Catherine Gildiner "When I was four years old," reminisces Catherine Gildiner, "the doctor told my parents that I was hyper-active and needed to go to work full time."

As a result of this rather strange recommendation, she said, "I went to work at the age of four for my father, who owned a drug store. My mother taught me to read so that I did the delivery rounds for the drug with a black man who drove the van. He couldn't read and I couldn't drive so we managed the deliveries between us.

She explained further, "When I went to school, I still worked. I started work at 6 in the morning and then got picked up from school at 3, 3:30, and worked again until 6."

All this is part of the autobiographical tales Ms Gildiner spins in her first book, Too Close to the Falls, of her life in Lewiston, N.Y. She recently followed that with the second volume about her life, After the Falls, about her adolescent years when she dealt with the fact that as a child working full time, she had missed out how to relate to her peers.

In the second book, she relates her technique for "worming [my] way into being a teenager." Observation and a sense of humour, it seems, were her main allies in coping with these challenges.

Ms Gildiner was concerned to relate stories from her life in the '60s and '70s, for which period there are few actual memoirs.

Her final destination of Toronto, Canada (up to this point) came via a stint of studying in Oxford, England, from which she came to Toronto, also to study, meeting the man of her life, marrying and settling here.

During her studies, she wrote her thesis for her PhD in psychology on Darwin's influence on Freud. Over her ensuing years of travel and work, doing lectures, she learned that, in Canada, at the University of Toronto, for example, Freud is not taught, due to his being an anti-feminist and, in the U.S., Darwin is not taught as being evolutionist.

As she put it, Freud was a man of his times, the mid- to late 1800's when attitudes toward women were not what it is now. Darwin's theories are disputed in the U.S. Bible belts, which does not actually diminish their veracity but keeps him out of the high school curriculum.

It seemed a pity to Ms. Gildiner for young people to lose the genius and wisdom of both these men for the sake of political correctness in the case of Freud and misguided information in the case of Darwin. As she was reluctant to have her thesis "go on a dusty shelf" she fictionalized it in a novel, Seduction.

She told me: "I wrote Seduction to push both these men forward."

Although, nowadays, Ms Gildiner works as a psychologist perhaps once a week, she is now a fulltime writer, working nine to five, five days a week. Currently, she is writing the third volume of her life's stories, which takes her from Amherst to Oxford to Toronto and her marriage here.

In recent years, she and her husband have bought a property in the country near Creemore, which they like very much. It is a working farm inasmuch as a local farmer grows crops on their fields. Picturesque and practical.

Says Ms. Gildiner, "I love the country. Of course, I was brought up in a small town near the countryside."

There are country life problems with which they are learning to deal: the wind blowing the snow across their driveway — "Sometimes we have to have the drive cleared three times in a day."

They are looking into snow fencing.

The recent storms took out five of their trees and demolished a shed so that they are looking at renovations to the house. Tightening, bracing for the winter like the rest of us.

Between writing fiction and autobiography, we agreed that in many ways, autobiography is easier to write but harder to defend. Some of the people are still alive, as Ms. Gildiner noted.

Apparently, libel relates to damage more than truth and truth is mutable when it relates to feelings and memories. Lawyers become involved and thin lines are drawn.

For her writing fiction, Ms. Gildiner is ambiguous. She would like to write another novel — a historical novel. She has been asked about writing short stories. She has a beautiful idea about telling the stories about people who have been through terrible ordeals but have chosen not to be the victims of those ordeals

"There are lots of ideas," she affirmed.

Catherine Gildiner is joining fellow authors, John Bemrose, Robert Rotenberg and Margaret Wente at BookLore's annual Armchairs, Authors and Art this Friday, October 2, at the SGI Canada Caledon Centre for Culture and Education at 20490 Porterfield Road (Peel Road 136), Alton. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., with refreshments by What's Cookin'.

Tickets at BookLore or the Festival Office 519- 943-1149.