There's a lot packed into these few pages: the story of a young girl whose narcissistic mother and absent father create a desperate, undirected longing
It isn't the shocking part of this book - the incest, the love affair - that gives it force. ''When my father says the words I've dreaded - 'make love' is the expression he uses - God's heart bursts, it breaks,'' she writes. She clings to another God, the God of maidens and children. ''God gave you to me,'' her father tells her when she argues, but even in despair Up the volume, making this ancient immorality tale a struggle between good and evil, between life and death, between God and the Devil. The story of an intellectually powerful man and his consuming desire to ravish an innocent, almost preconscious, young woman (sometimes his daughter) has often been told - Zeus, Lewis Carroll and Humbert Humbert come to mind - but Kathryn Harrison turns And now you'll never be able to have anyone else, because you won't be able to keep our secret.'' ''You've done what you've done, and you've done it with me. Town where he is a respected church leader. Her father says near the end of the book, after they have slept together in a string of tacky motels and he has finally persuaded her to move into a bedroom off the kitchen in the house he shares with his new wife and children in the small Harrisonĭescribes with submerged fury and sadness what it means to be a daughter and how it feels to be a young girl yearning for a love that probably doesn't exist even in a perfect family. Writing in affectless prose that reflects the shutdown in her feelings, Ms. ''In years to come,'' she writes, ''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.'' But this story is notĪbout her body or brain, it is about her soul, the soul of a young girl and the terrible injury inflicted by the man who should have been its protector. Harrison's powerful, disturbing new book, the story of an affair she had with her father when she was a college student with a slender body and long, long blond hair and he was a stocky, handsome middle-aged preacher. He picks up his camera case, and, smiling brightly, he joins the end of the line of passengers disappearing into the airplane.'' My father pushes his tongue deep into my mouth: wet, insistent, exploring, It is no longer a chaste, closed-lipped kiss. I pull away, feeling the resistance of his hand behind my head, how tightly he holds me to him, the kiss changes. Harrison writes of her father's departure after a weeklong visit when she was 20 years old - the first time she had seen him in 10 years. ''A voice over the public-address system announces the final boarding call,'' Ms. Kathryn Harrison's memoir, ''The Kiss,'' is a book like this. The work reverberates with similarities to our own experience, and with differencesįrom our own experience, so that in the end it gives us a new way of looking at the world. Every now and then, though, a writer looks back with such bold clarity that it's as if we were living right along with the story. For a writer, memory is treacherous and preciousĪt the same time.
One look backward can turn you into salt, or cause the loss of the woman you love. Separated from family and from the flow of time, from work and from school standing against a sheer face of red rock one thousand feet high kneeling in a cave dwelling two thousand years old watching as a million bats stream from the mouth of Carlsbad Caverns into the purple dusk - these nowheres and no-times are the only home we have.Kathryn Harrison remembers the affair she had with her father The trees bear blossoms big as my head their ivory petals drift to the ground and cover our tracks. We go to Muir Woods in northern California, so shrouded in blue fog that the road is lost and we drive down the Natchez Trace into deep, green Mississippi summer. The road always stretches endlessly ahead and behind us, so that we are out of time as well as out of place. We quarrel sometimes, and sometimes we weep.
I feel his fingers in the hair at the nape of my neck. He tips it up and kisses my closed eyes, my throat. Airless, burning, inhuman.Īgainst such backdrops, my father takes my face in his hands. Increasingly, the places we go are unreal places: the Petrified Forest, Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon - places as stark and beautiful and deadly as those revealed in satellite photographs of distant planets. One of us flies, the other brings a car, and in it we set out for some destination. We meet in cities where we've never been before.