Catherine Hiller (born November 16, 1946) is an American author and filmmaker, best known for writing Just Say Yes: A Marijuana Memoir. The first memoir about long-term cannabis use designed for a mainstream audience, Just Say Yes attracted national attention, being featured in The New York Times, Huffington Post, and Marie Claire magazine among other media outlets. In 2015, Hiller publicly "came out" as a cannabis user, saying that she has smoked marijuana almost every day for fifty years.
Early life
Born in New York City, Hiller was raised in Paris, Greenwich Village, and Park Slope. She attended Hunter College High School and Sussex University, and graduated summa cum laude from Brooklyn College. She has a PhD. in English from Brown University.
In 1969, while with her then-fiancé, film editor Stan Warnow, Hiller attended the legendary Woodstock music festival with the documentary film crew. A chapter in Just Say Yes chronicles her memories of making that epochal weekend.
Fiction
Hiller is the author of six books of adult fiction and two children's books, Argentaybee and the Boonie (1979) and Abracatabby (1981). Her first novel was the erotic drama An Old Friend from High School (1978), about a housewife who connects with her former friend only to start a secret love affair. The second, 17 Morton Street, was published by St. Martin's Press in 1990 and follows the love lives of three quirky sisters in New York. It became an official Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Kirkus Reviews called 17 Morton Street "an accomplished, fast-moving comedy of errors". Barbara Raskin praised the book in The Washington Post: "Catherine Hiller's writing explodes with surprising insights, juicy characterizations, and familial truths." Novelist and book critic Carolyn See said, "Catherine Hiller's voice is both fresh and very beautiful. She writes of the great dilemmas of our time - love and loss, and the wonderful ambivalence of family - with a deft mind and sure hand."
Hiller's third novel, California Time, centers on a New York family transplanted to the West Coast. (St. Martin's Press, 1993) Critical reaction to the book was mixed, with Booklist and Library Journal giving it a rave while Publishers Weekly and Kirkus believed it paled in comparison to the author's earlier work.
Hiller published Skin: Sensual Tales (Carroll & Graf), a collection of thirteen short stories, in 1997. John Updike praised the book, saying that "Catherine Hiller writes with a fine directness and clarity ... Good, brave, and joyful writing."Publishers Weekly said of the collection, "Though obviously not for the prudish, these nicely observed, gently ironic tales are a celebration of life inside and outside the epidermis." Two stories from the collection, "Skin" and "My Lover's Family", won PEN Syndicated Fiction awards.
In 2012, Hiller published The Adventures of Sid Sawyer (Armadillo Central), a retelling of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Events from Twain's classic are revisited from the viewpoint of Tom's half-brother Sid, who in Hiller's version is the village genius while Tom is just a fun-loving bully. Ironically, twelve years before Hiller released the novel, minister and television personality Stuart Briscoe wrote the following in his essay "Why Invite Trouble": "It is impossible to imagine a book called The Adventures of Sid Sawyer. Who would want to read about a good kid who never got into trouble, never rocked a boat, never finagled his way out of a fix?"
In 2018, Hiller published The Feud (Heliotrope Books), a novel about a deadly workplace enmity that climaxes when the two women find themselves alone in a stuck elevator.
In 2020, she won first place in the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest, sponsored by Poets & Patrons, for a poem she wrote 50 years ago and never tried to publish.
Hiller's new novel, Cybill Unbound (Heliotrope Books, February 14, 2023) is about the sexual adventures of an older woman.