Kathryn Harrison

Background and education

Harrison's maternal grandparents raised her in Los Angeles, California, after her teenage parents separated when she was a baby. She graduated from Stanford University in 1982 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Art History; she received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1987 after attending that school's Writers' Workshop.

Career

Harrison's memoir The Kiss documented a love triangle that developed involving her young mother, her father, and herself. It described her father's seduction of her when she was twenty and their incestuous involvement, which persisted for four years and is reflected in the plots and themes of her first three novels, published before The Kiss. In The New York Times Book Review, Susan Cheever wrote, "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 up the volume, making this ancient immorality tale a struggle between good and evil, between life and death, between God and the Devil." In The New York Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called the memoir "appalling but beautifully written."

In The New Republic, by contrast, James Wolcott strongly criticized the work. He called it "the oddest piece of kitsch" with "airbrushed" sentences that "leave wistful little vapor trails of Valium." He pointed out that at the time of the affair, Harrison was not an innocent child victim but rather a consenting adult. He asked, "Did she call him 'Dad' in bed?" Wolcott dismissed much of the book's prose as "bad Sylvia Plath." Writing in The Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley called The Kiss "slimy, repellent, meretricious, cynical." Stephanie Zacherek of Salon.com called it "colorless," "arid," "boring" and "numbing." In The New York Times, Maureen Dowd wrote that the book constituted an example of "creepy people talking about creepy people." After Michael Shnayerson published a critical account of the book in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker canceled an excerpt that it had scheduled.

While much of her body of work—the essays collected in Seeking Rapture: Scenes From a Life and in "True Crimes: A Family Album; a second memoir, The Mother Knot; and The Kiss—documents her tortured relationship with her mother, who died in 1985, Harrison also has written extensively of her maternal grandparents, both in her personal essays and, in fictionalized form, in her novels. Her grandmother, of the Sephardi Sassoon family, was raised in Shanghai, where she lived until 1920, her experiences there inspiring Harrison's historical novel, The Binding Chair. The Seal Wife, set in Alaska during World War I (and which critic Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times called "mesmerizing"), draws on the early life of her British grandfather, who spent his youth trapping animals to obtain their fur in the Northwest Territories and laying track into Anchorage for the Alaska Railroad.

Of her most recent book, True Crimes: A Family Album, "The New York Times Book Review" said, "These intimate essays, which probe the deepest parts of Harrison's psyche, wield a curious power."

Harrison has published seven novels, two memoirs, two collections of personal essays, a travelogue, two biographies, and a book of true crime. She reviews regularly for The New York Times Book Review. Her personal essays have been included in many anthologies and have appeared in Bookforum, Harper's Magazine, More Magazine, The New Yorker, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Vogue, and at Salon.com, Nerve.Com and elsewhere.

Personal life

She lives in New York with her husband, the novelist and book editor Colin Harrison, whom she met in 1985, when they were enrolled in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. They have three children, born in 1990, 1992, and 2000.

Teaching

Harrison teaches memoir writing at the City University of New York's Hunter College as part of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing.