One Bumptious Blonde

Those readers who enjoyed Catherine Gildiner’s best-selling memoirs of her childhood and adolescence will be delighted to see Coming Ashore, the third in her series, a vivid retelling of her years as a young woman in the late 1960s and early ’70s. They will also be disappointed to learn that this volume is her last in that series.

The reason she is stopping? It is a good bet it is not because the author’s life gets less full of incident after age 27; by the end of book three, we are well acquainted with Gildiner’s remarkable tendency to encounter, shall we say, lively events. No, this is the last in the series, she explains, because she does not feel entitled to describe the thoughts and feelings of those fellow travellers—husband and children, we assume, among others—who have since entered her life; not, at least, in the subjective terms she needs to write her own memoir. As...