The 1990s seems to be the decade of revelation. What used to be private is becoming increasingly public. All is aired on talk shows whose guests are no longer celebrities hawking their latest film, book, or album, but ordinary citizens selling their personal traumas. Mothers Who Sleep with Their Daughters' Boyfriends; Men Who Wear Their Girlfriends' Clothes; People Whose Families Have Been Murdered Before Their Eyes--no subject is too salacious or too shameful for public consumption. And now here comes a true story about A Woman Who Slept with Her Father--prime fodder for the TV talk show feeding frenzy. Certainly it would be easy to lump Kathryn Harrison's new memoir, The Kiss into this same category of titillating topics, but that would be a mistake. There is nothing remotely titillating about Harrison's book; instead, it reads like a slow descent into hell--one that compels and repels in almost equal measure at times. Harrison, who did not really meet her father until she was 20, takes the reader on a difficult journey into her loveless childhood, her bouts with anorexia and bulimia, and, eventually, the incestuous 4-year affair with her father. Her prose is deceptively simple; her choice of present tense to describe events that occurred many years ago forces an immediacy--almost a complicity--upon the reader that heightens both revulsion and compassion. The Kiss is not for everybody. Some readers will be outraged by its subject matter; others will find it just too painful to read. But for those who make it through, this harrowing tale promises the reward of a life reclaimed and a tragedy transcended.


From Library Journal
The reading experience doesn't get much better than this: a literary author whose fiction has flirted with incestuous leitmotivs (e.g., Exposure, LJ 12/92) writes a true confession, and in the present tense, of her several-year "affair" as a college student with her handsome father, absent most of her life growing up. Instigated by a French kiss in an airport?like the "transforming sting" of a scorpion that the father "administers in order that he might consume me"?their tentative rapprochement explodes into an "unspeakable" passion: he, an ex-theologian, worships her long hair; she is captivated by his ardent attention. She is also enraged at her mother, of course, and the cruelty the pair inflict behind her back is stunning. "Whatever passions we feel," Harrison extols in her psychoanalytically corrected, rather blank prose, "we call love." Indeed, there is a great deal missing here, namely, the sex, which Harrison claims she can't remember. It's hard not to approach this publishing sensation cynically; and Harrison, with foresight, has turned it instead into a rueful coming-to-terms with her mother, concluding with her death (the book is dedicated to "Beloved"?her mother, not her father). Whether it's a brave or brazen effort, readers will want this.?Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Susan Cheever
The story of an intellectually powerful man and his consuming desire to ravish an innocent, almost preconscious young woman (sometimes his daughter) has often been told--Zeus, Lewis Carroll and Humbert Humbert come to mind--but Kathryn Harrison turns up the volume, making this ancient immorality tale a struggle between good and evil, between life and death, between God and the Devil. The real shock is that this is a book with a happy ending.


From Booklist
Harrison's novels, including Exposure (1993) and Poison (1995), are rooted in a deep and abiding sorrow, and now readers learn its source. Controversial even before its publication, this exquisitely written and emotionally wrenching account of her love affair with her father is an act of astounding courage, integrity, and catharsis. Harrison's parents were teenagers when they married, and she was less than a year old when they divorced, a breakup encouraged by her high-handed maternal grandparents, who, after her selfish and unloving mother moved out, ended up raising her. Her father, a preacher, remained a distant and enigmatic figure until she left home for college, then he surged into her life like a biblical plague. Starved for love, Harrison became utterly enthralled by her father's terrible hunger, and was, for all intents and purposes, lost to the world. This is a riveting memoir, a tightrope walk performed with grace and daring. As Harrison exorcises her demons, she reminds us that it's a thin line between love and possession, sanity and madness. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
A mesmerizing true tale of a love affair between father and daughter, that in this talented novelist's hands takes on the mythic proportions of a Greek tragedy. Author Harrison (Poison, 1995, etc.) has written thinly disguised versions of these episodes in her novels (Thicker than Water, 1991), but the reality is both more gripping and more heartbreaking than fiction. Now married (her husband knew about the incest) and a mother, Harrison made the decision to lay the story out publicly before her children were old enough to be bent by the buzz that would inevitably follow such a revelation. Harrison's father and mother met, fell in love, got married, and had their daughter by the time they were 19. The father, a minister, left when she was only six months old, and Harrison saw little of him until she was in college. She lived with her mother and grandparents until she was six years old. Then her mother moved out, leaving no address or phone number, desperate apparently to be on her own. Mother visited Harrison frequently, but even in her daughter's presence, her attention was elsewhere, ``romantically fixated . . . on my father.'' The father remarried, had children by his second wife, had a church. It was when he came to visit his now college-age daughter that he began his seduction. Courting her by letter, phone, and tape recordings, meeting in airports and motels, in cars and even in his ministerial office, he was finally successful in making his daughter his sexual partner. Only after her mother died was Harrison able to end the relationship, realizing that it had been about her mother all along. No explicit scenes here, except for the kiss of the title, but powerful writing, not about desire or passion, but about abandonment and rage. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.



