Priscilla Gilman: Learning to See Our Parents as They Are
Priscilla Gilman is an author, critic, and former professor of English literature at Vassar College and Yale University. In her first book, The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy, Priscilla writes of the challenges and delights of raising her son Benjamin, who is autistic. Her newest work,The Critic's Daughter: A Memoir, is another family story—this time a searching reflection of her relationship with her esteemed, brilliant, and complicated father, the late theater critic and professor at Yale Drama School, Richard Gilman.
Though the world knew him as an exacting and confrontational critic, Priscilla and her sister knew their father as the adoring, playful parent who regularly entered their childish worlds, delighting in their company and imaginative pastimes. This father-daughter connection was forever changed, however, by her parent’s separation. At the age of 10, she witnessed her father fall—into shame and depression—which forced her to reckon with the lasting wounds marital dissolution could leave on a person, and a family. The book, filled with honest and painful stories of learning to see her father for who he truly was, expertly captures the universal experience of coming to terms with one’s parents as flawed, complicated people and then choosing to admire and respect them anyway. Our conversation explores what it was like to be raised surrounded by creatives and critics, the difficulties of being thrust into the role of parenting your own parents, and the gifts and complications that come from endeavoring to truly know those we love the most.
MORE FROM PRISCILLA GILMAN:
Read The Critic's Daughter: A Memoir and The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy
Explore Priscilla's Website
Follow her onTwitter and Instagram
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE:
One chord that struck me, and I guess we can just start here, is that in writing about the disillusion of your parents' relationship, that your mother felt so strongly about your father after, when it didn't seem like she felt that strongly about him during.
PRISCILLA:
Ah, that's a very interesting. And she felt very strongly, I think it's interesting, the Kirkis review, which was wonderful, and I'm so grateful for it, and I felt like the anonymous reviewer read the book with a lot of empathy and a lot of sensitivity. But the one words that I didn't agree with was she said that she described my mother's cruelty.
And I don't think my mother was cruel. I don't think she had the intention, ever, of demonizing my father or trying to promote herself over my father. I think she genuinely worried about my innocence and naivete about my father's life, that it would catch up with me at some point. I would find it out at some point. And I think she genuinely felt the need to explain why she had ended the marriage, because otherwise I would've been completely bewildered and distraught. And I think she didn't want me to be angry at her. And I also think that for many years she had been repressing all of her feelings about my father. She was basically in survival mode. And I have a lot of empathy for her, I write in the book about the moment where I find her in her room sobbing about Donald Barthly.
I think I was on leave from Yale at that point in my sophomore year and I just had never known until that point that she had married my father in the rebound. That she was still grieving for this loss of this romantic relationship with Donald Barthly and that my father had always been second to Don and it gave me such insight both into my mother's never having been in love with my father and into how terrible that must have made my father feel because he knew it the whole way through. She said to me I was never in love with your father and I told him that. And remember, I have that scene where I talk about how she said to him like that she wasn't, and he wanted to marry her. And he said, Oh, well, passion fades, but companionship survives. And he sort of talked her into marrying him.
ELISE:
And he's not wrong. I mean, it's interesting.
PRISCILLA:
I agree. He's not. And they were good companions in a lot of ways.
ELISE:
And having known you, it's so funny because you were my professor and not my peer, but it was interesting to even know you when I was 18. And you were probably what, 28, 30? I don't know.
PRISCILLA:
I was hired by Yale when I was 28.
ELISE:
Okay. Yeah. You were young and I feel like you were pregnant maybe. And this comes through the book, every page of the book, this combination of your incredibly complex and mature mind and then your sweetness. And as your mom said, not naivete, it's almost just like an enthusiasm. And I wanna talk about enthusiasm and criticism at some point in this conversation. But you are throughout the book such a big little child, Right? Little big kid. Invested with way too much responsibility taking on and with an understanding, I will say, of what's happening well beyond your years. But I don't know if that was a function of the seventies and eighties and this idea that kids could handle it or they could handle the truth. But the way that you were, I would say empowered, even though I hate that word was such a disservice to you, there was no way that you were allowed to be a child with all of your feelings. You were parenting your children, parenting your parents.
PRISCILLA:
Absolutely. Yes. And I was parenting my father from the minute I came into the world in a way, even though we were mutually parenting each other until the split happened. But I absolutely, in a sense was parenting my mom from the minute she starts revealing all this stuff to me.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, and it's interesting too, when you write about your mom, was it reading The Drama of the Gifted Child, and essentially plopping it in your lap and saying, see, your father was a narcissist, and your glory reflected on him. That's how he saw you was through himself. And you took understandably a lot of the front of that. And yet there was an attachment wound, right, with your father, this idea that there was no secure attachment in the sense of him being a durable, reliable, steady object to which you could depend on. But I don't know. I agree with you. He didn't seem like a narcissist.
