 | |
| Author | Kathryn Harrison |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Memoir |
| Published | 1997 |
| Publication place | USA |
The Kiss is a memoir by American author Kathryn Harrison. First published in 1997, the memoir details her relationship with her estranged father, which culminated in a sexual affair when they finally met again when she was an adult.
Harrison took pains to disguise her father's identity but nevertheless faced criticism for publishing the book while her father was alive. [1]
Harrison is a product of the short marriage between her parents, who met when they were both seventeen. Quickly marrying and having a child, they divorced due to pressure from Harrison's maternal grandparents, who convinced her mother to leave her father as he was incapable of financially supporting her and the child. They convinced Harrison's father to limit contact with both mother and child as they promised they would not come after him for child support.
Harrison's mother is extremely distant with her and moves out of her family home, abandoning Harrison to be raised by her maternal grandparents when she is 5. Harrison sees her father twice during her childhood, once when she is 5 and a second time when she is 10. Despite the fact that her father remarries and has children with his new wife and her mother has relationships with other men, Harrison suspects they continue to have an infrequent sexual affair during this time.
When Harrison is 20, she meets her father for the first time as an adult. The two are immediately attracted to one another and cannot stop staring at one another. When she drops her father off at the airport, he gives her a kiss on the mouth which quickly turns sexual. After the kiss, Harrison is disturbed and drops out of school. She tells herself that the kiss was chaste in nature. She and her father begin obsessively calling each other, planning to meet again.
Harrison's father becomes increasingly controlling of her and demands that they have sex as a means of expressing their love for one another. While Harrison repeatedly resists, she eventually acquiesces although she begins to black out as a means of coping with the sex. Harrison's mother and grandparents suspect that she is having sex with her father but she denies it.
Eventually, as Harrison has no job and no means of supporting herself, she goes to live with her father, his wife and their children. Her father continues having sex with her during this time and Harrison begins self-harming and contemplates suicide.
Harrison's maternal grandfather and mother both become sick at the same time. When her grandfather dies, Harrison goes to the hospital morgue to see his corpse. She gives him a final kiss on the cheek which she credits with helping to break her father's control over her. Her mother also dies of breast cancer and Harrison cuts off her long hair and gives it to her mother as a gesture of goodwill. Harrison finally leaves for graduate school. Before she goes she asks her father if they can try being a normal father and daughter and he refuses. She cuts off all contact with him.
In 1995, Harrison has a dream that her mother visits her and they are finally able to make peace with one another.
The memoir received mixed reviews. The New York Times considered it "a powerful piece of writing, a testament to evil and hope."; [2]
The events in The Kiss are reflected in the plots and themes of her first three novels, published before The Kiss. [3] In The New York Times Book Review , Susan Cheever wrote, "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." [4] In The New York Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called the memoir "appalling but beautifully written." [5]
In The New Republic , by contrast, James Wolcott strongly criticized the work. He called it "the oddest piece of kitsch" with "airbrushed" sentences that "leave wistful little vapor trails of Valium." He pointed out that at the time of the affair, Harrison was not an innocent child victim but rather a consenting adult. He asked, "Did she call him 'Dad' in bed?" Wolcott dismissed much of the book's prose as "bad Sylvia Plath." [6] Writing in The Washington Post , Jonathan Yardley called The Kiss "slimy, repellent, meretricious, cynical." [7] Stephanie Zacherek of Salon called it "colorless," "arid," "boring" and "numbing." [8] In The New York Times , Maureen Dowd wrote that the book constituted an example of "creepy people talking about creepy people." [9] In Slate, Alex Beam called the book "a memoir of French-licking her father." [10] After Michael Shnayerson published a critical account of the book in Vanity Fair , The New Yorker canceled an excerpt that it had scheduled. [11]
In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr dedicated a chapter, "The Public and Private Burning of Kathryn Harrison" to discussing The Kiss controversy. She suggests that the outrage was motivated by Harrison's gender. [12] [13]
The World According to Garp is John Irving's fourth novel, about a man who is born out of wedlock to a feminist leader, then grows up to be a writer. Published in 1978, the book was a bestseller for several years. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979, and its first paperback edition won the award the following year.
Xaviera Hollander is a Dutch former call girl, madam and author. She is best known for her best-selling memoir The Happy Hooker: My Own Story.
