INTRODUCTION It''s 1960 and twelve-year-old Cathy McClure has just been thrown out of Catholic school for--among other transgressions--filling the holy water font with vodka. In the hopes of giving Cathy a fresh start, her parents decide to leave their small-town life in Lewiston, New York--a town near Niagara Falls brought to life in Catherine Gildiner''s first memoir, Too Close to the Falls --bidding farewell to the family business, lifelong friends, and the only home Cathy''s ever known. Arriving in suburban Buffalo, Cathy''s sardonic mother dubs their new surroundings "Tinytown." Life in a subdivision and a school filled with "pubescent cheddar" holds little appeal for a girl who began working at four and smoking at nine. While adjusting to life in Buffalo, Cathy''s relationship with her father also experiences growing pains. His 1950s-era ideal of how a young woman should behave often clashes--sometimes painfully--with Cathy''s increasingly complex, passionate notions of her own development. Gildiner recounts the infamous "Donnybrook" incident, a harbinger of turmoil to come, when Cathy''s father roughly intervenes upon catching her giddily flirting with an older boy on the steps of the church. It is the first time he has seen Cathy as more than his little girl, and the experience is traumatic for both of them.
Her father admonishes her by saying, "Girls that chase boys come to a bad end. You looked like the kind of girl I don''t want for my daughter" (p. 24). His hurtful words begin a rift in their relationship that only grows with time. Cathy struggles with her burgeoning womanhood. Popularity is paramount in high school and Cathy tries to be liked while also striving to be a smart aleck. She develops different personas--neighborhood vandal, Howard Johnson''s hostess, FBI suspect, civil rights demonstrator--with plenty of confidence and a bit of false bravado. As she gains her footing and turns her attentions to the twin pursuits of social equality and financial independence, Cathy begins to take on the real world in Buffalo and beyond.
At the very moment she''s about to step outside the confines of Tinytown, however, tragedy strikes at home. Her father''s erratic behavior escalates into strange new territory and Cathy must step up to the task of caring both for him and her sheltered mother. Against the backdrop of the tumultuous ''60s--the assassinations of John F. and Bobby Kennedy, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War--Catherine Gildiner gives us a deeply personal, moving and often hilarious portrait of her life in her signature irresistible voice. ABOUT CATHERINE GILDINER Catherine Gildiner has been in private practice in clinical psychology for nearly twenty years. She writes a monthly advice column for Chatelaine, a popular Canadian magazine, and contributes regularly to countless other Canadian newspapers and magazines. She lives in Toronto with her husband and three sons. A CONVERSATION WITH CATHERINE GILDINER Q.
Do you think your father''s illness brought you and your mother closer together, or did it actually allow you to separate yourself from your family? My mother and I were always close. I think that my father''s illness made us even closer because we had a shared problem that we had to solve together. I took it over initially and at the end of his life, but she filled in for years in between. We both had to make sacrifices together. We often used black humor to get us through the rough parts. When one of us was at a low, the other would crack a macabre joke so we could go on. I had to deal with my father''s anger, which she found too hard to bear. She, however, sold her beloved collection of Niagara Falls lithographs in order to make the money for me to get away to college and then England.
We both did what we could to help the other. In answer to your question, which I noticed I haven''t answered, I don''t think my father''s illness per se helped me separate from my family, but his illness put me on the fast track to adulthood. There is no room for adolescent rebellion when the family is in the midst of trauma. Q. You vividly describe how shame "becomes part of you" (p. 26). You say that "for the rest of your life . the forked tongue of shame is there.
" Do you still feel the residual shame or after effects of the "Donny Donnybrook" to this day? I had misbehaved in my childhood on many occasions and my father had called me to task. He had always used his intellectual faculties to correct me while remaining dispassionate. However, on the Donnybrook occasion he used full throttle rage. If a parent has never once been angry with you in your whole life, when he finally blows up--you listen. When a parent acts as though you have shamed yourself the feeling is permanently engraved on your memory. I think I have the act of flirting and feeling of shame filed in the same neuron of my brain. Whenever men approached me, I shied away thinking that I had committed some untoward act to entice them. There are a few exceptions to that rule, but very few.
However pathetic this may seem, the taboo against flirting is still with me and I am in my sixties! Of course flirting is a rare event today. Yet once in a while some randy geriatric in Florida comes a-courtin''. It brings back all of the old feelings from the Donnybrook episode and I think I have behaved as some Jezebel. I always shut the whole situation down as fast as possible. I think that when you spend too much time with a parent it becomes much more difficult to separate. My father''s anger was inappropriate; however I didn''t know that at the time. I assumed since he had never been truly angry before, I must have done some really outrageously bad thing that not only humiliated myself, but also shamed the McClure name. Freud is right in this case.
The first sexual memory you have is a powerful one. Also we, as civilized humans, have a sexual instinct and most taboos in our society, particularly in the ''50s and early ''60s involved curbing sexual behavior. Later when I was doing a PhD in psychology and I read Civilization and Its Discontents , I was fascinated to read about how in order for civilization to work it needed sexual taboos. Q. The rape of Veronica Nebozenko is horrifying to read about--and it must have been much worse to witness. Did you ever consider telling your parents or any other adults about it at the time? How has your thinking about that incident changed in the intervening years? It was much worse than I described it. One of my best editors told me she could not finish the chapter because it was so horrific so I took out some of the most graphic details. I wanted the reader to be as repulsed as I was while watching the scene.
However, to the surprise of no one, I went overboard. I never thought of telling my parents about this event for several reasons both practical and psychological. First, no one should ever be a snitch. Second, those boys would have done something really bad to me if they knew I told on them. Third, we were not supposed to be hiding in a closet while they had their meeting. We were told very clearly not to go downstairs. I was the one who wanted to see the "workings of the American male"--always better left uninvestigated. On a psychological level, as strange as this seems, I did not tell my parents because I did not want them, mostly my mother, to know that such things existed in the world.
I thought it was my job to protect her from untoward events. I also remained mute because I somehow felt psychologically complicit in the event. My father had recently told me that I was "not the kind of girl he wanted for a daughter" over the flirting episode. I somehow felt I had been as pathetic and wanton as Veronica. Our mutual shame bound me to silence. My thinking on the incident has not changed much over the years. At the time I wondered how Veronica could fool herself into believing that those boys loved her. It puzzled me that she could be so naïve.
As an adult and a psychologist I see Veronica''s plight slightly differently. Her sense of self was so distorted that she did not believe anyone could love her other than in this degraded situation. I now know that we are all imperfect and see the world through our own past experiences. We are all simply trying to make it through life dragging our baggage with us. It can be an impossibly heavy load. I now don''t judge Veronica. I honestly pity her. What has surprised me is the readers reaction to the Veronica chapter.
Many readers, mostly younger than myself (which is most of the world), were shocked that those boys were not arrested for rape. These young readers believed, despite the fact that Veronica consented to that degradation, that those boys could be arrested for rape today. The women who shared these views mostly came of age after the feminist and the sexual revolution. I really wanted to include this chapter for two reasons. I not only wanted to tell my story but the story of my era. When people read my memoir in future years I want them to know about some of the ugly by-products of the era before sexual liberation. I believe a memoir also has to be a history, albeit from a personal point of view. What is interesting about The Diary of Samuel Pepys is not his personal thoughts but the window he opens on the seventeenth century.
Second, the episode occurs when I am thirteen years old just as I am about to embark on my own dating life. Of course it scarred me. If I hadn''t included the chapter no one reading the book would have known why I refused to have anything to do with boys for the rest of my high school car.