The Book

Now Available in Paperback from Vintage Canada!
Trade Paper | November 2005 | $21.00 | 0-676-97654-9

"It's really embarrassing to admit, but I forget why I killed my husband." So begins Seduction, a smart and sassy intrigue in which two ex-cons are hand-picked to investigate the director of the Freud academy, a man with plans to upset the entire psychoanalytical applecart.

Kate Fitzgerald has served nearly a decade of a life sentence for murdering her husband. While incarcerated she has put her restless brain to use by reading all of Freud's works and has become known in academic circles as an expert. Her prison psychiatrist offers her parole if she agrees to find out what director Anders Konzak intends to reveal in the forthcoming, unexpurgated Freud-Fliess correspondence.

Kate's partner in the investigation is Jackie Lawton, a violent bank-robber who has been in prison most of his life, but who now works as a private detective, having finally shed his criminal past. Or has he? Jackie and Kate are charged with discovering what Konzak has found that will "make psychoanalysis obsolete."

The novel takes us on a lightning-paced search from Toronto to Vienna, London, the Isle of Wight, New York and back again to Toronto. Along the way we meet an assortment of characters, from misfits to the demure but resolute Anna Freud, still living in the London house where she brought her ailing father for the last year of his life, and where she actively guards his legacy. The investigation soon becomes a manhunt, as dead bodies begin to accumulate, and Fitzgerald and Lawton discover that the killer is closing in on them as well.

Told with great wit and erudition, this accessible and thrilling page-turner is an intellectual delight and a detective story of outstanding ingenuity.

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Books

After the Falls (Vintage Canada, 2010)
After the Falls (Knopf Canada, 2009)
Seduction (Vintage Canada, 2005)
Seduction (Knopf Canada, 2004)

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Reviews

Praise for Seduction:

"There are enough twists, turns and identity shifts to keep you guessing… Like a dream, it makes you question what's real and imagined."
-Time

"Seduction is smart and entertaining - brainy fun for a cold winter's night."
-The Globe and Mail

"Book-review clichés come to mind: "I couldn't put it down," "compulsively readable," etc. Seduction is a fast-paced modern novel filled with snappy dialogue, exotic settings and juicy intellectual plums, somewhat in the manner of The Da Vinci Code."
-Montreal Gazette

"A stylish suspenseful romp through psychoanalytical academia."
-The Bay Street Bull

Praise for Too Close to the Falls:
"Memorably and skillfully told… Anyone who ever was, or has, a child considered different in some way will enjoy this book."
-The Globe and Mail

"Richly detailed and absorbing, Too Close to the Falls has only one real fault. It ends too soon."
-Toronto Life

"A fascinating childhood is no guarantee of a fascinating memoir. It still takes a gifted writer to translate the past into a work of art, and Gildiner is a gifted writer."
-Toronto Star

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Excerpt

PART 1: PEN PALS

Chapter 1: CELLULAR ACTIVITY

Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.
-Freud, One of the Difficulties of Psychoanalysis

It's really embarrassing to admit, but I forget why I killed my husband.

The vast majority of people do not kill their spouses. I've faced that I'm in an extreme minority. Since I'm locked in here anyway, I decided to try to figure out what I missed that everyone else seems to understand. In a former life I studied Darwin and examined how drives become instincts. It was great for watching birds make their nests and fly south, but it didn't give me any clues as to why I killed my husband, or help me figure out how to conduct myself when, and if, I ever get out of this cinder-block cell. I tried reading religion, but it didn't grab me. Philosophy was interesting, but it only made me wonder if I was here at all.

However in 1974, about eight years ago - I've been in this cooler surrounded by frozen tundra for nine years now - I ran across Freud. I started with volume one of his collected works, because I'm that kind of person, and read all twenty-three. (I'm that kind of person too.) Freud's theory is a turnkey operation. You only have to buy into the unconscious and the rest falls into place. It's like buying the model suite: you may have quibbles with the furnishings, but you have somewhere decent to live.

My greatest interest was early Freud, in all the discoveries he made before he was famous. In his letters he would explain that he'd seen patients all day and was then alone in his small study working through the night. Even when he went to sleep, he had dreams of planing wood - still honing the theory. Freud called this first decade of his most original discoveries, before he had any followers except for one loopy buddy named Wilhelm Fliess, his time of "splendid isolation."

I was also alone, reading Freud day and night in my six-by-nine-foot cell. Maybe it was the similarity of our splendidly isolated circumstances, but I felt Freud was writing to me. I even answered his letters in a notebook that I kept hidden in my cell. When I got on a real roll in the middle of the night after ten straight hours, I felt we were co-authors.

They say prison is hell and I suppose it is in most conventional ways, though I look at it as a monastic opportunity where all distraction is mercifully wiped away. Not many people share a cell for nearly a decade with one of the greatest geniuses of all time. Of course, I never said as much to my prison psychiatrist - he would think it was delusional - but I feel doing time with Freud kept me sane.

Fifty percent of female prisoners have a grade nine or lower education; forty percent are illiterate; the majority were unemployed at the time of their crime. Even though Native people make up two percent of the population nationally, they are thirty-eight percent of the Canadian prison population. Two-thirds of female prisoners are single mothers. Eighty percent have histories of sexual or physical abuse. Less than one percent of women in prison are there for violent crimes. On the rare occasions when their crimes are violent, the aggression is almost always toward a spouse who has repeatedly abused them first.

Not one of these statistics applies to me. And I've always been a fan of stats, since numbers pretty well paint the picture.

The only thing I've had in common with my fellow prisoners, as my psychiatrist likes to remind me, is that we've all committed crimes. Somehow I don't find that an icebreaker. Now Freud, on the other hand, was a biologist turned psychologist, like me. In fact he described himself as "Not a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker… I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador - an adventurer, if you want it translated - with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort." These are traits I also have in spades. In terms of curiosity I've studied everything I could get my hands on since I was a kid. If you want to talk about daring, then let me remind you that I killed my husband. If these are the qualities that make a conquistador, then Freud was a great one and I, albeit pathological, am one as well. No wonder I bonded to him.

I was determined to read everything to find out why I was so unusual. Depending on what psychological assessment you read on me, you can substitute the word psychopathic or paranoid for unusual. I never got too riled up over those labels because, let's face it, psychiatrists get paid to call you something.

Before prison, I liked science with all the bells and whistles - hypothesis testing, finding physical or numerical results, and measuring the difference. It's called hard science when you have something hard or physical to measure. There's a lot of comfort in measuring something you can see. Although Freud was a medical doctor, his greatest love was physiology and the biological research it entailed. When, at the age of forty, he didn't get the academic research appointment he wanted, he qualified as a neurologist and set up a private practice. Back in the days before psychiatry was an official discipline, the psychotics wound up in insane asylums run by doctors who were called Alienists. As far as I can tell, they were fairly alienated from the patients. Their job was to make sure the doors were locked and the lunatics had straw in their cells. The neurotics of the nineteenth century had nowhere to go, and out of desperation wound up dragging their anxiety, hysteria and nervous tics into neurologists' offices. Freud, one of the few neurologists who agreed to investigate hysteria, spent hour after hour seeing patients, mostly women, who had all kinds of symptoms with no apparent physical basis. Wanting to follow the rigours of the scientific tradition, Freud was in a quandary because he needed to study the mind in order to help his patients, but the hard sciences didn't have any methodology for doing so. You can't measure and quantify mental phenomena. Wanting to stick with the sciences, he had to invent his own science or method, which became known as psychoanalysis.

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Excerpted from Seduction by Catherine Gildiner Copyright © 2005 by Catherine Gildiner. Excerpted by permission of Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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