"Every sentence strikes and burns and scars, like lightening in the hearts's darkest tempest."



"Every now and then a book comes along that disturbs, disrupts, and polarizes the public in new ways."



"Appalling but beautifully written...jumping back and forth in time yet drawing you irresistibly toward the heart of a great evil."



"Every now and then a book comes along that disturbs, disrupts, and polarizes the public in new ways."


Book Description
We meet at airports. We meet in cities where we've never been before. We meet where no one will recognize us.A "man of God" is how someone described my father to me. I don 't remember who. Not my mother. I'm young enough that I take the words to mean he has magical properties and that he is good, better than other people.With his hand under my chin, my father draws my face toward his own. He touches his lips to mine. I stiffen.I am frightened by the kiss. I know it wrong, and its wrongness is what lets me know, too, that it is a secret.We meet at airport. We meet in cities where we've never been before. We meet where no one will recognize us.A "man of God" is how someone described my father to me. I don 't remember who. Not my mother. I'm young enough that I take the words to mean he has magical properties and that he is good, better than other people.With his hand under my chin, my father draws my face toward his own. He touches his lips to mine. I stiffen.I am frightened by the kiss. I know it wrong, and its wrongness is what lets me know, too, that it is a secret.


From the Publisher
"Only a writer of extraordinary gifts could bring so much light to bear on so dark a matter. I will never forget this book."
-- Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy's Life"This is a writer at the top of her form."
-- Mary Gordon, author of The Shadow Man"A powerful piece of writing, a testament to evil and hope."
-- The New York Times" Powerful. Remarkable for both the startling events it portrays and the unbridled force of the writing."
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)"A mesmerizing true tale that in this talented novelist's hands takes on the mythic proportions of a Greek tragedy."
-- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"This book offers an account of a moral victory -- the re-emergence of a thoughtful, disciplined, knowing sensibility."
-- Robert Coles, author of The Moral Intelligence of Children

ANNOTATION

In this extraordinary memoir, Harrison 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 Harrison was 20 years old. Exquisitely and hypnotically written, "The Kiss" reveals a shocking truth, a story both of taboo and of family complicity in breaking taboo.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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. 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.

SYNOPSIS

We meet at airport. We meet in cities where we've never been before. We meet where no one will recognize us.A "man of God" is how someone described my father to me. I don 't remember who. Not my mother. I'm young enough that I take the words to mean he has magical properties and that he is good, better than other people.With his hand under my chin, my father draws my face toward his own. He touches his lips to mine. I stiffen.I am frightened by the kiss. I know it wrong, and its wrongness is what lets me know, too, that it is a secret.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

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. 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. 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. Abandoned by her father as a child, neglected by an emotionally remote and impetuous mother, Harrison is raised by her grandparents. 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. A minister and amateur cameraman, her father visits Harrison after an absence of 10 years, when she is home from college on spring break. 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. 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. 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. 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. If Harrison sacrifices objectivity in places for a mode of storytelling engineered for maximum shock value, most readers still will find this book remarkable for both the startling events it portrays and the unbridled force of the writing. (Apr.)

