Catherine Gildiner: A writer with a quest for life

Her street is lined with big old trees that block out the hot afternoon sun and her front step is crammed with overflowing flowerpots. I had just read Catherine Gildiner’s latest book, Too Close to the Falls (ECW press, 1999). It is a memoir on her years as a young girl from age four to 14 in Lewiston, New York. The chapter that stood out most was one in which she tells of stabbing a bully with her compass while in public school. I wasn’t sure what sort of woman she might have turned into over the years, but was indeed interested in meeting her.

She greeted me at the door in bare feet, her eyes lighting up her warm smile. Her hair is short-cropped and tousled. She looks younger than the photo on the back cover of her memoir, probably because she carries a hearty vitality in her eyes. She is a woman in good shape and credits it to her participation on a rowing team. I followed her through the front hall and kitchen to her backyard where we sat in the shade and spoke over a cool drink.

What I learned over the course of the afternoon is that Catherine Gildiner doesn’t realise how funny she is. She answers my questions concerning her life in a factual voice and wonders why I find the image of her swinging completely over her swing set at the age of 4 surprising. She explains that back then the swing sets did not have the safety stops that they now do and that she has never broken a single bone in her body. Despite tobogganing down the Niagara escarpment and almost freezing to death, the only harm she has suffered was frostbite, bruises and a battered ego.

As an only child of two elderly parents, Gildiner grew up a little differently than most, working from the age of four in her father’s pharmacy and “delivering narcotics across Niagara county.” She has a fresh, yet practical, outlook on the world around her.

Eccentricities filled her life, starting with a mother who refused to cook, which meant that all of their meals were in restaurants and they never had food in the house. At one point in her memoir she describes eating a year-old sample box of cereal that came in the mail on a day when a snowstorm had closed all the restaurants.

After working for over 20 years as a psychologist she grew restless because she no longer found her work challenging. She decided to write about her life as a child and see how her first book did, thinking that once she wrote a book she could call herself a writer. Too Close to the Falls was on the Globe and Mail’s best sellers list for two years and also on the best sellers lists in the U.S.

Gildiner is strong and inquisitive and quite a good storyteller. She seems to draw strength from understanding the world around her. She analyzes people, characters and personalities and, although I was interviewing her, she asked almost as many questions as I did. She is a conversationalist, learning from the stories of others and passing on what she knows in the stories she tells.

Gildiner has just finished her latest novel, Seduction, which is about Darwin’s influence on Freud, a sort of detective thriller about intellectual history. She did her PhD on Darwin’s influence on Freud and wanted to explore some ideas she had about their relationship. It was picked up by Random House and should be out in February 2005. She tells me that she didn’t think the first line of Seduction was funny but her editors laughed when they read it. It starts, “It is embarrassing to admit but I forgot why I killed my first husband.”

With a title like Seduction, I asked Gildiner what she thought of romance. “Romance is wonderful and I love watching it in movies. I, however, have to admit the truth is I have never been very good at creating that atmosphere myself. I might start out with the idea of a candlelit dinner for two, but deep down I’d rather go kayaking with my partner. When I think about it I guess I see romance as two people doing what they enjoy together.”

Gildiner is currently writing a sequel to her memoir, which will cover her life from age 15 to 25. When I asked if the sequel would focus on her departure from being a tomboy to becoming a woman she replied that she “is still working on the woman part.” But then aren’t we all?