PRISCILLA:
No. And the moment when she admitted that she had been wrong, that was the greatest healing moment for me of all. And that would never have happened had I not written the memoir, had I not been sort seeking her out asking her lots of questions, details of fights that they had, why they fell in love, how they fell in love, what her doubts were. And then there was that moment where she sent me that brief email where she affirmed his essential goodness, his essential integrity, and his worth as a father. Which was so important to me. And essentially saying she married him in large part because she so desperately wanted to have children. And at that, in that era, she was 27, I think, or 28 when she married him, which for a girl who came from the Midwest was very late, especially. And she had gone through and then went through all this trauma. She had three miscarriages. She had something wrong with her uterus, she had to have surgery. So I was the fourth pregnancy that my parents had, and that's why they went ahead and had another baby so quickly with my sister 14 months later. And I think she just saw immediately that not only would my father be an incredible parent, but also he would be the dream parent for a working woman, because he wanted to do all that stuff that not only did she not have time to do, but she really didn't have any inclination to do playing with us, the imaginative play, taking us out on the weekends. I mean, my father, I don't think I ever, in my entire life had a moment where I looked at my father and thought he's tired of us, or he's exhausted, he's bored with us. He wants to get back to his adult things, every instant that he was with us, I felt him completely engaged and to use your word from earlier, completely enthusiastic.
ELISE:
Yeah. It's so interesting too, because you can also understand why your mom, who is sort of young and trying to cut her teeth in this literary world, we wanna borrow his confidence in her. And then also, it's interesting too, the beginning of the book and how you explain the way that he entered your world and played with you, because I've done some couples work with Sam Takin who specializes in attachment and attachment wounds. And one of the first questions that he asks as he's taking you through his questionnaire is, when you were a child who played with you, did your parents play with you? And did they enter your world? Or did they expect you to enter theirs?
PRISCILLA:
Ooh, I love that. I love that. What's funny is all the important adults in my life, except for my mother, entered my world: Grammy peg and grampy Merl. I talk about them a lot. My grandmother was wild for imaginative play. My nanny Carrie, we didn't call her a nanny then, but she was basically my third parent, watched all the children's shows with us. My brother from my father's first marriage who was 12 years older, so he was in college when we were little. My mother was the only one who did not wanna watch any of the kid shows with us, who didn't really like to read to us. Although she started to read to us later when she could read more adult books. David Copperfield was the first book that you had to us <laugh> and Jane Eyre. I remember that at some point.
I just always had the feeling that my mother had no interest. She loved me and my sister very, very much, and was proud of us. But she just had no interest in childhood per se, or children's past times per se. And I think part of that was that she had grown up with this mother who was obsessed with that stuff. And she was defining herself as opposed to her mother. My grandmother, Grammy peg, also named Priscilla, actually. Peg was short for Priscilla and the third Priscilla in my family. And my mother was just like, I gotta get out of the Midwest as quickly as I possibly can and get out of this world of being a stay-at-home mother and a Sunday school teacher and the Republican, which my grandmother, my grandparents both were and oh my gosh, Richard Gillman: divorced, liberal Jewish who converted Catholicism, illustrious, intellectual, could not be farther from the expected path that my mother had been presented with as a young girl.
I think as I write about it in the book, my father also felt like a weirdo and an outcast in his family. And I think that their marriage or their union, their dating, their engagement, their marriage, they saw each other as a kind of refuge from their conservative families, both of them. And I think for my mom, it's something that I look back on her career and it's just astonishing. It's astonishing that she comes to New York, she went to Northwestern on the acting scholarship. She decided she didn't wanna be an actress. She goes to the Radcliffe Publishing course and just moves to New York and is rooming with three or four other girls gets this job as an assistant at a women's magazine. And by the time she's in her mid to late twenties, she's representing Michael Creon, Tom Wolf, right? Hunter Thompson. I mean, it boggles the mind. My mom had so much ambition and so much grit. And she still says to me, she doesn't understand how she convinced them to sign with her <laugh>. Like, Why? I don't get it. And so it was just always this feeling that my mom was, I was so proud of her always as a little kid. I knew she was a pioneer, and my father was incredibly proud of her. And my father was always saying to us, we need to let your mother rest. We need to be quiet because she's had a very difficult week. And he was just very ahead of his time in that.