Library Journal

The reading experience doesn't get much better than this: a literary author whose fiction has flirted with incestuous leitmotivs (e.g., Exposure, LJ 12/92) writes a true confession, and in the present tense, of her several-year "affair" as a college student with her handsome father, absent most of her life growing up. Instigated by a French kiss in an airport-like the "transforming sting" of a scorpion that the father "administers in order that he might consume me"-their tentative rapprochement explodes into an "unspeakable" passion: he, an ex-theologian, worships her long hair; she is captivated by his ardent attention. She is also enraged at her mother, of course, and the cruelty the pair inflict behind her back is stunning. "Whatever passions we feel," Harrison extols in her psychoanalytically corrected, rather blank prose, "we call love." Indeed, there is a great deal missing here, namely, the sex, which Harrison claims she can't remember. It's hard not to approach this publishing sensation cynically; and Harrison, with foresight, has turned it instead into a rueful coming-to-terms with her mother, concluding with her death (the book is dedicated to "Beloved"-her mother, not her father). Whether it's a brave or brazen effort, readers will want this.-Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"

Salon

[F]or anybody lucky enough to have missed all the prepublication hoopla about The Kiss -- an excerpt snapped up by The New Yorker, a hand-holding profile in Mirabella, front-page coverage in the New York Observer, a raised-eyebrow report in Vanity Fair and the list goes on -- The Kiss is novelist Kathryn Harrison's memoir of the four-year affair she had, beginning at the tender but consenting age of 20, with her father. But for all the ink spilled, all the heat this book has generated before ever seeing the inside of a bookstore, there's not much here to raise anyone's temperature. Those who pick up The Kiss looking for sweaty-palmed titillation be warned: You'll find more sizzle at a backyard barbecue.

Which would be all right -- it would be shameful, after all, to be caught enjoying a memoir about incest -- if the book had something to make it stand out from the mob of survivors' stories, both fictional and autobiographical, that publishers have inflicted on us lately. But as The Kiss demonstrates, incest alone, terrible as it is, does not a compelling book make.

This is not to downplay the pain that Harrison suffered, or the disgust and horror of the affair itself, which begins with a farewell kiss at an airport: "It is no longer a chaste, closed-lipped kiss. My father pushes his tongue deep into my mouth: wet, insistent, exploring, then withdrawn. He picks up his camera case, and, smiling brightly, he joins the end of the line of passengers disappearing into the airplane."

A grotesque moment, one of only a handful in an otherwise numbed and numbing narrative. In etherized first-person, present-tense prose, Harrison describes the paternal seduction that followed, the obsessive phone calls and letters, the blurry sexual encounters: "In years to come, I won't be able to remember even one instance of our lying together. I'll have a composite, generic memory. I'll know that he was always on top and that I always lay still, as still as if I had, in truth, fallen from a great height."

Although her father, an encyclopedia-salesman-turned-minister, comes across as an insatiable, narcissistic monster, it's Harrison's mother who turns out to be the unlikely villain of the piece, and the true object of incestuous desire. She and Harrison's father married young and impetuously; he left before their daughter was a year old. Harrison's mother pulled an emotional disappearing act herself, creating in her daughter the familiar, poisonous brew of anger, despondency, self-loathing and anorexia.

Years later, the longed-for, long-absent father comes back to plant that loathsome kiss on his beautiful, blond, grown-up daughter. It's only when her mother dies of cancer that Harrison finds the strength to end the affair and come to terms with the fact that her mother, not her father, is the parent whose love she really craved. Probably the most shocking scene in the book features Harrison fondling her mother's corpse in its casket: "I touch her chest, her arms, her neck; I kiss her forehead and her fingertips ... I slip my hand down as far as I can, past her knees, past the hem of her white dress. I want to touch and know all of her."