The Kiss: A Memoir
By Kathryn Harrison
224 pages, Random House (1997)

I once dropped a course just so I wouldn’t have to read this book. Years of reading disturbing subject matter have left me with an acute awareness of, and respect for, my own limits: violence doesn’t bother me (I can, and do, read the gristliest descriptions of real-life murders and fall right asleep), but descriptions of sexual acts committed against children do. So, knowing nothing about this book beyond that it was about a sexual relationship between Harrison and her father, I avoided it.

Of course, if you’re familiar with the book, you’re now thinking, “What does that have to do with anything?” Yes. Exactly. My mistake. As I learned from a few lines near the beginning of While They Slept (my thoughts on that book here), Harrrison was twenty when the affair began. And that, to me, is infinitely more interesting and more complex and more fucked-up in its way and also more readable than her being a victimized child. So I bought this book.

And it’s a great book. It’s about the affair, yes, but it’s also about having parents and what love for a parent is and needing to break away. It’s about loss and it’s about anger and it’s about how the fuck you’re supposed to create your own identity and how sometimes it’s easier to let someone or something else do it for you—at least until it turns out that that’s no way to live. It’s about emotions we all have, just heightened. It’s Greek tragedy come to life—without, somehow, becoming histrionic or unbelievable.

A word about the sex: for the most part, Harrison spares the reader the gory details. That restraint goes a long way toward making the text readable. But as I read I realized, too, that what makes it readable is just how unimaginable the act is. I could read the emotions in the text, and those resonated. But I can’t relate to—can’t even imagine—the physical nature of her choice. My brain and body just balk. And it is that balk that makes the book bearable to read. The emotions become real and implicate the reader personally in the way that memoirs have the power to. The act, however, remains unreal throughout.

Of course, it’s also that balk that creates an incredible hurdle for Harrison as a writer: How to narrate the book effectively such that we will believe her actions and not condemn her for them? The answer is, very, very slowly, layering herself as a character so very carefully that by the time the choice is made, we may not understand it but we accept that she would make it. At times, too, when the sexual scene becomes too intense she glances away in the text, devoting a few pages to developing another aspect of her father’s personality that will further explain why Harrison responds the way she does. In another book, this would be annoying. Here, it’s merciful, and it works.

The book also works because Harrison understands her own complicity. She has an unflinching eye when it comes to both the power and the wrongs of her parents, and only rarely does she falter in using that unflinching eye on herself. You get the sense that she wants her portrayal of herself to be as accurate as possible, not necessarily sympathetic. As a reader, I respect and respond to that. (A glaring exception is the last line of the book. If there ever was a story that should not be neatly wrapped up and tied with a sunny bow, this is it. I am actually tempted to use a marker to black out mine.)

In thinking about what to write in this comment I ran up against the purpose of this blog: I want the blog to be immediate, to contain impressions and thoughts rather than considered reviews. I am not giving myself time to sit with texts before remarking on them here; this is a reading blog, emphasis on the gerund and the action, not a review blog. But I am aware, too, that this is a book I will think about for a long time, and I imagine my thoughts will change. I will return to it, reread, and always try to understand how Harrison managed to write it. I suspect she needed to write it, to survive. I suspect she needed time before writing it. But neither of those allowances answers how.

Yesterday I wrote the “Structure” page for this blog, and when I added the explanation of Provision B for the “Read this!” tag it was because I knew I would soon be mentioning this book, and I knew I thought it was great, but I couldn’t imagine recommending it to anyone. That changed with the last sixty pages or so, where sexual enslavement is replaced with a confrontation with death. This is memoir at its best, human and honest and gripping and brave and liberating. And now I want to recommend it to everyone. So here you go: read this. I promise, it won’t make you as queasy as you think it will.

I also promise to write about someone other than Harrison tomorrow. And maybe, just maybe, to actually stay within my word count.