ELISE:
It's interesting to me that you were such a creative and creatively expressed imaginative child, and your parents are both part of the structure of the arts, your mom representing, and my agent, for example, is an incredible editor. I don't know that she harbors any ambition to write, but she's an incredible editor. And your father is, or was a very famous theater critic, so they're part of the structure. But do you feel like either of your parents, and I thought it was really beautiful the way that you talked about how it was easier for you to pursue of nonfiction academia than it was to ever insert yourself into a creative writing class. You skipped all the creative writing electives at Bearely. What is that for all of you? That tangential association, but not in the actual, I mean, you're writing books, but you know what I mean.
PRISCILLA:
I completely know what you mean. And I gave up acting and singing after my first year at Yale. I mean, I sang in freshman chorus in the first year, and then I got tapped for red, hot and blue. And I didn't do it, and I didn't act in plays. I think my parents, my mother had wanted to be an actress. I think that's very important. She had been kind of crushed by very cruel teachers at Northwestern. She had been there with Richard Benjamin Paul Apprentice, some people who went on to quite a lot of success. And I think she felt, both of my parents felt, and I say this in the book, that they both felt that the world of writing fiction or being a mainstream writer, whether it's nonfiction or fiction publishing, getting reviewed and being an actor, it was a vulnerable position that they did not want their children to have to endure.
And I don't think my father ever wanted to be a creative writer. Now, he wasn't just a theater critic. He taught playwrights and he taught actors at Yale Drama School. So in the seventies, he taught, Henry Winkler was one of his most beloved students, Meryl Streep. He directed some shows at the Yale rep and he taught playwrights, many playwrights in addition to teaching the critics and the dramaturgs. But I think for both of them, it came from a good place of not wanting their children to struggle and suffer. And I think they also knew that having children was of the utmost importance to me, it was very strange. As I say in the book, I had 150 stuffed animals and dolls that were all my children. And I was called Mrs. Gillman, and my sister was called Mrs. Fulton, and we were single mothers. And they would say to me, You know, can't have children and be an actor. It just doesn't work. And how funny is it that Meryl Streep, my father's student, is one of the greatest examples of somebody, she's had four kids, she's raised them beautifully and had an incredibly successful career. So I think my parents were wrong but in many ways. But I think they were also doing this out of a desire to spare me being kind of relentlessly sized up and judged and appraised and found wanting in various ways. And then they also just very much believed in my critical intelligence and they wanted me to express it.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, do you feel creatively expressed or do you regret not feeling, not shamed away from that, but gently away from that other part of creative expression?
PRISCILLA:
I feel absolutely creatively expressed as a writer. I do. Do I wish that I had tried acting and singing a little bit more? I do. I have to admit it, Elise, it's, it's still a wound. I mean, I talk in the book about doing the musical at James’ middle school, which is incredible. And I sing a lot with my kids, and they're both singers and musician. Binge is a very talented guitarist. I do have some regret about that. I wish I had pursued it a little bit more. But I absolutely love writing about literature, teaching literature, and expressing myself and being very, very personal on my writing in a way that I was not able to do when I was an academic. So I might like to put out an album in 10 years, I don't know. But writing wise, I feel very, very, very creatively fulfilled.
ELISE:
Well, it's interesting because if you don't mind if I read this part of your book to you, but your dad is also incredibly vulnerable. He writes this incredibly, I haven't read Fake Sex Mystery, but he writes a tell all about himself and really exposes himself in a very vulnerable way to the world. You write: “It seemed that this indeed had been my father's struggle to reconcile his intellectual rigor and insistence on lucidity and precision with his hunger for belief, his spiritual yearning, his sense of something beyond the capacity of words to describe or the mind to grasp and master. He erected organic, but increasingly hardened care paces of eloquence and authority to protect the sensitive, vulnerable parts of himself by the time of faith, sex mystery, and even more in his checkoff book, He was coming out of that shell, allowing himself to lay bare his living wounded soul and his hunger for a larger life for what he called an opening into eternity.” You're an excellent writer. I'm sure you know that. But it's so beautiful. That idea of, And let's talk a little bit about criticism, right? Because this is the world in which you were raised, and it can feel like a defense, right? You're judging, you're assessing, you're passing verdict on other people's. Yep. Creative expression. And it's like, what is the, what's the Teddy Roosevelt? It's not the critic that counts, it's the
PRISCILLA:
Yes. The daring greatly.
ELISE:
The daring greatly, right? In some ways have an aversion to criticism. And I don't know, was that how it was when he was, or was there more reverence for that as an art when he was sort of working at his prime?
