Leaving Lewiston is next chapter for author

Features

November 1, 2010

Author of bestseller to hold Niagara Falls book signing

By Michele Deluca Niagara Gazette The Niagara Gazette Mon Nov 01, 2010, 11:57 PM EDT

NIAGARA FALLS — Catherine Gildiner’s first book about growing up in the Niagara region made it to the New York Times best seller list about 10 years ago.

She is practical about the amazing success of “Too Close to the Falls,” noting that while many people seemed to enjoy her stories, she also had to work her you-know-what off to drive the book to the prestigious top ten list. She traveled throughout the US visiting about 200 book clubs to introduce her work to readers. It wasn’t a tour supported by her publisher, Penguin, but she simply felt it was a sensible way to get her pages into the hands of people who love to turn them.

“I’ve worked full-time since I was four, so I know how to work,” she said during a recent telephone interview from her home in Toronto.

That unusual aside might actually be part of the reason her first book was such an amazing success. Her stories include her early childhood in Lewiston when her family is advised to cure her dangerous penchant for tree climbing by putting her to work in the family’s Niagara Falls drug store.

Working in her father’s pharmacy, she traveled throughout the city with Roy to deliver products to customers. She and Roy, a black man, lunched every day in different city taverns and met a clientele that ran the sociological gamut from local prostitutes to Hollywood movie star Marilyn Monroe when she filmed “Niagara” at the falls.

“Ten years after I wrote ‘Too Close to the Falls’ I was getting hundreds of letters from people who wanted to know what happened next,” she said.

What actually happened next, she said, was that the Robert Moses Power Project and the new parkway which diverted all the traffic from her father’s store which he was forced to close.

The family moved from a beautiful old home in Lewiston to a tiny bungalow in Amherst and Gildiner attended Amherst High School during which time among her tribulations, she was arrested for organizing a movement to paint the faces white on all the little ceramic lawn jockeys in the city. She also accidentally set a doughnut shop on fire and later, joined the civil rights movement.

This sequel is called “After the Falls,” and she describes it as being “basically about a life in the 60s, and a very naive girl who wants to better the world.”

Gildiner, who will be attending a book signing at 2 p.m. Saturday at The Book Corner, 1801 Main St., has at least one more book in her about her life.

She plans to write a third volume about the period she spent pursuing a master degree at Oxford University in England.

What she will most likely not write about is her life in Toronto where she works as a psychologist and where she has raised three sons with her radiologist husband.

“There will be nothing about my children or my husband,” Gildiner laughed. “They’ve been very clear about that.”

Contact reporter Michele DeLuca

at 282-2311, ext. 2263.

“When I was working at my dad’s store in Niagara Falls, I would wander over to the falls and get cooled off by the spray. I couldn’t imagine not being near the rising clouds of mist that parted to reveal the perpetually optimistic rainbow.”

From “After the Falls”

by bestselling author

Catherine Gildiner

Text Only | Photo Reprints

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