his life six months after he published that book, and I don’t think that’s an accident. So he was my lodestar in making that transition and writing something that was so vulnerable.
Debbie Millman:
I believe you’re talking about your father’s memoir, Faith, Sex, Mystery. Is that correct?
Priscilla Gilman:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Priscilla Gilman:
What a title, Debbie. What a title.
Debbie Millman:
Right. In that book, he starts with a quote from George Bernanos from his book, Diary of a Country Priest. And he states, “When writing about oneself, one should show no mercy.” How hard was it for you to show yourself no mercy as you were writing, or did you fly in the face of that advice?
Priscilla Gilman:
Wow, Debbie. What a fantastic question. I forgot about that Bernanos quote. Mercy is a big theme in my memoir. I extend mercy to my parents by the end of the book, and it’s one of the big themes of my book. How do I write honestly and not sugarcoat and be true to the spirit of my father as a rigorous, truth-telling critic, but yet I do want to show mercy and I do want to be forgiving.
So I think that perhaps I did revise my father’s ethos in my own memoir. And I believe by the end, my father in his own memoir demonstrates mercy towards himself too. Debbie, but in his memoir, he comes clean, to use his phrase, about his complicated sexual makeup. That’s part of the cascade of revelations you started out by saying that I receive when I’m 10 about my father. That he has what we would now call BDSM tendencies. He doesn’t refer to them that way in the book.
Debbie Millman:
No.
Priscilla Gilman:
He even calls them perversions in his own book.
Debbie Millman:
I know. And I wanted to say, you know what? I understand when this book came out, how that might’ve seemed that way.
Priscilla Gilman:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
But if this book came out now, people would be like, “Okay, cool.” It broke my heart…
Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, yes.
Debbie Millman:
… when I read that he considered these perversions, when he has so much shame about it. Which now would just mean he has some kinky fun in bed.
Priscilla Gilman:
Exactly. Debbie, Debbie, I could not agree with you more. I kept thinking to myself as I was working through this, we would call this so mild today, even if it was not mild, even if it was far over on the BDSM spectrum. If you’re a good person, you would accept him and you would embrace him and you would say, “This is who you are.” And there’s a million websites you can go and find willing adults who will happily do everything that you would like them to do with you, no shame. Right.
Debbie Millman:
I’d be like, “Who’s not into that now?”
Priscilla Gilman:
Exactly. Exactly, Debbie. And I kept thinking, and I say towards the end of my book, it broke my heart over and over and over again as I researched my father’s life and read his work, and thought about all this guilt and shame that he carried around. Not only about his sexuality, he was probably bisexual too. I find out later that he had had sex with men, that he had cheated in his marriages, because his wives didn’t want to do what he wanted them to do.
And he had all the shame also about converting to Catholicism from Judaism and not telling his parents, and struggling with writer’s block and depression. And I just wrote, “It broke my heart in that it felt on so many levels and in so many ways, like my father lived too soon.” And I wish every day that my father were still alive to give his blessing to our trans children, to people who have complicated sexual makeups and have shame about them.
And I think one of the greatest things, he smoked as a form of self-medication for depression. He died of lung cancer, and it just was so wrenching to me to realize all of these ways in which he contended with so much shame from his conservative parents. And I wanted to belatedly or posthumously, bestow a blessing on him and say, “Daddy, I do understand, and I accept you in all of your messy humanity, and all your contradictions, and all your complexity. And I wish that I had been able to say these things to you while you were alive.”
Debbie Millman:
Well, let’s talk about his dedication in the book, “For my daughters, Claire and Priscilla, who will understand some of this book now and the rest of it in time.” So he knew. He knew. He knew.
Priscilla Gilman:
Thank you. That makes me teary when you say that, but yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Well, you described your father as a certain kind of New Yorker in the 1970s. Liberal, passionate, intellectual, clad in denim shirts, bell-bottomed jeans or corduroys with wild, curly hair. And then you go on to state that he loved classic New York deli food, pastrami, pickles, corned beef sandwiches, Chinese takeout. He shopped at Zabar’s and the local mom and pop stores in your Upper West Side neighborhood.
So Priscilla, I don’t know if you know this about me, but I grew up in the 1970s New York City as well. And though my father was a pharmacist who worked at City Drug adjacent to Carnegie Hall…
Priscilla Gilman:
What?
Debbie Millman:
… you could be describing my dad as well. And it was somewhat freaky because he wore the same. He was definitely a liberal Jew. I actually suspect now, and I’ve tried to find more information from my family, but have been unable to. But I suspect that he was bisexual as well. He was into Bette Midler and was going to the baths with his friend, Harvey. They lived together in Greenwich Village right across the street from Horatio Street. He was really, really into Broadway musicals. There were a lot of things, but who knows? Who knows? He’s no longer on this plane, so it’s hard to say. What did you and your dad like doing together back then in the ’70s?
Priscilla Gilman:
Essentially, we liked doing everything together. My dad wholeheartedly embraced every aspect of my sister’s and my childhood world. And I write in the book at one point, I say, “My father was the kindly priest/rabbi/whatever it might be, who presided over the cathedral space of my childhood.” And that’s a quote from Virginia Woolf. And he loved watching Sesame Street, Zoom, all of those classic people.
Debbie Millman:
Zoom.
Priscilla Gilman:
Zoom, zoom, zoom right. Loved it.
Debbie Millman:
Zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom.
Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, my gosh. Every time the music would come on, he would come running from the other room to catch it. He loved reading Moreno and Morgan Freeman on that show too. He loved reading to us. He would read to us. My mother would have to say, “Dick, it’s time to stop.” Even when we were tired, he loved reading all the books that we loved. He loved taking us to Central Park and Riverside Park, and pushing us on those precarious metal swings, if you remember those, with no padding underneath them.
He loved romping around physically, throwing a football to me. He loved watching sports with me. My mother often joked that I was the son my father never had, because my older brother from my father’s first marriage was into art and music, but not at all into sports. My father converted me and I was a huge New York Giants fan, New York Mets fan with him. We followed-
Debbie Millman:
As was mine.
Priscilla Gilman:
Oh my goodness.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Yeah, they could have been brothers. It’s a little bit freaky. It’s a little bit freaky.
Priscilla Gilman:
I wonder if they knew each other, if they ever met?
Debbie Millman:
Richard Gilman, Martin Millman, what can I tell you?
Priscilla Gilman:
Martin Millman and Richard Gilman. You’re having fun up there wherever you are. Know right now you’re hanging out. I love this Debbie. I love this.
Debbie Millman:
Now, what kind of books was he reading you? Were they erudite books by Joan Didion, or were they the books of Dr. Seuss?
Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, they were absolutely Dr. Seuss, and they were absolutely not at all erudite. My dad was very into the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. And my school, I went to a school called Brearley, which is a girls school in the city that didn’t stock those books in the library, because they didn’t consider them literature. And my father was like, “That’s ridiculous. What Happened at Midnight is a great book,” and that was a Hardy Boys book. So it was high, low, and everything in between. It’s one of the things that my father bequeathed to me. And it’s funny because I was reading Roxane’s Opinions book and I watch The Bachelor. She is the high, low, and everything in between. She’s my kind of girl, my father’s kind of girl. So it was everything from The Wizard of Oz books he loved. He loved the A.A. Milne books, E.B. White, Dr. Seuss, and all those Richard Scarry books we would read. I’m looking, because I have a whole wall of children’s books behind me. The Babar books. Anything and everything, Debbie, anything that we were… Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, the Edward Eager books. I was listening to Susan Cain’s interview with you, which was such a great interview, and she talked about loving Edward Eager. Edward Eager writes these wonderful magical children’s books that my father loved. But it was everything, anything that we liked, he invested in it.
Debbie Millman:
Your dad supported your mother in having a major career, and happily took on childcare duties and mostly worked from home. Did he ever resent it at the time, or was it wholehearted support?
Priscilla Gilman:
It was absolute wholehearted support. He was so proud of my mother. He bragged about her all the time. He genuinely loved getting down on the floor and playing. We also had an amazing nanny, who we didn’t call her a nanny, we called her just Carrie. She was like my third parent who came in the morning and left at six o’clock at night. But on the weekends, it was just my dad. We didn’t have a babysitter on the weekends and he would say, “Lynn, you need to go do your reading.” He really, really supported her and was so incredibly admiring of her work ethic and everything that she had achieved.
Debbie Millman:
You were a seven-year-old tomboy who hated wearing dresses and having your hair combed. And in that stage, your dad told you that you might not be as pretty as some of the white pinafore-clad, blonde, wringly little girls in your Sunday School class, but you were something more important. What was that?
Priscilla Gilman:
He said, “It’s more important because you’re smart.” And he patted my head and said something about my brain and how beautiful he thought my brain was, and it just felt so wonderful. Debbie, I think in The Boston Globe review of my memoir, it was such a moving review, because the reviewer really responded to how my father empowered me as a little girl. To be an unabashed intellectual, to love learning, to be curious, to not care about what I looked like, to be really not interested in shopping. My sister would go shopping with my mom and my dad was like, “Let’s watch the Mets. Let’s watch the Giants. Let’s go outside and romp around.” And he just accepted me for who I was in a way that felt so affirming and just put me completely at ease.
Debbie Millman:
Did you at all get upset or feel slighted that he was telling you that you might not be as pretty as some of the other girls? That was what I took away from that line. I was like, “Hey, wait a minute. You want your dad to think you’re the prettiest girl in the world.”
Priscilla Gilman:
I know Debbie. I know. I think I really didn’t. I don’t know. He gave me this confidence because he wasn’t saying, you’re not pretty. He was just, I think the implication was you don’t look like those conventional little, and especially in the ’70s. Like having hair like your beautiful color, my hair was more of a dirty blonde and in between. And he just made me feel like you don’t have to be conventional. It was more that, that was the vibe. Like you don’t have to be the ideal of what a girl should look like in order to be pretty to me, and your brain is more important. And I really took that for what it was.
Debbie Millman:
You were also quite a performer. You got solos in music class at camp, in school performances, but you were always aware that while your dad was proud of you, and really both your parents, they did not want you to take that talent anywhere professionally. Both he and your mother agreed that you should not be given any voice lessons or encouraged as a child performer in any way. Why?
Priscilla Gilman:
Yeah. So my mother had wanted to be an actress. And she had gone to Northwestern for theater on a scholarship and changed her major from drama to the oral interpretation of literature, which prepared her very well to be an agent, I think ultimately. When she was horrified by how competitive the drama division was, and how these professors were cutting down the students in a very ruthless, mean way. And I think that scarred her, and she did not want her child to be vulnerable in that way. And I think my father in the ’70s, he was the Head of the Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism Department at the Yale School of Drama, but in the ’70s and ’60s, he also taught actors. So he taught Meryl Streep, he taught Henry Winkler, he taught David Alan Grier, who I’m still close to to this day. I adore him. And I think he just felt that the life of a performer was too vulnerable. Again, my parents didn’t want me to struggle. They didn’t want me to be subjected to this ruthless sizing up of my appearance or my talent. And they also believed in my intellect, and they always said, “We want you to get a PhD.” They didn’t say necessarily had to be in literature, Debbie, but they were like, “You need to do a PhD in something.” And I was a very dutiful little girl, and once I got to Yale, I stopped acting. So I was in some off Broadway things when I was a little girl, because these people came to my ballet school and they recruited us. They had auditions, which my parents didn’t know about, so then I was already cast, so they sort of accepted it. But they wouldn’t allow me to audition. I wanted to audition for Annie, they wouldn’t allow me to, and I just accepted it. And I was in a vocal jazz ensemble in high school, and I did lots of musical theater and straight theater, but it was always my hobby. It was never going to be my job. And I do think my parents were very well-intentioned, but as a parent, I would do it differently. If I had a child who had a talent and they loved doing it, I loved acting and singing, I would support them in that.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, you have certainly with Ben.
Priscilla Gilman:
And I have, yeah. Yeah. And James, who actually sings opera at Yale now.
Debbie Millman:
Wow.
Priscilla Gilman:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Well, speaking of siblings, when your little sister was born, I understand she cried all the time. You described her as a fussy, peevish, colicky baby. Your older brother called her the cranky old man. And when she got older, she sometimes made scenes, but you stated that you envied her lack of self-consciousness. Her insistence on advocating for herself and her ability to be herself without apology. Yet it was you who dreaded her setting your father off. So what would set him off? Why did he get set off? And why was it you that took on the responsibility of recalibrating him from those experiences of being set off?
Priscilla Gilman:
My father had a temper, and I would describe him as irritable. Again, I think it was a fluke of his temperament. And I think my sister had a temperament more similar to my father actually. You know how we’ll often say things set us off that remind us of ourselves. I think they were both a little bit cranky. They could get cranky if they were tired or they weren’t feeling good. So my sister would resist doing something that my father asked her to do, or she would be taking too long in a way that was annoying him. And then he would speak to her in an impatient voice and that would set her off. And it was just this drama where I was like, “Oh, gosh. Oh, no, I have to calm them down.” Now, in terms of my role as the peacemaker or the one who recalibrated him, I say in the book that I was blessed with this naturally optimistic, buoyant temperament. And it was legendary in my family and my grandmother, Carrie, my nanny, everybody would always talk about how I never cried when I was a baby, and I was just naturally very happy. And I think both of my parents saw that in me and they celebrated in me, but they also leaned into that. And from a very young age, I felt that my mother, if my father were in a bad mood, she’d be like, “Go in to your father.” And so it was almost like, and I would walk into the room and he would immediately seem calmer, look happier, his face would light up when I would come in. I just had a calming effect on him. I don’t know exactly why. But with my sister, I adore my sister, and she’s my best friend, Claire. She’s actually the curator at The Drawing Center.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I know. It’s incredible.
Priscilla Gilman:
Yeah, my amazing sister. And I love them both so much, and it was extremely painful, because I felt like I had to mediate between the two of them. And I would see both of their points of view, and I would just try to lower the temperature in the room and get them to get along again, so that we could go off on our adventures, the three of us, and play and go to a movie, or do what we wanted to do.
Debbie Millman:
That’s a lot of responsibility for a little girl. And your mom even told you that your father favored you over Claire, because you never fussed or fretted and never made trouble. And I can understand how a mom might think that that’s something a little girl should feel good about, but it also sets you up for having to continually do that in order to either stay in his good graces, or stay in your mom’s good graces. A really hard place to be. And I know that when your dad’s moods went black, so to speak, you write how he needed to be strenuously pulled back into good humor and regain his composure. And you stated that you sensed his needs with just extraordinary sensitivity and rushed to meet them. Did you feel like you had to do that at the time, or was it just something that was so ingrained in the dynamic of your behavior together that you almost involuntarily felt that you had to do that?
Priscilla Gilman:
I think it was more the latter, Debbie. I do. I think it was, I say in the book at one point, I use a theatrical metaphor, which I do throughout. I structure the book in terms of acts, and I talk about how I was cast in a role of being the one who placates him, and actually everyone in the family, and soothes ruffled feathers and brings everybody back into happiness. And I was cast in that role because it wasn’t a stretch. But no one can be that way all the time. But I think when I was a little girl, it was just it felt good to be that person. And I agree with you that when my mother said that to me, she didn’t say it in a monitory way, like, “You have to do this or he’s going to get angry with you.” She said it more as a way of affirming that I was doing a really good job with my father. And also, and I think it was a really good impulse on her part. She was telling me he doesn’t favor you because you’re better than Claire. He favors you because of the quirk of your temperament. It just matches or fits with his better than Claire’s does. We talk now about a fit, a poor fit, or a good fit between parents. And so I grew up not thinking I’m better than my sister in any way that he’s wanting me a little bit more than her. He adored my sister too, adored both of us as a unit, but when he was in a bad mood, I was better for him. But I think that it really took writing this book, going back into it, looking at pictures of myself as a little girl and over and over, my editor and my agent would say to me, “You need to acknowledge how much pressure this was.” Look at little Priscilla. You were 7, 8, 9, 10 years old. This wasn’t really okay for your parents to be putting this much pressure on you. And it was hard for me to acknowledge that and to say, “I would never do this to my children.” But at the same time, we all cast our children inadvertently in roles, and we have to work hard not to do that. And I never resented my parents. I was never angry at them for it. But as I worked on the book, part of the healing process for me was looking at a childhood that I had thought was halcyon and perfect, and oh, I had this incredible childhood with these wonderfully loving parents, and realized I was actually under a lot of pressure too. It was hard.
