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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Advice writer dishes out life story in tasty servings

Reviewed by: Maureen Scurfield

Posted: 10/11/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

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After the Falls

By Catherine Gildiner

Knopf Canada, 368 pages, $33

CATHERINE Gildiner, an American-born Toronto psychologist and former Chatelaine advice columnist, is dishing out her unusual life story in tasty servings.

After the Falls, covering ages 14-21, is the second portion, served up 10 years after her bestseller Too Close to the Falls.

This book interweaves vignettes of the '60s civil rights movement, Vietnam, interracial love and black power. It's a memoir with parallel plot lines and it's hard to put down.

The story opens in 1960 when the McClure family has moved to Buffalo, N.Y. On a weak excuse, Cathy's father has just sold the family-run pharmacy back in Niagara Falls, where Cathy has worked since she was a preschooler to take a research job.

Cathy is shoved into a suburban world of ridiculous girl parties, acne problems and arrogant high school boys. Then a doctor diagnoses a slow-growing tumour in her father's brain.

Mom can't cope and Cathy has to take charge, alerting doctors to her father's condition, getting dad fired and taking away his keys.

Being a premature grown-up isn't new to Cathy. In the first memoir she was too "busy" and "bossy" (hyperactive) to stay out of major trouble, so the family doctor suggested a real job.

At age four, she learned to read to help dad's illiterate driver, Roy, make deliveries all over the Niagara Falls area. Cathy bonds with Roy as her best pal, and grows up fast near the majestic Niagara Falls. She has security, status, adult friends and important work to do -- until they move away.

After the Falls has unforgettable main characters: a brilliant father who speaks with crazy tumour-affected logic, and a modern mother who should have had a career, but is trapped in the '50s mindset where "having to work" shamed your husband.

Cathy gets a breather from home problems while on a summer poet's tour with Laurie Coal. He was important like her dad, and dark-skinned like her old friend Roy.

"For most of my life I had kept my emotions, particularly about males, under lock and key in a cobwebbed basement below a trapped door," Gildiner writes. "Meeting Laurie had caused a fire in the cellar and all of the stored emotions were rising and coming out like smoke and escaping through cracks in the floor."

Her mother finally wakes up to her daughter's heavy family burden and enrolls her at university in Ohio. Laurie, who is on a football scholarship nearby, finds her again. She becomes the only white woman in his political protest group, which results in a scandalous revelation about Laurie.

The civil rights subplot, and FBI interference, carries the book along at a faster pace than most memoirs, and baby boomers will love the lines out of familiar '60s songs.

The writing style, in Cathy's changing child-to-woman voice, is bright and honest. One quickly feels an empathy and fascination with this frank girl whose radically changing life plunges her back and forth between child and adult several times.

It's no surprise she became a clinical psychologist.

Winnipegger Maureen Scurfield writes the Miss Lonelyhearts advice column for the Free Press.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 11, 2009 b9

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