1 star is too many.......When reading a memoir it helps if one can relate or sympathize with the author, unfortunately for me I could not understand, relate, or have any compassion for Ms. Harrison. She paints herself as an incest survivor who falls for the manipulations of her father, but by the end of this memoir I just wasn't buying what Ms. Harrison was selling. In fact I was left wondering if the events in this memoir are even true. So basically Ms. Harrison had a not so great childhood. She says her mother didn't love her enough and was cold and emotionally absent, her grandparents who helped raise her paid off her father to divorce the mom and abandon Kathryn So as a young adult Kathryn is pissed at her mother for not being there emotionally and angry that her father was absent from her life. **Ok first of all Kathryn should thank her grandparents every single day for banishing that pervert father of hers. I really felt bad for the other children this sick man had with his second wife, I hope he didn't violate any of them. **At 20 yrs of age, the father re-enters Kathryn's life. During their first meeting this creep who is now re-married has sex with his first wife, Katherine listens and is jealous, then the next morning he tells his daughter that he didn't want to have sex with her mother that he did it out of kindness because she asked him too. What a peach! Kathryn then drives her father to the airport, at the airport he kisses her. The kiss on the lips at first is chaste until he slips her the tongue and the kiss turns passionate(barf!) Hmmm so what does Katherine do? Does she tell her mom that her dad is a freak who tried to tongue kiss her? Nope! She doesn't because......“As for my mother, she is the last person I would tell about the kiss, she’s the one most likely to respond hysterically, even violently. She would prevent me from ever seeing my father again. And I can’t not see him again. From the time he left me, my first thought, the one that pushes aside my fears about the kiss, has been When. When will I see him again? When will we be together?” Does Kathryn decide to never see her father again because he is pervy nasty man? Nope! She begins meeting him and starts having sex with him. So now we come to the part that totally made me rage, the reason why Kathryn sleeps with her father is to get back at her mom! I get it, she had a shitty mom who wasn't there for her but dang there is no need to resort to incest just to get back at mom. But that's what she did....check out some of these passages.....“Our words about love are, like most people’s, unoriginal, unmemorable, but my father and I have a subject more consuming than love, Her. Love’s object. My mother. His wife. We’re locked in the kind of sympathy for each other that only two people spurned by the same woman could feel. Through her, in thrall to her, spiting her the person neither of us could ever know or possess we hold on to each other. She is more compelling than we are, because she always eludes. She is mysterious, whereas we are only too eager to bare ourselves. With words, my father and I lay open the organs of love.” “My father vilifies my mother and her parents. I defend them, but they have hurt me, too. It’s a relief to hear someone say that my young, beautiful mother, whom all my friends jealously admire, is a narcissist, that she’s selfish and cruel as only the weak can because cruelty is all she has to keep herself safe” “My father no longer makes the gesture of taking one photograph of my mother for every one of me, and not only his camera has shifted its focus. In my mother’s home, both of us her guests, my father and I forsake her, our former object of devotion, for each other” “It’s anger that frightens me most. I sleep to escape my rage. Not at him, but at my mother. To avoid owning a fury so destructive that I would take from her what brief love she has known, because she has been so unwilling for so long to love me just a little”So yeah a 20 year old adult decides to have an incestious affair with her father just to spite her mother. I was just left shaking my head.Lastly this line in the book just made me laugh.......“I’ll think of the kiss as a kind of transforming sting, like that of a scorpion, a narcotic that spreads from my mouth to my brain. The kiss is the point at which I begin, slowly, inexorably, to fall asleep, to surrender volition, to become paralyzed. It’s “the drug my father administers in order that he might consume me. That I might desire to be consumed”In my opinion if you want to read a memoir dealing with "consensual" father/daughter incest go read the diary of Anais Nin. The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934 I'm not sure Ms. Nin's accounts are all that truthful either but at least Nin tells an entertaining story unlike this boring memoir.
I was morbidly drawn to this book when I read it described as a memoir about a woman's "consensual affair with her father." I wondered, what circumstances could make an affair with one's father consensual; did she not know he was her father? Did she grow up without him, and not see him as a father figure when they finally met?It turns out that she did grow up without him in her life, but it's a stretch to call their affair consensual. It begins when Kathryn is 20 years old, meeting her father for the second time in her life. When they part at the airport, he French kisses her, and thus begins their non-platonic relationship. Nonetheless, the story still smacks of all the conventions of sexual abuse: shaming, secrecy, coercion. Kathryn's relationship with her father was abusive to say the least, and it left me feeling as if he really was an awful person, one who should have known to get some serious help.Despite Kathryn's being an adult when the affair started, the power dynamic keeps it from feeling consensual or ethical. I can hardly imagine living the kind of life Kathryn lived as her father's "secret lover," but it was difficult to stay with Kathryn's "victimized" tone, to read about all the ways in which she self-destructed (self-harm, anorexia, bulimia, etc.), and the way she pinned her vulnerability on a lack of affection from her mother felt a bit too much like the "poor me" card -- I would have she rather placed the blame where it really belonged, which was on her father. She manages to skirt around the more intimate details of their affair by claiming that she doesn't "remember" them, something that doesn't feel authentic to me, but which is a fair allowance to give. The writing in the first half of this book is vivid and compelling, but the second half reads more like an early draft. The book also lacks hope, despite the fact that we know that, somehow, Kathryn managed to move on, marry, and raise a family. In some ways, 207 pages are just too few to do a subject matter this complex justice. I found myself caring about her enough to want to know how things really happened, to see the healing half of the journey. But unfortunately, this memoir only offers the suffering, with only vaguely implied redemption.
What do You think about The Kiss (1998)?
What an amazing, fascinating, horrendous book!! I could not put it down, yet at the same time had feelings of repulsion, revulsion and great sympathy for Harrison -- since it is her memoir,It is her story of being born to teen parents who barely know each other, abandoned (physically and emotionally by her father and emotionally by her mother) raised by a very judgmental grandmother and a (thank goodness!) somewhat warm, caring grandfather -- and all the scars and needs she carries as a result of this.At 20 she is reunited with her father -- and has a totally dysfunctional relationship with him and her mother -- often trying to wreak revenge on her mother through the relationship with her father.The father, despite being a minister, initiates an incestuous relationship with his daughter -- which is the subject of the book -- starting with the first non-parental type kiss.Harrison writes incredibly well -- almost poetically -- and lays out her feelings about what is going on, her conflicts and indecision and some of her understanding of why things are happenin. Yet, at the same time, she avoids sensationalizing and writes much more about her feelings about the incest, rather than going in to great details about the actual sexual behaviour.
—Ann
Last Sunday's Washington Post Magazine contained an article about "While They Slept: An Inquiry Into The Murder of a Family" about murders in Medford, Oregon, another book by this author. The article mentioned this book, and I was intrigued by the author's statement that at age 20, she began a 4-year affair with her father. Normally one would refer to such an incestuous relationship as molestation, or some other such term. At any rate, I requested this book from the library and read it in one sitting. It is a strangely dark and disturbing book. The fact that the father in question was a minister lent the situation a quality that I can only call evil. We can only be grateful that the man left the ministry. I was surprised that I didn't view the author as a victim, as she was certainly guilty of something. There are psychological overtones of jealousy and vengeance against her mother. While the story, which is billed as a memoir, is disturbing, the writing is good. I will probably read "While They Slept..." simply because I have some familiarity with the locale. I don't know that I would recommend this book.
—Jeanne
Yawn. Admittedly, she didn't have the best childhood, but on the other hand she grew up in a stable household with her grandparents, enough money, education, etc. And I don't buy that her father "manipulated" her into a relationship. She was 20 years old, she could make her own choices at that point, especially when it involved voluntarily travelling long distances to meet him. Not that I was looking for details (yuck), but I also don't buy that she "doesn't remember" any of the times that she had sex with him.I didn't find this memoir disturbing or harrowing in the least, just pointless.
—Terrie