PRISCILLA:
There was absolutely more reverence for it as an art, yes. I mean, I grew up not only surrounded by all these wonderful creative people, but all these incredible critics like Stanley Kaufman, the longtime film critic for the New Republic, Anna to Broyard and Christopher Layman, half who were the book critics in the New York Times Alfred Kan, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, all of these magnificent critics who were valued on the level of creative writers. And I think one of the things, when I first got the impulse to write this book, initially I saw it as kind of an elegy for the lost kind of glory era of criticism and how the verdicts of critics the thoughtfulness of these critics, the way that these critics saw themselves as advocates for not only the arts in general, but for the truth. In other words, there was something courageous about telling the truth. And when my father found, and he was a literary critic as well, when he found works lacking or he derided them, he was doing it out of the desire to uphold a standard of greatness in art or to dispel what he saw as kind of pernicious hype around things that really weren't good. And he wanted to point, and he saw himself as working on behalf of readers and theatergoers. And being that middle man he compared himself to a policeman at one point, I think, Gentle policeman who helped across the street. And I am a critic, and I review both fiction and non-fiction for the Boston Globe. And I am a much, don't know if I would say gentler critic than my father, but I certainly don't eviscerate books the way my father did. But I admire him for his courage in practicing. I say in the book that John Leonard, another great critic, fantastic critic, who made Tony Morrison or we are so grateful to him for giving her that phenomenal review for Song of Solomon. John Leonard said my father practiced confrontation criticism. And that's so interesting because I learned to avoid confrontation.
ELISE:
Yes, me too. Interesting. I mean, I am enthusiastic. And you talked about your dad, sort of how critical hypercritical and enthusiastic he could be, and perhaps they're not mutually inclusive. I tend to, the criticism that I do, I mean, I don't write criticism, I just ignore. Right?
PRISCILLA:
I've done that too, Elise. I've done that too. I've recused myself from writing a review when I read and I'm like, Oh no, this is not gonna, Yeah, this is triggering me. Or there's something that, No, I don't wanna do this.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, I think that omission is another form in some ways, not of criticism, but of just abstaining and not having an opinion about something if I don't feel like I can be enthusiastic about it. But when you're reviewing books and when they're choosing books for you to review is what are the parameters on which criticism is done now? And has that changed? Are you reviewing books that are deemed important? Are you reviewing books that are deemed important or potentially popular? Is there a code that you are abiding by?
PRISCILLA:
It's so interesting cause I wrote a review of a children's book for the New York Times book review around the time that my paperback was coming out. And I was very grateful to Pamela Appal, who was the children's book editor at that point, went on to become the editor of the New York Times book Review and is no longer there, writes an opinion column now. But she gave me the review because she felt bad that the New York Times hadn't reviewed my book. And so she said, let's give you a chance. And then she hired me to do a backpage essay from the New York Times book review. So I entered the world as a critic in part because of a perceived slight of my book by the New York Times, which was so interesting. And fortunately, Elise, I love this book. I could be so enthusiastic about it.
But then my first review in the Boston Globe was of a debut novel. And I wrote probably the most scathing review I've written to this point. This was I think in 2013, 2014. And it had gotten a huge advance. There was a ton of hype around this book, and I really thought it was terrible. And I just channeled Richard Gillman full bore. And I said, I've got to point out, I saw it as almost this is kind of what's wrong with the way publishing is working now, that something like this is getting a huge advance when there are all these much worthier books out there. And so I really did. But I look back at them, I think, Oh my gosh. And then I saw something on Twitter that said, someone said, this is my code in reviewing, I will never publish. An editor said a terribly negative review of a debut book.
And I thought, oh, I did that. I wrote that. At this point, I've been at the Boston Globe for long enough. I get to pick the books I review, so I'll just say, these are the ones I wanna do. And I generally try to pick a range of things by authors that I love, or books that I think sound interesting and engaging. And so every month or so I'll do research on what's coming out. But there are times like I asked to review Marilyn Robinson's, Jack cause I'm a huge fan of Marilyn Robinson. And I really didn't like it. And I couldn't believe that the one time I've gone into print about Marilyn Robinson, I had to give her a bad review. It was terrible. So it causes mesome sleepless nights, there's some moments where, and with the Boston Globe, the reviews are relatively short. And one thing that I really want to start doing is writing more long form criticism, writing for the New York Review of books, writing the New Yorker. I just haven't had time because I teach so much but I need more space. I want and need more space so that I can be more nuanced.