Debbie Millman:
It was so heartbreaking to read how you had to rescue your parents at that time in so many different ways. I wonder if there was ever a time where you felt you could just be yourself? Or in thinking about that question, would you even know what yourself needed or wanted at that time, because you were so carefully calibrating who you were to fit their needs?
Priscilla Gilman:
Yeah, I think I didn’t. I think I thought that’s who I am. That’s my value, that’s my identity. And it was close to who I was, but no one can be just that.
Debbie Millman:
Right. In October of 1980, when you were about 10 or so, your parents made the decision to separate. And you write how you sat on your yellow bedspread and wrote in your little Holly Hobbie Journal, “Please don’t let this happen. Please don’t let them get divorced. I’ll do anything if they just stay together.” So I have a couple of questions. First, do you still have that Holly Hobbie Journal?
Priscilla Gilman:
I don’t.
Debbie Millman:
I was hoping.
Priscilla Gilman:
I know.
Debbie Millman:
I was just talking to another guest about journaling, and she didn’t have any journals as she was growing up, and she’s quite a prolific writer. And I thought, “Oh, that’s so too bad because it becomes evidence of a life in so many ways to have that record of how you felt at that time.”
Priscilla Gilman:
Debbie, you’re so right. And thankfully, I did still have it when I took the only creative writing class I’ve ever taken. During the year that I had dropped out of Yale, I took a class at Columbia, and I wrote a piece, a nonfiction piece, that incorporated the journal, and I had the journal at the time. So I had it transcribed in that piece, what I had written.
Debbie Millman:
Your dad took the separation very hard, and he didn’t want it. It was your mother’s decision. He told you that if it weren’t for you and your sister, Claire, he would kill himself. And that meant that your father’s survival was your responsibility. And you wrote that you would do anything and everything in your power, use every ounce of your energy and ingenuity and love to make sure he survived. How did you manage?
Priscilla Gilman:
It’s so interesting, I feel, and that was a moment that he blurted that out, and he was alone with me. My sister was not there when he said that, neither was my mother. And it was one of those moments that just changes your life forever. I realized in that instant how fragile my father was, which I had always sensed, but I never knew it to that extent. And I was determined from that moment on that I had to direct my attention, my efforts, every ounce of my energy, and I use the word ingenuity in the book, to making sure that he knew that he was wholly loved and supported by me. And that even when I was not with him, because I was not with him very much in the first couple of years after my parents split up, that’s what was one of the hardest aspects of it. I was going to write him notes, call him, every time I saw him shower him with love and affirmation. And as you were reading those lines, Debbie, it occurred to me that in a way, I’m still doing that work, because for six years I’ve worked on this book to ensure that he survives. Now it’s a more complicated version of survival, but I’m still doing it. I’m still attempting to keep him with me and to keep him in the world for other people to know.
Debbie Millman:
In the meantime, your mother made it clear to you and your sister that you weren’t supposed to think of this split as a bad thing. And in the ’70s, it was really quite unique for parents to be getting divorced. When my parents got divorced in 1969, people made fun of me in school, because nobody else knew of anybody getting divorced. And they would make fun of me and say, “It’s your fault your parents are getting divorced.”
Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, my gosh.
Debbie Millman:
But that’s how uncommon it was. So your mother didn’t want you to think it was a bad thing. You didn’t cry, you didn’t complain, you didn’t express any sadness, so she wouldn’t worry about you. And at 10 years old, you became the mini adult of your entire family.
Priscilla Gilman:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn’t want her to worry about me. And you’ll remember that the only time that I cried was when we had to give our dog away. We had gotten this puppy.
Debbie Millman:
I can’t even, this story kills me.
Priscilla Gilman:
I know. And I went in the linen closet and I buried myself in the bedding, and I cried because I had watched the dog running after our car after we brought her back to the breeder, and it just absolutely killed me. I could cry for the dog, but I couldn’t cry for my father, and I did not want my mother to feel guilty. I knew that my mother had needed to do this. I did not blame her. I saw how much happier she was out of the marriage. Nonetheless, I look back on that and I think, “My goodness, I had no one to talk to about this.” Claire didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk to my grandparents or Carrie, because I thought that they might judge my mom because they were all religious Christians and I thought they would think divorce was a terrible thing. I didn’t talk about it with my friends, none of my friends. One of my friends had divorced parents, and I write in the book that Becky Royfee, Katie Royfee’s sister, was one of my best friends, and their parents had been married a bunch of times before. So I felt they were still together, but at least they had been divorced. They had gone through this. And when I was with Becky, I could feel at ease a bit, didn’t feel like I had the Scarlet D on me.
Debbie Millman:
So you were propping up your dad and pretending in front of your mom, and hence Priscilla Gilman overachiever is born.
Priscilla Gilman:
Yes. Yes.
