Q&A with Catherine Gildiner

Catherine Gildiner is the author of After the Falls: Coming of Age in the Sixties (Viking Adult 2010) and Too Close to the Falls (Penguin 2002).

Q: In the book, After the Falls, you express a lot of regret about the breakdown in your relationship with your father as you became an adolescent. Was writing about it an exercise in healing?

A: It certainly was an exercise in healing. However, before the healing I had to lance the wound and that was difficult. I had to bring up all of the old events that infected our lives and relive them. When I wrote After The Falls, I was often surprised by what my fingers were typing. I had no idea before I started the book that so much of it would be about my father. I was shocked when I recounted the ‘Donny Donnybrook episode’ by how truly insignificant the event was. Yet it set off years of my refusing to speak to my dad. The job of a teenager is—when all is said and done—is to break away from her parents. I guess when you have to break away from your father, any small event can cause a schism. I mean was the Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the real cause of World War 1 or was it just an excuse to change allegiances?

I was almost into automatic writing when I had Roy, the black delivery car driver I worked with as a child, come back as a vision to soothe my guilt. I was forgiving myself when Roy forgave me for my cruelty. He said that relationships are about a lifetime, not just a few short months or years. Of course Roy never said that since he was long gone, but I knew if he had been with me in Buffalo during my teenage angst, he would have said that. I think we can all imagine what our closest relative or friend would say about almost any situation. I forgave myself through the vision of Roy who forgave me. One of the joys of being a writer is you can write your own forgiveness!

Lots of people who read the book have written to me to say they hated their parents when they were teenagers and then by the time they were in their twenties they were again close. I never had the opportunity to know my father when I was an adult. I lost my dad before my rebellious years were over. Mark Twain described the teenage interlude perfectly. He said when he was a boy of fourteen, his father was so ignorant he could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when he got to be twenty-one, he was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

Q: I loved your description of bell-bottoms. When you first encountered them, you seemed disoriented by their appearance. Do you still slip on a pair once and a while and remember the sixties?

A: I never slip on a pair and I got rid of all mine since they would now fit a q-tip. I have read that they have come back (but then again so does your supper after a bad evening). My most vivid memory of them is how they were so long they always got shredded on the ground and they were so wide at the bottom they got caught in my bicycle wheels. When you wore the tight ones you looked like a moving stove pipe. I don’t really understand why we can’t let sleeping togs lie.

Q: Was there a part in particular that you found difficult to recount, either because your memory of it is foggy, or because it was painful to recall?

A: Well, this is rather embarrassing to admit but I guess once you have written a memoir you have already hung out your laundry. I wrote the book and sent it to my best high school friend to read. She returned it with a note that said, ‘Where is the cheerleading episode?’ I wrote back insisting that getting kicked off the cheerleading squad for having severe acne by the teacher who was the advisor was, in the overall scheme of things, not a big deal. My friend, Leora in the book, said that it was a huge deal and that it was so humiliating because the whole school knew about it. Also, it was the first time that an adult had done something cruel to me. In fact, he was doing what he thought was ‘best for the squad.’

I think the real reason I not only didn’t include the incident in the book, and never even thought of including it, was because it made me appear vulnerable. Parents raise the child they want to have (in most cases) and mine raised me to be feisty and a person who grabbed hold of my own destiny. That is why I had no trouble discussing when I almost was arrested over the black lawn jockeys or the donut fire. In each of those cases I was pursuing my destiny, not taking guff from anyone. However, the cheerleading episode was different. In fact I was so humiliated, I never told my mother about it and I shared most things with her. I had no recourse and I couldn’t shake my fist and get my way. I had to crawl away in defeat and my scarlet A was all over my face. Once I realized that I had unconsciously left the cheerleading episode out because it didn’t match the fantasy or memory of who I was, I realized I needed to include it.

Q: The sixties were a time of massive social change. Looking at more recent generations, do you think that activism was a product of the time, or an internal impulse that’s alive and well in young people today?