ELISE:
Yeah, certainly. I loved this description of your father as a critic, you write: “criticism for my father was a diagnosis of false seeing, a diagnosis of false being. He loaded plays that pander to an audience's comfortable view of itself or loaded every rift with highfalutin or he, people who put on errors were pretentious, dishonest, hypocritical. He was a critic of what he referred to disparagingly as bourgeois culture and Broadway's prominent role in it of celebrity for its own sake, part of his resistance to star vehicles, vanity projects and pop pieces of material, inquisitiveness, and ostentation.” I love that. And those things guard against, right?
PRISCILLA:
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And it's so interesting because then my father was just such a contradiction and so paradoxical in many ways because I write at other points in the book about how he was a sucker for my Fair Lady, and he loved Annie, and there were certain Broadway shows and he loved musical theater. He loved it. And Avita, I remember him, it was so funny because I remember my mom and my dad coming back from seeing the original Avita with, and they had just gone not as in his critical role, but just on a date night right before they broke up. And it was Patty Luon and Man Patinkin. And my father was like, this is fantastic. And I remember him going on and on. And then Andrew Weber is now kind of synonymous with Velvita but I will argue until the day I die, least that the Phantom of the Opera is a great musical.
ELISE:
You loved Cats too?
PRISCILLA:
Oh, oh my gosh. And he never knew that I sang memory in a talent show.
ELISE:
Actually, Cats was the first thing I ever saw on Broadway. And I was probably eight or nine and I loved it. So I'll defend cats with you. I'm not planning on going again. I don't wanna shatter that childhood memory.
PRISCILLA:
No, I've never gone again. Never gone again, not seen the movie, which is supposed to be absolutely horrific. The very problematic James Gorden. I will not see it.
ELISE:
Well, one thing throughout the book, and this is I guess the point as you talk about him as the critic and enthusiast and the complications of having him as your father, as well as the gift, as you write this book: “is an attempt at exorcism at the same time that it is a plea to be haunted.” Such a beautiful way of talking about that extreme ambivalence that so many of us feel about so many people in our lives, right? Having to hold to very different views or feelings about the people we love the most.
PRISCILLA:
Yes. My father taught me how to do that. I mean, I think that it's so interesting, my father, what was he most enthusiastic about his children? If you asked him what's the most important thing to you? I mean, I never doubted for a second that my father would give his life for us in an instant. That we were by far the most important thing to him always. So it's funny when you're talking about attachment, and I love Stant Takin's work, by the way. I think I have this book about dating. I think I bought it I have it. It's great. A Wire For Dating, I think it's called. And I always describe myself as being securely attached. When I take the quizzes, I always come out as securely attached. But I think I was securely attached in the sense that I always knew that my sister, my brother, and I we were the most important thing by far to our parents. And I never doubted their love for a second. I never felt that I was anything other than completely loved and seen, particularly by my father for who I really was.
At the same time, there's an insecurity, maybe this is something that the attachment theorists need to add to their next edition. There's the person who's securely attached in the sense that they know that they're loved and they don't doubt it. And I've never had anxiety in relationships, romantic relationships or in my marriage about, Oh, does this person not love me? Is this person gonna leave me? Et cetera in a romantic sense. But I have had the anxiety, is this person gonna die? Is this person gonna get sick? As I say in the book, I just had this feeling from a very early age that my father was gonna die from smoking. I just always felt it. And I have always had this anxiety, is this person, and I have the part in the book, I talk about choosing, especially after my father died, choosing moody, depressed, prone to addiction men. And so being riddled by that anxiety, are they gonna be in a good mood today? Are they going to drink today? Are they going to self-medicate in an unhealthy way today? And so that's been the anxiety, never feeling like, Oh, are they gonna love me today? Not that so much as just, are they gonna love themselves enough today?
ELISE:
Well, and I would argue that, and by that sunning and incredibly hard thing that your dad said that you understandably very much internalized, which was, sometimes I think I'd kill myself if it weren't for you girls.
PRISCILLA:
If it weren't for you girls.
ELISE:
Yeah, yeah. And this idea that of course he loved you, not that he loved you too much, but that you were it, right? You were what was keeping him alive. That is a very heavy burden for a child and an overwhelming burden. And so of course, the part of me that wants to be a therapist and psychoanalyst is like, this is how you learned love. This is what you think love is. Assuming dependence and dependability required of you to be this rock. And so that seems to be what you're recreating. That's the attachment wound, isn't so much, are you lovable? It’s, of course you're gonna have to be the center of someone's world, the foundation for their life.