Debbie Millman:
You overachieved in school. Your A’s quickly became addictive. And while that might’ve been great for the future Priscilla, at the time, is it was what you felt you needed in order to win both your parents’ love. I can’t imagine that that must’ve been anything, but exhausting.
Priscilla Gilman:
It was so exhausting, Debbie. I look back now and I realize I started having all of these physical symptoms when I was in high school. Getting all these sinus infections, and my mother would send me to the endless doctors. And I know now that it was my body rebelling and saying… I had not worked. I had not been a hard worker in school. I’d been like this creative madcap doing theater, doing well in English, but hating math and science and not caring, to I have to get A’s in every single class and get in early to Yale. And I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome in my early twenties. Now, was it actually clinical chronic fatigue syndrome, or was it…
Debbie Millman:
Depression.
Priscilla Gilman:
… my adrenals were shot and it was depression. Yeah. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
You graduated high school, you went on to Yale University majoring in English. But you wrote that you never felt as happy, free and as expansive as when you were performing. Nevertheless, your parents remained adamant that you should not study drama in college or take any steps toward becoming a professional singer or actress. Did you ever feel like you could defy their wishes and do it anyway?
Priscilla Gilman:
I don’t even think it would occur to me to think of it in terms of defying their wishes. It was so ingrained in me that my parents knew best, that my parents were looking out for me. That once I started getting the A’s, it was like then we had added on to my parents, my teachers, my professors, this whole chorus of parental figures that were like, “You must make good on your intellect and you must get a PhD in English.” Now you remember that I dropped out of school at the beginning of my sophomore year of college. And that was a big step for me to say, “I’m exhausted. I’m sick. I need to come home. I need to get out of my head.” And I worked as an aerobics teacher.
Debbie Millman:
I know. I know. I have this whole list of jobs you did.
Priscilla Gilman:
Debbie, it was so much fun. I loved it. And that was the closest I came to being a performer. And I actually taught David Rockwell aerobics.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, good to know.
Priscilla Gilman:
I know he’s been on your show.
Debbie Millman:
I’m going to ask him about that.
Priscilla Gilman:
He used to come to our studio. I taught Mary Tyler Moore. I taught a lot of big winks. It was so much fun. I loved it. And I did go into therapy and I did become healthier, and I did get some perspective, but then once I was back in college, it was the lure of the A’s. And I think the other thing to say about it is that the only thing that I ever heard my parents discuss in mutually happy and they sounded like they were getting along and they were close, was when I would overhear them talking about, “Oh, Priscilla is so brilliant. Oh, isn’t it incredible how well she’s doing?” And, “Oh, she’s got to get the PhD, and we’re so proud of her.” And so it was a way not only of making them happy individually, but also of bringing them together and creating a unity. Because their split had been so acrimonious, it took them seven or eight years to get divorced. They were fighting over money. They were arguing in a vituperative way, and they were hardly ever in the same room. And this was something that they both wanted and that they could bond over.
Debbie Millman:
Did you really want to get a PhD in English Literature, or did you do it without even thinking that you had a choice?
Priscilla Gilman:
I think I did want to do it in the sense that I love teaching. And my first teaching job, I was a camp counselor, a theater counselor when I was in high school, and then I was an aerobics teacher. And I still think that everything that I needed to learn about teaching, I learned being an aerobics teacher. And you need a warm-up, you need an arc of your class, then you have a cool down. I still do that when I teach literature. So I really, really wanted to teach. I love teaching. I am passionate about literature. I would be transported in my literature classes. So those two aspects of it, I really did want. What I didn’t like about academia, and I think I didn’t know this. I think I went into graduate school with my idealism intact because of course, my father didn’t even have a BA, Debbie.
Debbie Millman:
I know.
Priscilla Gilman:
So he had ended up at the Yale School of Drama, and I think that was another thing. My parents were living vicariously through me. They both wanted to have advanced degrees. My mother’s parents didn’t graduate from college. My mother had a degree in a theater-ish degree. They were like, “Oh, our daughter has all these amazing opportunities, and she even got a PhD from Yale.” And then I was hired as a professor in my fifth year. I love teaching the students, but I hated the pettiness of academia, the politics, the publisher parish mentality. The, you must interrogate literature rather than be passionate about it. I’m an enthusiast. You could tell other Zoomers who are, right, I’m an enthusiast. And I didn’t like having to tamp down my enthusiasm and be just this objective, analytical thinker. I wanted to bring emotion and I wanted to bring subjective experience to teaching and writing about literature.
Debbie Millman:
In the book you write that you became increasingly bothered by what you described as the cutthroat environment of academia, its petty politics, its infection by the worst kinds of hazy, theorizing, and irrelevant pompous or inane arguments.
Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
So after two years as an Assistant Professor at Yale and four years as an Assistant Professor at Vassar, you decided to leave academia. How hard was that? How hard a decision was that for you to make?
