Gildiner takes second trip to 'The Falls'

“After the Falls’’ introduces us to Gildiner’s deeply personal vision of the tumultuous ’60s. Backed with a cornucopia of culture images, from the Kennedy assassination to the Vietnam War, Gildiner provides a pitch-perfect soundtrack, everything from the heart-pounding time she watched the Beatles’ first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show’’ to the protest songs of Joan Baez.

When the book begins, the economy has tanked and the beloved family pharmacy where the author worked alongside her father is no more. The Gildiners are all shuffling off to the Buffalo suburbs, where her father will work for a large drug company and her mother, who doesn’t cook, clean, or hold a job, will run their tiny little bungalow and be her daughter’s best friend.

Gildiner chronicles how she comes of age and begins to break away from the father she used to adore in a voice so conversational you feel as if you’re sitting across from her at the local diner, talking over a vanilla Coke. Zooming from one hilarious misadventure to another, she describes how she stealth-paints offensive suburban lawn jockeys, works at a restaurant where she unknowingly serves Howard Johnson himself, and in one harrowing episode with a friend, bears witness to two boys abusing a classmate in a darkened rec room.

And just when the book begins to seem a tad too episodic, Gildiner’s father is diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor. He begins to forget more and more and his speech becomes jumbled. He takes their money and invests it in worthless businesses, including growing potatoes out of garbage. Terrified, Gildiner doesn’t want to leave her father to head off to college, but her mother insists.

While Gildiner worries about her father, she battles the culture shock of sororities, navigates the murky road of sex, and sees first-hand a shattering drug casualty. When she writes an essay about an oppressive judge, she wins a contest and meets Laurie Coal, a handsome black man, poet, and college football star. Together they become involved in civil rights demonstrations, attend the fireworks of the Chicago Democratic convention, and deal with the dangerous politics of being an interracial couple. In the thick of the Black Power movement, dark and tragic secrets burn to the surface, and Gildiner must begin to understand her father, her lover, herself, and her family in a whole new way.

But this is so much more than a coming-of-age memoir. If anything, it’s about learning how to connect, how to be a daughter as well as a young woman in your own right. As Gildiner’s father begins to feel the impact of his brain cancer more and more, she comes to understand that the real tragedy of her life lies in her failure to keep connected with this decent, loving man who wanted the best for her and the world, because she was “trapped in teenage rage the same time her father was losing his mind.’’

Moving (you will need tissues), spirited, fierce, and funny, Gildiner delves into the bonds of family and love, all in a voice so infectious I’d follow it anywhere.

Caroline Leavitt’s novel “Pictures of You’’ will be published by Algonquin Books in January. She can be reached at www.carolineleavitt.com.