PRISCILLA:
And even I would say up until 2010, 2011, if a man said to me like, oh wow, don't, I'm not gonna drink anymore because I'm so happy dating you, or I've been depressed all my life, but now the sun is bursting through the clouds and it's all because of you. That was so seductive to me that was familiar, that feeling of, oh wow, that's what this person must really love me and I'm doing a good job and I'm being a good girlfriend. And even my husband, the father of my children he wasn't depressed, but he the heavy burden of his parents both dying very young. And he was diagnosed as an adult on the autism spectrum, like our son, and was very introverted. And I was bringing him out and I was coaxing him into social life and warmth and happiness.
And I say at one point in the book that when his mother was dying in her early fifties tragically of cancer, she said, I'm not worried about him because I'm worried about my other boys, but I'm not worried about him because he has a you. And I felt, Oh, that's good. I'm doing the right thing. So happy that she can die feeling secure about her son, and I'm being a good wife because I'm gonna be the one who keeps him happy and keeps him connected. And as I say in the book, I've done tons of, I mean the melody beauty books. I am the classic codependent in the arena of romantic relationships. My therapist always says to me, you're not codependent with work. You have very good boundaries around that. You probably remember that, Elise, I probably put it on the syllabus, right? You will not call me after nine o'clock, and if you do, you'll get in trouble. But in romantic relationships, certainly, I mean with Matthew Previn obviously I started dating him before the whole nightmare and tragedy with Mia and Woody Unfolded. But his parents had a very bitter split. His father was a womanizer and very problematic in many ways. And I certainly in that relationship too, from the beginning felt, Oh, this is a wounded bird in some way. And then obviously stayed with him.
I love him dearly as a human being, but the romantic relationship was problematic, but I stayed because I owed it to the family and I couldn't abandon them. I had to be there for them. So it's definitely something where, it's funny when you were talking about criticism and enthusiasm and you might remember this from what I was a professor I was known as the hardest grader in the Yale English Department, but whatever you were. So I was very hard. I hardly gave any A's because my father had taught me straight A is reserved for the exceptional. And even when I would give good grades, I would give a ton of feedback because, and I remember valuing the professors who would give a good grade, but then would tell you a lot of ways in which you could improve and be rigorous with you.
And my father really did bequeath to me this combination of warmth slash enthusiasm and critical rigor and honesty about work, because I've always believed that the greatest gift you can give somebody, whether it's in my personal life, I was that person who would say, my friend would say, does this skirt look good on me? And other people would be like, yeah, it does, it does. And I would say, no, I actually don't think it really does, because I would want that from my friend. And so I would give it to my friend. But you have to do it in a kind way. You have to do it in a way that shows I'm giving you this honest feedback because I believe in you, I value you, and I think you can do better. So I try to channel that as a critic as well. And as a writing teacher.
ELISE:
It makes sense. My brother is a book editor and a very, very good editor. And he did notes on my book and he was like, I'm telling you this because I love you.
PRISCILLA:
Exactly. My mother's a big fan of your brother, by the way.
ELISE:
Oh, that's nice to hear. He's the best. It's funny thinking about your childhood and my childhood, I think there was less play in my childhood, but a lot of literature, and it's probably not surprising that Ben is a book editor, and all I do is read because there's something about that exposure I think as a young child, and the one thing that breaks my heart as a parent now is trying to get my kids into books. I'm like, what do I need to do to get you to pick up? Maybe they have too many books.
PRISCILLA:
How old are they now?
ELISE:
They're nine and six, so they're little.
PRISCILLA:
Nine and six. They're little. Okay. Well, my older son, obviously the one who's autistic he doesn't read much I have to say. Although I did manage to turn him on to certain childhood classics like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But my younger son, who's dyslexic and dysgraphic and couldn't even really read until he was seven, is doing direct and studies at Yale's gonna be an English major probably. So that's never too late.
ELISE:
Okay. I won't stress, I won't stress.
PRISCILLA:
Don't stress, don't stress.
ELISE:
I just get so much joy, like you, out of books. And so I want that for my kids, even though I'm trying to not force them into any particular identity. So what do you think, obviously you're teaching and you're reviewing and you're writing, but there's no novel in you. Maybe an album, maybe a Christmas album?
PRISCILLA:
I did the Christmas album with Benjamin about five years ago. Definitely an album at some point maybe as a backup singer with my wonderful kids. I think there is a novel in me.
ELISE:
You do?