A: There is always activism and social change happening. (My son, speaking of social change, is presently on a legal commission in Serra Leone in Africa.) However, I think that today it simmers on a back burner where in the 60’s it boiled front and centre in many of us and for some it boiled over. Since I went to school in America I was privy to soldiers who came back from Vietnam either physically or mentally crushed. It was the first time we had TV coverage of a war and the napalming of villages, etc. We needed to demonstrate and stop the war. It was as many of the books have said, ‘an unjust war’.

Race in America had reached the tipping point. The desegregation and the busing of the fifties and the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education set the ball in motion. Martin Luther King kept the momentum through his peaceful resistance and sit-ins. The tide had turned and King had won over substantial numbers of white voters. Blacks had been waiting for things to change since the legislation of the 50s. By the 60’s blacks were impatient for the change they were promised. I am proud to say that I lived and demonstrated in the 60’s—an era when there was more social legislation than in any other era.

Then there was the thunder of the feminist movement. Many of our mothers had gone to college and yet they were still dependent on a man for everything. They had gone to college but were given no power after they graduated. They went to college as the 50’s slogan goes ‘to get their Mrs.’ However, with education and the vote which had only been granted in 1929, there was quiet ferment. Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem tapped into a consciousness that was brimming with dissatisfaction. The feminist movement was one of the most exciting times of my life (described in my next volume).

When I talk to many young women today they seem to have the idea that most necessary social change has happened. My son’s girlfriend says that what bothers her about feminists and women of her mother’s era (which is my era as well) is how angry we are. She has no idea what it was like to be harassed on a job with no recourse or to receive half of the salary of a man for the same job. Those battles have been won for her. When I took the law boards I was the only girl in a room of hundreds. In my son’s recent law class the females outnumber the males. It is hard to remember how far we have come in such a short time.

I think eras like the 60’s only come along once in a while when the historical kindling is set and it only takes a match to set it aflame. Probably in another 50 years there will be another revolution of social change when the issues on the back burner have to be attended to.

Q: This is your second book of memoirs, and moves from childhood, which you wrote about in Too Close to the Falls, into adolescence. Did you have diaries to defer to on such a feat of writing?

A: I don’t have any diaries of any kind. I was way too busy to have a diary. I always worked, went to school and had tons of sports to do. I do, however, have a good memory for the past. Don’t ask me about the present because at 62 I have nominal aphasia. The other day I forgot two of my son’s names so I just called them ‘the twins’.

When I taught memoir writing at the Banff School for the Creative Arts, I made the point to the students that you really don’t have to remember the details of your life. Most of them are boring. When you look at a book like Too Close To The Falls, for example, there are twelve events in that book. I relate those events and tie them together with characters. Nearly everyone can remember twelve events in their lives. It is especially easy if you think of developmental moments. (Moments when you were learning something new about the world.) I think being a psychologist for 25 years in private practice helped me to realize that there are certain moments that everyone remembers. If you ask yourself the following questions, you will be able to write your memoirs:

1. Most traumatic memory and work backwards
Finding out about the Priest and the sex with my classmate.
2. First time you realized that not all of the world is like your own home
Mad bear’s house for the beating.
3. First time you realized your parents were not always right
Handling the bully.
4. First sexual memory
Marilyn Monroe and Roy at the hotel.
5. First aggressive memory—bully or bullied
Hair pulling episode where I stabbed Anthony MacDougal and he was hospitalized.

In After The Falls, second memoir of my teenage years, I have again only addressed about ten episodes. Teen years are all about the following:
1. Breaking away from your parents—struggles with father
2. Peer pressure—sorority, Leora
3. Puberty and its effect—acne and refusing to date
4. Rebel—paint garden lawn jockeys
5. Independence and its consequences—wild boy in car accident and paraplegic girl
6. First job—donut fire and Howard Johnson’s
7. First love and its demise—Laurie and the marriage
8. Going from girlhood to womanhood—taking care of my father instead of the other way around
9. Confront death—father’s brain tumour
10. Career—go off to Oxford

I have no idea why people think they have to remember the boring minutiae of their past life. Really you only have to ask yourself the important questions about joy and tragedy and growth moments in your life and you too will have a memoir.

- Rhianon Huot

Catherine will be on tour from November 3-10. Her tour schedule can be found at: http://gildiner.com/appearances.html

Congratulations to Kate Robinson – our book giveaway winner!

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