The Kiss

In this powerfully written but disturbing memoir, an emotionally paralyzed young woman gets involved in an incestuous relationship with her narcissistic father. It took a lot of courage to tell this story, and to explain why the author complied with, and even ended up sharing, her loathsome father's obsessive desires.

This has to be the most honest memoir I have ever read. The subject matter in almost any other context would be impossible to read about. The underlying story is deeply disturbing, but the writer's ability to shape and color, and place the events in a relatable storyline, is absolutely first rate. I know I am writing this 25 years after it has been published, but I read it as part of my research into writing my own deeply disturbing memoir. It was recommended in at least two how-to-write-a-memoir books I have read recently. Highly recommended within the framework noted above, but not everyone will be able to read it.

A beautifully written memoir about a very dark subject. In her 20s Harrison embarked on an affair with an older man who happens to be (she is aware of this fact) her father, long absent from her childhood. What could be tawdry is instead a very brave and moving memoir. Tobias Wolff says it all on the back jacket: the author “brings so much light to bear on such a dark matter, redeeming it with the steadiness of her gaze and the uncanny, heartbreaking exactitude of her language.”

Reviewed by: John

I find it so hard to write a review of this book that I can’t help but wonder how Kathryn Harrison wrote it. It was a New York Times bestseller when it was originally published in 1997 and has been read by many.The Kiss is a very disturbing story. It’s about incest. And betrayal. And mental illness. And a “man of God” who was anything but. But mainly it’s Kathryn’s story* and how she negotiated growing up and learning how to be a woman. She accomplished it–painfully–in the midst of predation and neglect and without even a pretense of protection from anyone. The writing is hypnotic, reflecting the way Kathryn felt drugged or poisoned by events and by the power of her father’s personality. The tense is present, making show more the reader feel as if events are happening “right now” and “always and forever.”

One of the fascinating things about this book has been the response of critics and readers. It tends to polarize people. There are many who sympathize greatly with Kathryn for what she went through and others who wonder why she was compliant. There are others who question her motives for making her family’s story public. People who despise the tell-all nature of many memoirs villify her for exposing a taboo subject.

The book’s arc seems to take an odd twist. It begins with how the father developed as such an obsession in Kathryn’s mind. She grew up without him in her life, witnessing him in the house as if he were a ghost. The story continues by showing how Kathryn was caught like a fly in the father’s web when they met as adults. And, finally, it moves to how their relationship ended. But the twist is that, near the end, the relationship with the mother is made central. There is a forgiving and coming-together of mother and daughter when the mother is dying. The book is dedicated to the mother: Beloved 1942-1985.

Because the book was so successful, I have to conclude that it is possible to twist and tweak to give a story the sort of long-range perspective the writer desires. Nevertheless, I wasn’t persuaded. The mother was not presented positively. She abandoned her daughter to be brought up by a mentally ill grandmother. Is that forgiveable? Forgiveable enough to make the book about the mother?

Or is the forgiveness on Kathryn’s part because Kathryn realizes that as her father ruined her life, he had done so with her mother’s?

I don’t think there can be a satisfying ending in the face of the tragedy that occurs in the book. But I am wondering if the through-line of the book is damaged or distorted by trying to make it “about the mother” at the end.

Have you read the book? If so, what do you think about the storyline?

Flawed or not, it’s a book you will never forget.

* I purposefully rely on Kathryn’s first name here to give her a breathing presence because of all she went through as a child and young woman. show less

