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Catherine Gildiner

Best-selling Author and Psychologist

  • My Memoirs
    • Coming Ashore
    • After the Falls
    • Too Close to the Falls
  • My Other Books
    • Seduction – A Novel
    • My Articles
  • My Book Talks
  • Book Reviews
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Book Review, “After the Falls”, Montreal Gazette

January 13, 2015 By Catherine Gildiner

Susan Schwartz, Montreal Gazette masthead
A smart, nervy teen comes of age; Catherine Gildiner looks back on her not-so-typical life

Montreal Gazette
Sat Oct 10 2009
Page: H6
Section: Weekend: Books
Byline: SUSAN SCHWARTZ
Source: The Gazette

She did such outrageous things as a teenager – like take the family car when she was only 13 to meet friends at the local pizza joint and, a few years later, get herself hired as a short-order cook at a Howard Johnson’s even though she didn’t know how to cook – that several times while reading Catherine McClure Gildiner’s memoir about coming of age in the 1960s, I laughed out loud, the way I would at Lucy Ricardo’s antics on I Love Lucy.

The young woman we meet in After the Falls is sassy and cocksure, absolutely. But the book is more than simply funny and Gildiner, then Cathy McClure, is not just outrageous. She is smart and caring, determined and enterprising, curious and brave. And some of the tales she tells are nothing short of harrowing stories in which sex, infidelity, even murder, figure.

Gildiner came of age in the United States at a time defined by the Vietnam War, by civil rights demonstrations and by the death of Martin Luther King – and readers see the time through the prism of her experience. “We all lost people in Vietnam,” she said in an interview. “We all knew people who were maimed.”
[Read more…]

Filed Under: After the Falls, Book Reviews

Hollywood Twinkle Interview

January 9, 2015 By Catherine Gildiner

Hollywood Twinkle interview photoProduction Notes: Catherine Gildiner

I had the great pleasure of interviewing New York Times best-selling author, Catherine Gildiner, regarding her book, After the Falls: Coming of Age in the Sixties. To know Gildiner is to love her…rather – to read Gildiner is to be an instant fan and addict.

I read her first tome, Too Close to the Falls, a memoir of her childhood in Lewiston, New York, and simply could not put it down.  I will never look at a holy water font or a compass quite the same way again.  I fell in love with the little girl – her spunk, her wit, her courage, her intelligence and precocity.

After the Falls is the story of her life ages 13-21 with no less wit, humor, or fun.  Things are just a bit more serious, but no less amusing.  (I dare you to find a white lawn jockey – I did!)

–Sophia Smith

Read interview here.

Filed Under: After the Falls, My Memoirs, Too Close to the Falls

Podcast: BlogTalkRadio, “Who You Calling Old?”

January 6, 2015 By Catherine Gildiner

blog talk radio "who you calling old" program mastheadJoin us as we talk with author Catherine Gildiner who at age 12 moved with her family from her Niagara Falls home to a Buffalo suburb, leaving behind a family business, small town contentment, and the rebellious childhood chronicled in her first memoir, Too Close to the Falls. While her uprooted parents struggle to adjust, Gildiner stumbles in making new friends and edging into puberty. Her restlessness and a fundamentally outspoken and argumentative nature regularly catapult her further than simple teenage trouble, and she frequently fails at the standard American girlhood, often with comic results. The conflicts between the narrator’s individuality and conformity propel her into her first relationship at the same time that the seismic shifts in American society, culture, and politics hit home with ever-increasing force. Tune in as she talks with us about her life and the experience of living in the sixties.

Filed Under: After the Falls, My Book Talks

Book Review: “After the Falls”, Welland Tribune

January 4, 2015 By Catherine Gildiner

welland tribune masthead
– GEORGE DUMA/For The Tribune, Friday, December 18, 2009

PORT COLBORNE – Catherine Gildiner is pretty much an adopted local.

The Toronto-based author was born in Lewiston, N.Y., in 1948, raised in Niagara Falls, N.Y., then spent her teen years and early 20s in Amherst, just outside of Buffalo.

During all that time, she spent 13 summers at Wainfleet’s Long Beach.

On Thursday, Gildiner was the fourth author to grace the Roselawn Centre stage during this season’s Canadian Authors’ Series. It was her third time here during the past seven years. This time she was reading from her latest autobiographical novel, After The Falls.

The book is a sequel to her first novel, Too Close To The Falls, which chronicled her life from the ages of four to her early teens and which was the focus of Gildiner’s first visit to Roselawn. She has also been in town to read from her novel, Seduction, which looked at Charles Darwin’s influence on Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: After the Falls, Book Reviews

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The 411 On Me

Best-selling author. Psychologist. Raconteur. Three memoirs. One novel and counting. Made in the US, imported to Canada. Toronto urbanite and Creemore farm hand.
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Coming Ashore Reviews



"Gildiner depicts herself as a hard-headed, risk-taking young woman who spoke her mind and fully embraced life. For readers, following that life is an irresistible roller-coaster ride full of humor, wise insights, and poignant reflections."
- Publishers Weekly

"...much of Gildiner’s gift as a storyteller is her ability to imbue anecdotes with hefty doses of humour."
- Quill and Quire

"This is the third memoir I’ve read by Catherine Gildiner and I hope it won’t be the last. Although in the preface she says that this is the final book, I’ll continue to hope she changes her mind."
- Goodreads

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