PRISCILLA:
I do. And both of my agents, So Tina Ben, who is my first agent, and Eric Simon, my current agent, I think they both think, I mean, I wrote my memoirs in the way that one would write a novel in the sense that I thought about them in terms of the characters, and I wanted them to be suspenseful. I wanted you to be with me as the experience was unfolding. I teach mostly fiction now, although I was equally a poetry and a fiction person as an academic. I wrote my dissertation on Jane Austin and Wordsworth and William Cooper, the 18th century poet that you might remember from our class. But I'm also a big mystery and thriller reader like my father, I'm a high low person, and my father brought me up watching reading Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and watching the Hardy Boys on TV. Sean Cassidy, My first Love shout out to you and watching Murder She Wrote. I talk about that in the book with Angela Lansbury and taking us to all the movies. And I have an idea for a mystery slash thriller. I might do it, Elise.
ELISE:
I think you should do it. Maybe you should become the next Julia Quinn and write romance novels, but make them mysteries and turn them into Netflix shows and become a billionaire.
PRISCILLA:
Well, that would be pretty amazing. Her husband is a friend of mine, and yes, I am. Yes. That would be pretty cool. That would be pretty cool. Yeah.
ELISE:
Alright, we'll come back to your parents and then I'll let you go. But just picking up the codependent theme again, did your mom refuse to be codependent with your dad? And do you think that's also why she bailed a little bit on family life or was present but absent because she couldn't handle the pressure of his needs for codependency?
PRISCILLA:
That is a fascinating insight. Wow. Yeah. I think my mother was very good at protecting her work life and setting boundaries around her work life. And she recently told me, it was so funny, I was reading Jan Wenner’s memoir and my mom obviously worked with Jan a lot on Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolf and Jan is talking about how Hunter would call him at all hours of the morning and do drugs with him. And my mother said, I really laid down the law for Hunter. And what's so funny cause I said, Mom, how did you survive this? We were little, How did you deal with this? Jan talks about getting 15 calls a day, and she said, Hunter never calls me after eight. He respected that I was a mom and somehow my mother is very good at enforcing those boundaries. I do think though, Elise, that she was somewhat codependent with my father in the sense that she absolutely believed, as I did, that everything had to be in a certain way in order for my father to write and remember, I talk about how she would say, Don't go near him. It's very important.
And she very passionately believed in his intelligence. And I mean, she would say to this day, if I asked her, she'd say, your father was absolutely brilliant, probably the most brilliant person I ever met. And she believed in that. And I do think that she, in some way there was something seductive for her about being the strong, stable one who went out and brought home the bacon. And she was okay in that role until she wasn't. But I say in the book that she dated another kind of troubled, depressed person right after my father. So she said once to me I have quit the emotional salvage business for good. And I actually haven't asked my mom about, I haven't asked her if she identifies as a codependent, it's something that I would be interested in asking her.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, but I am curious considering you talk about, I think you might even called it elation or the happiness that you could sense when she sat you and your sister down to tell you that she was leaving and that they were getting a divorce. And then she, as you mentioned, is excellent at boundaries, the firmness of boundaries that she laid down to the detriment, I would say I feel like now we're a lot more nuanced. We have a much more nuance and maybe advanced idea of divorce and sort of putting the kids in the forefront, as you said, the way that you went through your divorce and nesting and ensuring that your kids weren't displaced and that there was an equity between lodgings of parents so that your kids weren't put in the situation that you were, where your dad was sort of scraping by and your mom. But where did her anger at him, I don't know what it is, where did that sort of strong boundary, and maybe not hate, I mean you do say that she hates him, but you say one of whom hated the other. Where did it come from?
PRISCILLA:
I think in a way, as you're talking, it's sort of realizing, I think in a way the anger and the anger slash hate was the only way that she knew to get out. In other words, I think she had so much guilt about breaking up the family about taking away the parent who spent much more time with us, who was much more invested in our childhood, that it was easier for her to just depict things in a kind of black and white way and be like, I think there was also probably suppressed, Oh my gosh, I can't believe I've wasted however many years. It was at that point, 15 years of my romantic life on this person that I was never in love with.
And I think she wanted to make up for lost time. I definitely got that feeling. And you're right, I say quiet elation. She had an expression of quiet elation. She finally managed to do it. And I think she always had one foot out from the minute they started dating. She said, she never said to him, I'm in love with you. She made it clear to him but I think he needed her so much. And that was seductive to her. And he adored her and he put her on a pedestal. And I think especially at that time when there were very few men who would've supported my mother having a career this big, my father was not at all jealous. He was fine when she traveled, I remember I posted on Instagram of Michael Creton today, my beloved Michael Creton, who was the most gorgeous man I've ever seen. And the flesh. And my father never had new jealousy go out to dinner with, he wasn't controlling or jealous and he didn’t feel less than because my mother was more successful.