Priscilla Gilman:
Debbie, it was a really hard decision, and there were a number of false starts. So I actually, in 2001, on September 10th, 2001, I sent an email to the Yale English Department resigning my position. And I had decided at that point to join my mother’s literary agency. I had a two-year-old child, Benjamin. And the next day I woke up and it was September 11th. And my ex-husband, my husband at the time, said, “We’re not going to New York. It’s too dangerous. I don’t want to bring a child into the city.” Vassar headhunted me and offered me a job, and offered my ex-husband, who was in the PhD program with me at Yale, a halftime position. And I thought, “You know what, this was meant to be.” So I went back in and I went to Vassar. And I said, “Maybe at Vassar it’ll be less cutthroat, it’ll be easier.” And then I found Benjamin was diagnosed with a host of special needs. I had another child, and I thought, “I cannot produce an academic book on this rigid timeline of six years and you’re out. I need to prioritize my children.” And so I wanted to move back to the city and have a wider circle of support, and be in a place where Benjamin could go to a special school. And so I joined my mother’s literary agency, and I worked as an agent for five years until The Anti-Romantic Child was published. And then I just went freelance as a teacher, and a book critic, and a speaker and all of that. But it was an incredibly difficult decision to make. And I’m very fortunate that I’m still able to teach literature. I lead book groups. I teach for Yale Alumni College, and I teach writing. And I don’t have to grade papers or write dry, hazy articles infected with hazy theorizing, Debbie. So it all worked out in the end, but it was very hard.
Debbie Millman:
Well, you talk about ending your career as an academic, ultimately representing your shedding the identity others had wanted for you.
Priscilla Gilman:
Yes, yes.
Debbie Millman:
And you came to realize that you’d taken on the role of academic in large part to please your parents, then your professors, and ultimately your then husband, now ex-husband.
Priscilla Gilman:
Exactly.
Debbie Millman:
How did that decision begin to change the dynamics in those relationships?
Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, it’s such a good question, Debbie. Some of my professors applauded me. And David Bromwich was one of my dissertation advisors, and he was so proud of me and said, “This is wonderful. You’re going to be able to do so much more in the world.” Other professors were furious at me, didn’t speak to me for a while. Said, “We’ve invested in you and we’ve pushed you for these. You’ve gotten these two top jobs and now you’re just walking away.” And they were angry at me. And it was such a maturing experience for me, learning how to say, “Okay. Accept the different reactions that I would get.” Now, my father was very ill already. By the time I joined my mother’s agency, my father was in essentially a waking coma. So he never knew that, and I was terrified that he was going to think, “Oh, my gosh, is this choosing my mother over him?” He was so proud of me when I got the jobs at Yale and at Vassar. But I think the other thing, Debbie, about my father is that when you read those lines from my book, it was so funny. I was like, “Is that me or my dad?” Because my dad would often say that even though he had a sense of insecurity, that he wasn’t Dr. Gilman, he was just Richard Gilman, and he didn’t have an advanced degree. He also felt that being an outsider helped his work, and that he wasn’t inhibited, and he didn’t have to footnote constantly, and he could just write and he could write for a broader audience. And I know that he would’ve found a lot of the constrictions and constraints of academia that I was being subject to. He would’ve found them intolerable. And so in a way, if I went into academia in part to please him, I also left it in part because of what he had taught me. And I do feel that he would be proud of me for doing that.
Debbie Millman:
It seems as if you had a much healthier, you had a whole slew of healthier years with your dad after he got remarried and moved to Japan to be with his new wife.
Priscilla Gilman:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
When he was diagnosed with cancer, you wrote that you found yourself not wanting to be anything, but a source of sustenance. So you dismissed your sadness as unworthy of consideration. And I’m wondering if you could read another short excerpt from your book about how you felt at that time?
Priscilla Gilman:
Sure. So this is at a part in the book where my father is diagnosed with stage four lung cancer that has metastasized to the brain. And he is overcome suddenly saying, “I haven’t written my life’s work,” and, “I can’t die yet.” And I’m shocked in a way, because I had thought that he was in a much healthier and happier place. And that he had done a lot of growing and that the insecurity that had plagued him for so much of his life was gone, and then it all resurfaced. So I write, “What could ever fill the hole inside him?What would ever assuage his fear that he didn’t measure up, hadn’t accomplished enough, was inferior, lacking, incomplete? He had three devoted children and a remarkable wife who adored him. Shouldn’t he use his remaining days to love and be loved? But even as he frustrated me, even as I saw his meager self-worth, even as I increasingly understood how different I was becoming from him, that he was caught up in ego and marks of accomplishment even as I was moving away from them. I never let on to him that I found his outlook not just sad, but troubling.
Priscilla Gilman:
It’s such an interesting defining moment in the book, because it’s clear that you’ve created some boundaries. Even though you were still trying to buoy him in some ways, you were also like, “You know what, this is as far as I’ll take this.”
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Yes. Yes.
Debbie Millman:
And how did those new boundaries impact the way you wanted to work, and teach, and write? It seems like you’re still doing all three, but on very different terms, entirely different terms.
Priscilla Gilman:
And in a way still performing, because teaching is a kind of performing. I’m still reinventing it every day, but I think I just, and my sister and my brother were huge sources of comfort. And we would increasingly just share with each other how our father was frustrating us. We would talk more openly amongst the three of us about like, “Oh my gosh, when he said this, oh, I just wanted to scream.”
And so I was able to vent it more. And I was in therapy and I was able to talk more about. I think it was in my early thirties, I first discovered the phrase or term codependency, and I started to think about how I had been subordinating my own needs, and not even realizing that I was doing that. Not even realizing that I had needs that were separate from what my parents’ needs were from me.
And I started to realize that I could be a certain way around him and not feel that that was who I was entirely. That when I’m with him, I’m there to be there as a support for him and as a comfort to him. But it’s okay for me to have these thoughts. And do you remember that scene earlier in the book where my sister is laughing about this awful shirt that my father had bought? You know like the way teenagers do? They go, “Oh my God, I can’t believe you thought we would wear this. This is so ugly.”
