BOOK: The Kiss - Kathryn Harrison (1997)

The Kiss - Kathryn Harrison

This book packs a wallop precisely because of its subject matter: incest.  Yet this isn't some prurient work of taboo erotica.  This is indeed a memoir, simultaneously loaded with emotion, but written without emotion.  That is worthy of praise.  The situations are jarring, but they're delivered in a matter of fact style.

While I didn't feel overtly manipulated, I could tell when my strings were being tugged.  Mrs. Harrison is deft at admitting guilt while providing ample evidence that the sexual relationship with her father was inevitable given all of the personalities involved, especially her mother's impact on her emotional development.

I'm not a psychologist.  I can't begin to describe what Mrs. Harrison has been through.  That is one of the powerful things about the book.  She describes by showing and it takes the entire book to grasp, even at the edges, what has happened.  This is not a story for a 5,000 word essay.

Reading this story (I almost said, 'watching her life') I feel that I am viewing her through a rainy window, glimpses, some parts in focus, others fuzzy, and some impossible to make out, while other parts are completely out of view.

This is an intelligent woman; high school valedictorian, college student, aspiring writer.  She can obviously think for herself.  She can build a social network.  Yet she succumbs to this overbearing, possessive ass, who happens to be her biological father.  He is clearly the villain, with her mother and herself (and other people, including his congregation, current wife, and children) as the victims.

Her narrative lines rarely stretch beyond a page or two.  Instead of a clear story, we are observing the individual lines of a sketch.  Some lines are thick, some as pale as a light touch of charcoal.  She reveals to us what she wants to reveal and with the aperture open only as far as she deems necessary for her to get this particular piece of her sketch into our consciousness.

It is a lovely work.  Haunting.  Yet I wanted a straightforward account of this ogre's abuse.  The people that populate this book, Mrs. Harrison's first family, are narcissistic, egotistic, and uncaring.  I was sickened at how she was raised.  But she still winds up valedictory, she still heads off to college, she still leads what looks like a normal life.  But we can't see it because of the rain drops on the windows.  It doesn't move Mrs. Harrison's case forward that these matters were out of her control.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that this could happen.  This man, her father, is the worst kind of predator.  What he did was unforgivable.  But I can't help but feel that I didn't get a complete story in context.  There's more on the canvas that I cannot see.  Perhaps it is irrelevant, but how would we know?

I didn't read this when it came out over a decade ago.  I didn't watch her interviews.  I believe it when I read that people judged her by the supposed content of the book, when they probably didn't even read the book.  This makes me think of 'The Last Temptation of Christ' by Nikos Kazantzakis, one of my favorite novels, and how people judged it and the subsequent movie without knowing a thing about it.  People can be so idiotic.

Please, read the book.  It is uncomfortable, but she has written so that it is accessible without being disgusting in its detail.  She, conveniently, has put memories of the actual coitus out of her mind, so we're spared that.  You'll be moved by her story.

You will likely see aspects of your own personality in at least one, if not more, of the characters.  The way they psychically and emotionally prey on each other is fairly common behavior, though, obviously, not always to this extent.  If you disagree, vehemently, with that, then you are might want to do some soul searching.  I'm not saying we're all as bad as this, but we all have that potential.

And, yes, I saw aspects of myself in that ogre of a father.  His possessiveness and neediness are ugly and universal.  No father believes that another man (or, god forbid, a boy) is good enough for his daughter.  The only thing extraordinary about this awful man is the degree of his possessiveness and neediness.  And that he acts on these traits.  I am surprised that he has not committed a murder for the same reasons he committed incest.