After the Falls

October 4, 2010
At age 12, Gildiner and her family moved from their Niagara Falls home to a Buffalo suburb, leaving behind a family business, smalltown contentment, and the rebellious childhood chronicled in her first memoir, Too Close to the Falls. While her uprooted parents struggle to adjust, Gildiner stumbles in making new friends and edging into puberty. Her restlessness and a fundamentally outspoken and argumentative nature regularly catapult her further than simple teenage trouble, and she frequently fails at the standard American girlhood, often with comic results. The conflicts between the narrator's individuality and conformity propel her into her first relationship at the same time that the seismic shifts in American society, culture, and politics hit home with ever-increasing force. On the page as in life, comedy, tragedy, and elegy live right on top of each other, and as with most remarkable memoirs, the straightforward, honest voice and perspective are steady even in the most painful moments.

August 15, 2010

This sequel to Too Close to the Falls (2001) picks up the story in 1960 with the willful, exuberant 12-year-old author entering adolescence and exiting small-town Lewiston, N.Y., for a new life in a Buffalo suburb.

A former clinical psychologist, Gildiner is also a gifted storyteller. With verve, she relates how she cleverly manipulated her way into the popular girls' clique in high school, how she nearly burned down the doughnut shop where she worked and how her plan to paint the neighborhood lawn jockeys white went awry. She also writes about her disappointment when bad acne kept her, a talented athlete, from making the cheerleading team. In one grim episode, she and a girlfriend spied on a fraternity meeting, becoming stunned witnesses to a gang rape. In the second half of the book, the author chronicles her college years in Ohio—coping with roommates, making friends and encountering sororities, which at first she was determined to join, but which she soon characterized as bastions of a social conservatism that she abhorred. This experience and her observations of racial discrimination politicized the author. Gildiner's summer job with a state welfare department opened her eyes to a malfunctioning system, and her romantic relationship with a somewhat elusive black poet and her work with civil rights brought her into contact with the black power movement. Disillusionment followed, and a scary brush with the FBI prompted her to accept a professor's offer to help her get away from Ohio and into the University of Oxford. Throughout, the author examines her fraught relationship with her father, to whom she had been close as a child. It was his criticism of her flirtatious behavior with a boy that shaped her skeptical attitude toward boys throughout her high-school years and probably later still. But when her father was diagnosed with a brain tumor and began to lose his mind, Gildiner stepped in to protect him from himself. The author's relationship with her mother, a superficially conforming prefeminist, seems sympathetic but somewhat unclear.

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October 1, 2010
In this follow-up to Gildiners first memoir, Too Close to the Falls (2001), which became a surprise best-seller, she details the familys move from small-town Lewiston, New York, to a Buffalo suburb. Used to working side-by-side with her father in the family pharmacy from the age of four, she now must refocus her considerable energy into fitting in with her peers. But once she conquers the clique of popular girls, which takes her little more than two months, she moves on to land a job in a gritty, working-class doughnut shop, which she almost burns to the ground. The second half of her memoir deals with her experiences at Ohio State University, where she enters into a romance with a black football player and becomes involved in civil rights work, which leads to a frightening encounter with the FBI. Her relationship with her father, once so close, becomes frayed until she realizes he is suffering from a severe health issue that requires her help. Throughout, the authors offbeat attitude, born of her unusual upbringing and wide-ranging experiences, proves to be charming, amusing, and even inspirational.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)