Catherine Gildiner, author of After The Falls, speaks candidly about her coming of age memoir.

Q: Too Close To The Falls, your childhood memoir was written in 1999 and was successful. What made you decide to wait 10 years to publish your coming of age memoir, After The Falls?

A:  I published Too Close To The Falls with a small publisher and I had to hit the ground running. I spent a few years doing massive publicity to get the book known and sold around the world. I was my own publicity machine which worked well; however, it took years out of my writing time.  I also spent four years writing Seduction, my thriller about Freud and Darwin. It involved a lot of research and was difficult to write.

Then I started the second volume of my memoirs, After The Falls. When I finished, it was over 1000 pages in length. My editor helped me cut it down to a size that no longer competed with War And Peace.  It took a long time to write that huge book and then much longer to cut it down to less than half.

Q: In After The Falls, some of the moments you write about are extremely personal. Is there any incident that you wish you had not included?

A: No. If I had not wanted to include something I wouldn’t have.

In fact, I gave a copy of the manuscript to someone from my high school to read and she said that I should have included the ‘cheerleading episode’ which I had left out. She was right. It was an important episode and I had chosen to leave it out probably because I was still wounded and humiliated by it almost 50 years later. So, although it was painful I included it. I had no trouble writing about my arrests and unkindness to my parents and others; therefore, I think this episode was difficult to write about because I was in the role of ‘victim’ or ‘helpless’ which I have always found reprehensible.

Q: A great deal of your memoir has to do with how you dealt with the deterioration of your father’s health. Your role in the family changed from daughter to caregiver. You had to make some really serious decisions. Was it challenging to write about your relationship with your father?

A: It was difficult in some ways and cathartic in others. It was difficult to call to mind how unkind I was to him for so many years, and then when he lost his mind there was no way to make up. I had even forgotten the horrible visit to the bank with the police, intervention. It was really painful not only remembering it but then having to write it.  However, as I wrote the book I began forgiving myself and used the words of my friend Roy, who said that ‘a relationship is measured over a life time–not a few years’.  As I wrote, I saw myself as the young confused teenager that I was at the time.

Q:  You grew up in the 1960’s, which was a very exciting time in America, and you had some unique experiences. What was the best part of coming of age in the 1960’s?

A: The best part of the 60′s was the sense of possibility. No matter how naive we were, we believed in change. I loved working on civil rights and in fact there was more civil rights legislation passed in the 60′s than at any other time. The political unrest mattered. We DID get out of Vietnam. Feminism DID take hold.

Even though there was the Kennedy and King assassinations, riots in the streets, and the Chicago riot at the democratic convention there was a lot of hope. We woke up every day thinking that if we worked on social change, we could change the world.

Q: Will there be a third memoir?

A: The third memoir is almost finished. It is tentatively titled, The Long Way Home. It has three parts. The first is about my years at Oxford in England during the swinging Carnaby Street era. The second is about my life in Cleveland, Ohio during the Hough area riots when we were escorted to school by the National Guard. The last third is about coming to the University of Toronto and my life in Canada where I have remained.

*After The Falls is scheduled to be released in the US on November 1, 2010 by Viking. For more information please visit http://www.gildiner.com/