And then I see my sister run to the phone and say, “Oh, hi daddy. Hi. I was just calling to say I love you.” And when I remember that it was such a revelatory moment in the sense that we would feel guilt if we would ever say anything negative about him. And as I got older, I realized it’s okay to express how difficult it is. Not just express it, Debbie, to acknowledge that it could be difficult to be his daughter and to express it to other people. And to act in certain ways when I was with him and not feel guilty for having thoughts when I wasn’t with him about how hard it was.
Debbie Millman:
Your father died at age 83 in a suburb of Kyoto, Japan in October of 2006. And at the beginning of The Critic’s Daughter, you write, “I lost my father for the first time when I was 10 years old. In the months and years that followed, I lost him over and over many times, and in many different ways. This book is my attempt to find him.” In writing this book, what did you find?
Priscilla Gilman:
So much. And I found my father, Debbie, in the round. I was able to see my father, Debbie, in the round. I was able to see him from the front sitting in the audience, watching him on the stage. I was able to see him backstage, in his costumes, out of his costumes. In his many costumes with makeup on, without makeup on. Struggling and mighty, all of these contradictions, all of these different roles and selves that my father inhabited. From reading his work, and I read hundreds of articles, I couldn’t believe it.
And constantly discovering things, surprising things about my father. And I learned to find him, but also to realize that I’ll never completely find him in the sense of mastering him, or locating him, or pinning him down. He wouldn’t want it that way. Do you remember in the end, I talk about how there’s this beautiful article that my father wrote about Hamlet in the New York Times?
I think it was published in 1990, I believe Kevin Klein was doing a Hamlet. And so my father was writing about this and going back into the history of Hamlets. And he writes about how there are always things that are left behind. Hamlet is an eternally fertile prince. And I write about my father that way too. And I write about that dedication to Faith, Sex, Mystery that you read earlier, “My daughters, who will understand part of this now and the rest in time.”
Do I understand him completely? I would say no. He wouldn’t want me to understand him completely, because human beings, all of us exceed our ability to completely master them or know them. Faith, Sex, Mystery, my father valorized mystery. I want my father to forever remain mysterious to me, but mysterious in a beautiful and fertile way.
Debbie Millman:
At the very end of Faith, Sex, Mystery, he states, “Well, those readers who went through this book with goodwill and openness to me feel disappointed because I gave them nothing definitive. No calls to order, no models for behavior or moral resting place, and left them with the sight of me still peddling in midair. I finish the book and take my chances.”
Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, right? Wow. Oh, my gosh. Now I really am teary. Debbie, wow. I had never connected that before.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. That ending just made me shiver. And I thought, “Still peddling. Still peddling.”
Priscilla Gilman:
Aren’t we all, Debbie?
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Priscilla Gilman:
Aren’t we all?
Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah. Priscilla, I know that in addition to writing books and your speaking engagements, and your newspaper columns, and all of the reviews that you write, all your teaching, I think you’ve taken a few steps back into performing. How does that feel? I know you did something with one of your sons. How does it feel to be back on the stage as an adult?
Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, it was, now both of my children are singers, and my younger son is an actor, and my older son is a classical guitarist. And being their mom, I got to perform reading out loud to them, doing all the voices. And I sang with Benjamin, my older son, and we actually recorded a Christmas album to raise money for organizations that help support autistic teenagers and young adults. We gave all the proceeds, and that was incredibly, that was so much fun. That was in 2017.
And then a year after that, my younger son in his high school, they did a production of Shaina Taub, whose musical sucks. It’s coming to Broadway this spring. Shaina Taub did a musical version of As You Like It. And my son’s school opened the auditions to everybody in the community, alums, teachers, parents. I had to ask James, I was like, “James, is it okay if I audition?”
And he was a new student at the school in ninth grade, and he was like, “Mom, of course you have to.” And Benjamin actually came with me to the audition, Debbie, and accompanied me on the guitar. And I performed “Take Me Back to Manhattan” by Cole Porter in my audition from Anything Goes, which my father had seen me performing when I was in ninth grade. So it was this crazy full circle moment.
And my son and I, we understudied leads and we had little parts with little solos, and we performed at the Sheen Center downtown. It was so much fun. It was incredible. And I just loved it so much. And my book, the chronological part of my book, ends with that moment of being on the stage. And if you remember, I write about how in my college application to Yale, oh my gosh, the corniest, cheesiest essay, Debbie.
I don’t know why they let me in. But I wrote something about how my extracurricular was performing, and I wrote, “Shakespeare wrote that all the world is a stage. And I would say that the stage is also a world.” And the song in “As You Like It,” I’m standing on the stage and it’s all the world is a stage, like this song that takes that line. And I’m standing there and I’m like, “This is the end of my book.” I just signed the contract to write this book. So it was really a full circle moment. If anyone wants to cast me in their off, off Broadway shows, you know where to reach me, priscillagilman.com.
Debbie Millman:
“Hello, World!”, you now know. Priscilla, I have a few last questions for you tangentially related to your family. At first, how is criticism today different from the time your father was writing criticism?