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir is a 1996 memoir by the Irish-American author Frank McCourt, with various anecdotes and stories of his childhood. The book details his early childhood in Brooklyn, New York, but focuses primarily on his life in Limerick, Ireland. It also includes his struggles with poverty and his father's alcoholism.
Katie Roiphe is an American author and journalist. She is best known as the author of the non-fiction book The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus (1993). She is also the author of Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End (1997), and the 2007 study of writers and marriage, Uncommon Arrangements. Her 2001 novel Still She Haunts Me is an imagining of the relationship between Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell, the real-life model for Dodgson's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. She is also known for allegedly planning to name the creator of the Shitty Media Men list in an article for Harper's Magazine.
Middlesex is a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Jeffrey Eugenides published in 2002. The book is a bestseller, with more than four million copies sold since its publication. Its characters and events are loosely based on aspects of Eugenides' life and observations of his Greek heritage. It is not an autobiography; unlike the protagonist, Eugenides is not intersex. The author decided to write Middlesex after reading the 1980 memoir Herculine Barbin and finding himself dissatisfied with its discussion of intersex anatomy and emotions.
Wolcott Gibbs was an American editor, humorist, theatre critic, playwright and writer of short stories, who worked for The New Yorker magazine from 1927 until his death. He is notable for his 1936 parody of Time magazine, which skewered the magazine's inverted narrative structure. Gibbs wrote, "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind"; he concluded the piece, "Where it all will end, knows God!" He also wrote a comedy, Season in the Sun, which ran on Broadway for 10 months in 1950–51 and was based on a series of stories that originally appeared in The New Yorker.
Elizabeth Janeway was an American author and critic.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt was an American journalist, editor of the New York Times Book Review, critic, and novelist, based in New York City. He served as senior Daily Book Reviewer from 1969 to 1995.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison was an American journalist, essayist and memoirist. She is best known for her autobiographical work, particularly her account of growing up as a Jehovah's Witness, and for her travel writing.
Kathryn Harrison is an American author. She has published seven novels, two memoirs, two collections of personal essays, a travelogue, two biographies, and a book of true crime. She reviews regularly for The New York Times Book Review. Her personal essays have been included in many anthologies and have appeared in Bookforum, Harper's Magazine, More Magazine, The New Yorker, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Vogue, Salon, and Nerve.
Susan Cheever is an American author and a prize-winning best-selling writer well known for her memoir, her writing about alcoholism, and her intimate understanding of American history. She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award. She currently teaches in the MFA program at The New School in New York City.
Dorothy Elmhirst Straight is an American author who wrote How the World Began in 1962 at the age of 4 for her grandmother, Dorothy Payne Whitney, making her among the youngest published authors in history.
Gloria Hemingway was an American physician and writer who was the third and youngest child of author Ernest Hemingway. Although she was born a male and lived most of her life publicly as a man, she struggled with her gender identity from a young age. In her 60s, she underwent gender transition surgery, and preferred the name Gloria when possible.
The Liars' Club is a memoir by the American author Mary Karr. Published in 1995 by Viking Adult, the book tells the story of Karr's childhood in the 1960s in a small industrial town in Southeast Texas. The title refers to her father and his friends who would gather together to drink and tell stories when they were not working at the local oil refinery or the chemical plant.
Elizabeth Crow was an American editor, journalist, and businesswoman.
Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned" is a 2014 memoir written by Lena Dunham. The book, a collection of autobiographical essays, lists, and emails, was released in hardcover by Random House on September 30, 2014, and in paperback on October 20, 2015.
Nina Gore Auchincloss Straight is an American author, journalist, and socialite. She is the mother of writer/director Burr Steers and artist Hugh Auchincloss Steers, half-sister of Gore Vidal, step-sister of First Lady Jacqueline Onassis and socialite Princess Lee Radziwill.
Leslie Kenton was an American-born writer, journalist and entrepreneur who specialised in New Age health and beauty. She was the daughter of jazz orchestra leader Stan Kenton.
India Riven Oxenberg is an American actress and documentary film producer. A granddaughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, she is a relative of the House of Karađorđević, the former royal family of Serbia and, later, Yugoslavia. Oxenberg began her career as a child actress, with small roles in film and television projects that her mother, Catherine Oxenberg, and then-stepfather, Casper Van Dien, were involved in. As a teenager, she was a cast member of the reality television series I Married a Princess.
Margaux Artemia Fragoso was an American author, best known for the memoir Tiger, Tiger.