McCall, Catherine

PERSONAL:

Education: Emory University, M.D.; University of North Carolina-Wilmington, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home— Wilmington, NC. E-mail— Catherine@catherinemccall.com.

CAREER:

Psychiatrist and writer. In private practice. Formerly chief resident at Emory University

WRITINGS:

Lifeguarding: A Memoir of Secrets, Swimming, and the South, Harmony Books (New York, NY), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

A self-described "student of human nature … fascinated by the inner world," as quoted by Wilmington, North Carolina StarNewsOnline.com site contributor Ben Steelman, Catherine McCall specialized in psychiatry after completing her M.D. at Emory University. Throughout her career in private practice, she nurtured a keen desire to write. "English was my favorite subject in high school," she recalled in a feature for the Wrightsville Beach Magazine Web site. While maintaining her psychiatric practice she began writing short pieces and commentary for her local radio station. After several years, though, she decided that she wanted to commit herself more seriously to her writing, and she enrolled in an M.F.A. program at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Her thesis there became the book Lifeguarding: A Memoir of Secrets, Swimming, and the South, which was published to considerable critical praise.

The memoir's title is both literal and symbolic. McCall, a championship swimmer at school, entertained youthful dreams of earning an Olympic medal in the sport; her siblings, too, were competitive swimmers, and all of the siblings knew lifesaving skills in the water. But they also needed skills to save their emotional lives and guard against the damage of a dysfunctional family. Their father was a severe alcoholic who was often out of work; their mother worked as a schoolteacher, but money was often scarce and she developed various stress-related ailments. The family lived in a big old house that, according to McCall, was haunted by the ghosts of her grandparents, who died suddenly while still young. Added to these stresses was McCall's growing awareness that she was sexually attracted not to boys but to girls. As a teenager, however, she lacked the voice to express her feelings. As she confided in a Lifeguarding passage quoted by Steelman, she grew up with the sense that "saying things got people in trouble—silence made the trouble stop." Even in her journal she could not bring herself to express her own thoughts. Only when her older sister, just before leaving for college, asked for the journal and wrote a long letter in it for the younger girl did McCall realize she, too, could use the written world to express herself.

Critics considered Lifeguarding an affecting and powerful book. "McCall doesn't sugarcoat the difficulties of coming out to her familiy," wrote Sylvia Pfeiffenberger on the Durham, North Carolina IndependentWeekly Web site, "nor does she spare their flaws or soften the hard edges of prejudice and denial (her own included)." The book, Pfeiffenberger concluded, is "revelatory and beautifully written in the voice of an honest healer." In a starred review, a writer for Publishers Weekly called the memoir an "immensely compelling and deeply moving" account of "love and redemption."