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.

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. 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.Īnd now here comes a true story about A Woman Who Slept with Her Father-prime fodder for the TV talk show feeding frenzy.

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. What used to be private is becoming increasingly public. The 1990s seems to be the decade of revelation.

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. 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 a parent whose absence had haunted her youth.Įxquisitely 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.

Kathryn harrison the kiss read online