It’s a shame that in the preface to Coming Ashore, author Catherine Gildiner tells the reader that this, the third volume of her memoirs, will be her last.

As you finish the book, you want to shout back, “Just when it was getting interesting!”

This, actually, would be unfair. It was  interesting from the get-go, which is why saying goodbye to the sassy, sharp-tongued Cathy McClure is so difficult.

It’s hard to explain the allure of McClure, now Gildiner. Why would the first 20-some years in the life of a successful but otherwise unremarkable Toronto psychologist warrant three books? And more importantly why would they be critically acclaimed bestsellers?

The best answer is that Gildiner is an artful storyteller. It’s not that her childhood and youth were especially noteworthy, but she did have interesting experiences, and it’s these episodes that she cultivates to the fullest.

For instance, in her first book, Too Close to the Falls, which focuses on her childhood years, she mentions coming across a half-naked Marilyn Monroe while delivering pharmaceuticals from her father’s shop in New York State

In Coming Ashore, which picks up her memoirs from the age of 20 or so in the late 1960s, she comes across a youthful Bill Clinton and hippie-icon Jimi Hendrix.

Coming Ashore starts at Oxford University, the prestigious English school she attends on a scholarship just after the events of the second book, After the Falls, which focuses on her turbulent teenage years.

One evening, with her college dorm mates (all men except for another American expat, Margaret-Ann), she decides to take a trip to London, which in the late ’60s, was rivalled only by San Francisco for its hip, counter-culture lifestyle.

At a small club to see Eric Burdon and the Animals, they happen to see “a thin black man in a large black felt hat with a feather in it” jump onstage holding a guitar and playing Foxy Lady. That man is Jimi Hendrix, who while huge in America, is only just making it big in England.

It doesn’t end there. Several months later, her roommate Margaret-Ann, a somewhat pious, and overbearing young woman, confesses to her that she has cancer, and wants Cathy’s help in losing her virginity before she dies. And she wants it to be with Jimi Hendrix.

The amazing thing is, after finding out his routine after gigs, they are able to pull the feat off. (OK, knowing the Hendrix legend, maybe it’s not so amazing, after all!)

One day, Cathy gets talked into participating in one of the riverboat races that elite English colleges are particularly renowned for. 

At one point in the race, Cathy’s boat gets “bumped,” and they have to pull aside and let the other boat behind them pass. But a man watching “with curly hair and a scraggly beard” who’s just a few feet away on the bank cups his hands and yells in a southern American drawl, “There are no officials here, keep going.”

She meets with and talks to this young American “with the Allen Ginsberg beard” after the race. She later learns he is at another college and is planning a big anti-Vietnam war rally. His name is Bill Clinton.

Gildiner has a wicked sense of humour at times, but she can also be a bit preachy.

Several times, she gets into discussions with her upper-class English dorm mates about the  “stultifying” class system, and you feel like yelling, “Oy, she’s such an annoying American.”

This oppressive class structure is one of the reasons she leaves Oxford, and soon, after a brief tenure as a teacher at an inner city school in Cleveland, she winds up doing a PhD on Samuel Coleridge at the University of Toronto.

After a short spell at Rochdale College, Toronto’s notorious downtown student co-op, she meets Michael, and leaves Rochdale to move in with him.

One day, he drives her to his parents’ apartment at Bathurst and Wilson in Toronto. It’s the first time in her life she is in a Jewish neighbourhood. “Nearly all the men we passed were wearing small skullcaps with bobby pins holding them on… Then we passed men who looked like they were extras in Fiddler on the Roof… These men had long curls on the sides of their faces as though they had set one piece of hair in a pin curl and it had unfurled.”

As she makes disparaging remarks abut the men and the women in wigs, Michael finally tells her that his parents are from Poland and lived though the war. “We lived with my grandparents, who looked exactly like these people.”

Cathy, a Catholic girl from New York State,  is confused. It’s then she realizes that her Jewish girlfriends growing up in suburban America were different from these first-generation immigrants, descendants of Holocaust survivors from eastern Europe. Her Jewish friends had Christmas trees, she tells him. 

“I would never have a Christmas tree,” he tells her.

Things don’t go so well at his parents’ home either. Later, she hears Michael’s friend tell him that his mother is “sitting shivah now that you’re dating a shiksa.” Looking up the words in a Yiddish dictionary, she understands that essentially Michael’s friend has told him, “You are going out with a detested thing, and your mother will mourn your death.”

Of interest to us is that shortly after this, she gets invited to his aunt’s for Passover. “No one else was there,” Gildiner writes, “except for one couple sitting in the corner of this cavernous room. The man was reading The Canadian Jewish News, and the woman was sitting primly, clutching her purse on her lap.”

Alas, out of respect for the privacy of those still living, she decided to end her memoirs at that stage. So we’ll never read about her conversion to Judaism and marriage to Michael Gildiner. 

Which is unfortunate, because no doubt Gildiner would have spun a wonderful tale about it – and who knows  who she would have run into at her wedding?