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Throughout the book, Harrison omits names, dates and locations, shrewdly fashioning these dark events into a kind of Old Testament nightmare in which incest is just one of a host of physical trials, from pneumonia to shingles, self-cutting and bulimia. Gradually consenting to his demands for sex, Harrison drops out of college and moves in with her father's new family, extricating herself from the affair only when her mother is stricken with metastatic breast cancer. A relationship of passionate promises, obsessive long-distance phone calls and letters then flourishes, as her father, presented here as ghoulishly predatory, relentlessly draws her into his web. The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison Memoir Incredibly brave and poignant. Her first novel, Thicker Than Water, was a New York Times Notable Book of 1991. Kathryn Harrison is a graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers Workshop. The boundary between flirtation and paternal affection is soon blurred, as her father lavishly dotes on her and, in parting, kisses her sexually on the mouth. Mary Gordon, author of Circling My Mother Harrisons story is her own, but it is also. Kiss by Kathryn Harrison available in Trade Paperback on, also read synopsis and reviews. A minister and amateur cameraman, her father visits Harrison after an absence of 10 years, when she is home from college on spring break. She retreats at a young age into a complex interior life marked by religious fixations, bouts of anorexia and self-injury, rage at her callous mother and obsession with her absent father. To call it controversial would be a laughable understatement it has been the object of almost apoplectic fury. Abandoned by her father as a child, neglected by an emotionally remote and impetuous mother, Harrison is raised by her grandparents. Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss, a memoir of her incestuous relationship with her father, is the latest, and perhaps the best, example of such a polarizing work.
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#KATHRYN HARRISON THE KISS SERIES#
Not surprisingly, the book is unremittingly novelistic: it unfolds in an impressionistic series of flashbacks and is told in the present tense in prose that is brutally spare and so emotionally numb as to suggest that recounting the affair is for Harrison is the psychological equivalent of reliving it. Harrison here turns an unflinching eye on the episode in her life that has most influenced those books: a secret, sexual affair with her father that began when she was 20.
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| Authors, American - Biography.Few memoirs receive the amount of prepublication hype that surrounds this slim and powerful autobiography by a writer whose lurid, psychologically vivid novels (Exposure, etc.) have portrayed sexual abuse, cruel power games and extreme, self-destructive behavior. | Novelists, American - 20th century - Biography. The kiss Item Preview remove-circle Share or Embed This Item. A story both of taboo and of family complicity in breaking taboo, The Kiss is also about love - about the most primal of love triangles, the one that ensnares a child between mother and father."-BOOK JACKET.
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"In this extraordinary memoir, one of the best young writers in America today transforms into a work of art the darkest passage imaginable in a young woman's life: an obsessive love affair between father and daughter that began when Kathryn Harrison, twenty years old, was reunited with the father whose absence had haunted her youth." "Exquisitely and hypnotically written, like a bold and terrifying dream, The Kiss is breathtaking in its honesty and in the power and beauty of its creation.