Priscilla Gilman:
It’s different in ways that are better, and ways that are worse, I think. I think one thing that shocked me, Debbie, when I went back and looked at reviews of my father, and also reviews that he had written, is that friends used to review friends. So he has a rave in the New York Times from Anatole Broyard, one of his best friends. He has a rave from Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, one of his best friends.
There’s less corruption in that way. Like with The Boston Globe, I’m a regular book critic for The Boston Globe. I have to sign a no conflict of interest agreement to write criticism. But I do miss, and I did a theater podcast with Peter Marks and Elisabeth Vincentelli, they have a great podcast about theater. Peter was the theater critic for The Washington Post and Elisabeth writes for the New York Times. And they were saying they were shocked in going back and reading my father’s theater criticism how much more critical people could be back then.
I think there was a vituperativeness and a harshness, which I think could get taken too far, quite frankly. But what was great about that period was that the culture in general supported criticism and critics. You can’t make a living as a critic now. I can hardly afford to take the time to write a book review as opposed to teaching a class, or tutoring a student, or doing something where I’m actually able to support my family.
Unless you have a staff critic position, it’s virtually impossible. And newspapers and magazines are eliminating book editor and book critic positions. So that’s something that I wish we invested more and criticism is vital, I think, to a flourishing intellectual and artistic culture. And I would love to see, thank God Bookforum got saved, but there was that slew of bad news. I think the Los Angeles Times just laid off their book editor. The Boston Globe has made the book editor a part-time job.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it’s happening in music as well. They let go of their music editor, who is a friend of mine, and of course Pitchfork now.
Priscilla Gilman:
Exactly. And dance criticism too. We need a vibrant culture of critics to support the arts. It’s so important. And criticism, I also would suggest, is an art.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, absolutely. This is a long question because it includes a bit of a quote. Your mom is a pioneer in publishing, and when asked about what you might know about the business that others don’t, you stated this.
“Just because someone got great reviews, was highly acclaimed, won awards and received prestigious honors, that didn’t mean their books sold well or that they weren’t struggling financially. I knew that authors who made gobs of money sometimes lacked confidence in the intellectual or artistic merit of their work. I knew that one bad review could sink a writer’s mood and damage his or her well-being for months. I knew about jealousies and feuds between ostensible friends and colleagues, and I knew how fragile success was. How little it took to sink a project, how life-changing one rave review could be.”
Priscilla Gilman:
I know.
Debbie Millman:
What advice would you give to anyone reading their reviews or wondering if their work will sell or be successful?
Priscilla Gilman:
I’m very much my father’s daughter, but I’m also very much my mother’s daughter. And my mother raised me to never pin your financial hopes on your writing. My mother tells every one of her writers, “You have to have a day job or a bunch of day jobs, or a lot of bows in your quiver.” Especially also if you really want to produce work that’s authentic and meaningful to you. You don’t want to write for the market. You don’t want to write in a way that’s going to necessarily set, and also we can’t predict that.
So I think that’s something that I would advise writers. A few people break through and they get to a point, like my mother had a bunch of them, like Tom Wolfe and Anne Rice. But it’s harder than ever today to do that. You used to be able to sell a magazine piece for $10,000.
It’s like the magazine, the diminishment of magazines. It’s terrible. Even in the 12 years since I’ve been a writer, just a writer, I only just recently started writing writer on forums, Debbie. But I could sell a magazine piece for $5,000. I could do this and do that. It’s so much harder now. So I think that’s really, you have to have other things to pay your rent or your mortgage.
The other thing I would say in terms of reviews is that, and I actually, you’ll remember I wrote my dissertation on criticism in the second half of the 18th century. In the early 19th century, I wrote about Jane Austen, romantic poetry, gothic novels and how these writers coped with this new power of reviewers and critics. I think I was preparing myself to be a professional writer by doing this. And so I talk about these different strategies like on the one hand, the people who frenetically revise their work and change in accordance with the reviews, but then it doesn’t work, it backfires.
And then on the other hand, the people who cultivate a, I read about this 18th century poet named William Cooper, who’s a fascinating character, and how he cultivates what he calls a indifference to criticism. And he does it by coming up with his readers that matter to him. We all need our trusted readers are what Milton called our fit audience, though few, even if it’s few, right? It’s the people that we really trust.
And I think particularly for memoir, people bring their own stuff to memoir when they review it. It was just crazy to me to see how people were projecting their own stuff on to, she doesn’t talk about this, so she must be that, or this isn’t mentioned, so this must be true. And you just have to understand you don’t control the way, it’s a life lesson.
We cannot, however much we work, to control how we’re going to be received. This is the lesson I’ve spent my life learning, Debbie. We can’t. We have to just put ourselves out there authentically, let the chips fall where they may. And the people who are your kindreds, to use Susan Cain’s term, will get you and they will understand.
And you certainly, from the moment you first messaged me about this book, I was like, “Debbie is reading this book in the spirit that it was written. She gets it. She understands. She’s seeing me truly.” Not everybody will, and you have to let those people go.
Debbie Millman:
Well, you can definitely count me part of your tribe.
Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, Debbie, I can. I know.
Debbie Millman:
Priscilla Gilman, thank you, thank you for writing The Critic’s Daughter. Thank you for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Priscilla Gilman:
Thank you so much for this wonderful podcast and for being such an incredible human being.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Thank you.
Priscilla Gilman:
Thank you for seeing me truly, and my father as well.
Debbie Millman:
To read more about the work of Priscilla Gilman, you can go to priscillagilman.com, and Gilman has only one L. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.