Some of her friends did not make it, their lives ruined by war, drugs, drunk driving and other scourges of the young. Cathy emerges intact on the other side of adolescence, though not without emotional scars.
"It would take all I had to maintain my balance," she writes early on. Gildiner's gifts shine again in After the Falls, which picks up Cathy's story as she moves into the years of teen rage and young adulthood. Gildiner, it was clear, had the rare skill of being able to present a child's worldview in an adult's voice, overlaid with an adult's knowledge and judgment. It was a wise and funny book, populated with memorable characters, not least among them Roy, the illiterate black delivery man at her father's drugstore, from whom she learned important life lessons. Too Close to the Falls was about an exuberant only child raised by eccentric parents in the 1950s, a decade that was anything but sterile or conformist for those in Cathy's orbit. She recounted her childhood in "Too Close to the Falls," an enchanting memoir that became a best seller after its publication in 1999. She was 12 years old and had just been thrown out of a Catholic school in Lewiston, N.Y., a village perched on the rock face along the Niagara River, close enough to the Falls to see the mist rising from its mighty waters. When last we left Catherine Gildiner, née McClure, it was 1960.
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