The story that Kathryn Harrison tells in her memoir "The Kiss" is narrated in such clean, tight prose, and with such devastating detachment, that the reader could almost be excused for missing the horror at its core. Harrison was the victim of what could be termed a "perfect storm" of parental dysfunction. The only daughter of parents who conceived too early and separated while still young, she was raised mostly by her maternal grandmother. Craving the affection of an emotionally withholding mother who drifted in and out of her life, she is ripe for the picking when her father re-appears when she is twenty. Emotionally fragile and naive, Harrison is unable to resist her father's forceful and uninhibited devotion, and the two embark on a show more lurid affair. In a short time her entire existence revolves around her father, and the sole thought in her head is to be with him. This continues even after she realizes he is a selfish manipulator and she is the victim of an unnatural sexual obsession. The affair concludes unceremoniously after a few years, and more than a decade later she produced this account, sparing herself nothing, dissecting her every action, motive and emotional state. A truly chilling book and something of a milestone in the art of the memoir. show less

Unbelievably powerful writing, plummeting you into the soul-numbing experience this author went through as the daughter of narcissists and the price she paid as her brilliant father's narcissistic supply during a four-year affair with him in her early 20's. While we're screaming "walk away" after the first kiss, the power of the story lies in, not only her masterful phrasing and what she numbly reveals in brevity, but in the fact that when a soul is so wounded and under a dark spell, the body follows its own path toward destruction even as the intellect instructs you to desist. I read it wanting to know how a writer could possibly craft this story, wondering what words and memories she'd pick to share such a dark soul path. I learned. show more Harrison is a master. Warning, it's a two hour read, but might stay with you forever. show less

The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison
Memoir

Incredibly brave and poignant recounting of the author's dysfunctional relationship with her entire family. The focal point of her life had always been her mother and father, who had married young after becoming pregnant. She always felt invisible to her mother and wanted only to be seen and loved by her. Her mother was incapable. She had her own internal demons which left Kathryn abandoned, neglected, forgotten.

Her father, who was forced out by his wife's parents, left the family when she was six months old. She saw him only a few times as a child, and even though he had remarried, he and her mother still had an obsession with each other which Kathryn witnessed with curiosity on the few occasions they show more were all together.

After a 10-year absence, Kathryn and her father were reunited. She was then 20 years old, a college student. They both seemed to be mesmerized by each other--Kathryn feeling like she was getting to know herself when she saw similarities between herself and her father, same walk, same face, same gestures. Her father, by then a successful minister, seemed to have fallen into an obsessive trance when he was near her. He couldn't stop touching her, staring at her, crying over the years lost. Even though it seemed over the top, Kathryn ate up all the attention she received from him. She finally was being seen by someone who declared he loved her.

I don't know it yet, not consciously, but I feel it; my father, holding himself so still and staring at me, has somehow begun to "see" me into being. His look gives me to myself, his gaze reflects the life my mother's willfully shut eyes denied.

From a mother who won't see me to a father who tells me I am there only when he does see me: perhaps, unconsciously, I consider this an existential promotion. I must, for already I feel that my life depends on my father's seeing me.

Slowly and cunningly, her father forces her to give everything to him, all or nothing. He is determined to own her, to possess her. In his mind, he feels that God gave her to him. She becomes distraught and unable to function in daily life; she even leaves college for a while. All her attention is focused on him and she is unable to explain to anyone what is happening inside her. ...I know it is wrong, and its wrongness is what lets me know, too, that it is a secret.

Her story is really heartbreaking and maddening. It seems at every turn, she encountered yet another person who was incapable or unwilling to give her a safe place to grow. Abandoned by both parents, grandparents withheld physical affection. Several people saw the unnatural relationship between her and her father developing but did nothing but cluck their tongues. To be fair, at one point her mother did suspect that something was going on and brought Kathryn to her therapist. In the telling, however, it almost seemed like the mother was doing it not out of concern for her daughter, but possibly out of jealousy or the need to prove her level of importance in the "contest" for the father's love.

In any event, there was evidence of a cycle of abuse through generations (her father's father made a pass at her as well) and no one seemed to be doing anything to stop it, including the author herself. There was no epilogue informing/reassuring her readers that her younger sisters or even young women in her father's congregation were kept from his possible manipulation. All that being said, her honesty is commendable, she's a talented writer, and her ability to put words together in such a beautiful way is a rare gift. show less