And there were just a lot of qualities that he had that enabled her to both have the extremely successful careers she had and also to have children and feel like her children were being well taken care of and were being brought up in the way that she wanted them to. And I think she always saw, he nurtured us in the right way and did everything. And she was just very grateful to him for that. But I think when she decided to get out, she had so much guilt. Remember she's a Midwestern girl where no one in the community got divorced. And she was in 1980. This was the beginning of this whole wave of divorce. And I say at one point I talk about Lionel and Virginia Tiger getting divorced and how I see my mother kind of looking and I'm thinking, Oh dear, right, is this going to embolden her? Right. Because a member of our circle is splitting up.
ELISE:
Contagious. Yeah.
PRISCILLA:
And it was.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, it's interesting that what be was so seductive to her originally would become suffocating in some way or too much. And then probably in the aftermath, the justification or the work that we do to feel justified in our decisions and how we have to process that with ourselves. And I guess she brought you into that. Did she like the book does or does she think it's fair?
PRISCILLA:
She is not reading it. She does not wanna read it. And it's funny because, so my ex-husband refused to read the, or declined to read, I should say, my first book in which, I mean, he's a character in this one, but in the first one too. And my mother has declined to read this one. They both say they trust me. They, it's too painful for them to go back into it all. And my mother is the, when the big biography of Donald Barth when he came out and she was interviewed extensively before it. And she's a big character in it. She shutters every time she thinks about reading it. And she sent me out to Borders to check the passages that she was in and to tell her if it was okay. So she is just doesn't wanna read it is very proud of me.
ELISE:
And does that bother you or is it better to not be confirmed?
PRISCILLA:
Oh it was the best news I'd heard all year. I was like, fantastic. I think it's funny because so many memoirists wait until both their parents are gone right before they go. And I think I resisted writing this book, but I think when my agent said to me, you need to write a book about your dad, you just need to. And my mother at first was just when I told her about it, she was like, but who cares about the seventies and criticism? I mean, it's really not that interesting. And then I sort of told her what the story was gonna be and that it was a book about divorce and it was a universal story of how we all at some point idealize romanticize our parents. The parent falls off a pedestal. You have to come to terms with your parents as flawed and complicated people. And then ideally you get back to a place where you can look at them. And this gets back to the enthusiasm and criticism thing, where you can look at them with clear vision and a sort of romanticized view, but recover the deep love and respect and admiration. And then at that point she said, oh, you do need to write this.
ELISE:
But I won't read it.
PRISCILLA:
I won't read it. She said, I don't need to. So really, when Richard told me he wasn't reading my first book, and Richard actually helped me with this one, he edited. He's a great editor and he, my ex-husband lives in my building.
ELISE:
So sweet. I remember when you guys were a young couple, very handsome couple,
PRISCILLA:
Elise, I remember you came out to the car once to see Ben who was in the car seat. He was a very handsome guy. And I love him dearly and he's a great father. And I do think my parents gave me a great example of what not to do with the divorce.
ELISE:
Yeah, seriously. Yeah. Well thank you. The book is beautiful.
As Priscilla said, this book is one of nuance. It is a hard look at her father and his life and his legacy, and also a full embrace and it’s really beautifully done and moving to watch her extrapolate and process her understanding of her parent’s marriage and of his life and of her role, as this underlining support and structure to his. And both the burden and delight and joy of that, she really gets at that, as she writes: “And yet, there was pressure involved in remaining pure and unspoiled for him and knowing that I was his greatest source of joy. I directed my appearance, my behavior, my life trajectory in ways that would bring him the most joy, sometimes at the cost of suppressing vital aspects of my being.” That’s a heavy sentiment, but I think many of us can understand what that feels like, and when you are dependent on your parents and you feel that their happiness is dependent on your own, how that can require so much of you, right? It certainly required a lot of pricilla. And yet, the love for her father is present on every page of her book. She mentioned that the Kirkus Reviewer called her mother cruel, that’s not how I read the book at all, but I recognized parts of myself in her mom and the way that she struggled to enter into their childhood. I’m not great at that, to be honest. I love being with my kids but Rob is better at playing with them and entering their world. So anyway, it’s one of those books, particularly if you are a child of divorce (which I’m not), but there is a lot in these pages that will hit your heart. And I think for all of us who both love our parents dearly and at times feel critical of them, this is one path, one look at how that can ultimately resolve. Alright, thanks for listening. See you next week.
