Dad is definitely presented as creepy, or at least an excellent candidate for character assassination. It’s all about mortification and a teenage girl’s masochism. The long hair, the fat body, the thin body. The structure is necessary, I think, because the material is so dangerously hot. The structure is more than a little by the numbers, a kiss at the beginning, a kiss at the end, a journey into darkness. What seems a little unbelievable is Kathryn’s complete lack of agency in a four year sexual affair, but I accepted that an emotionally abandoned young woman could be fascinated by a longed for father’s fascination, and also that her father seduced her, in the old fashioned usage of the word. The story, which took place long in the past, is narrated in present tense, heightening the narrator's passivity, the lack of thinking things through. Most characters are depicted as horrid and there is not the slightest hint of humor.
The tongue kiss at the airport is like the scaly monster appearing from behind the bedroom door. This short slight memoir read like a horror movie, impossible to put down. Finally her unhappy mother dies of cancer, crystalizing Kathryn's disgust at her participation in the relationship. He is sexually possessive and eventually brings her to live into his house with his wife and kids. He pesters and pesters her for coitus, and finally she agrees. That night, he enters her room, lifts her nightgown, and performs oral sex on her. She drops out of college, accompanies him to his parents’ house. At the airport, her father, a Presbyterian minister (!), sticks his tongue in her mouth. Kathryn also realizes her parents have resumed their sexual relationship. When Kathryn is at college, her parents reconnect for the weekend, a weekend in which her father grows besotted with his daughter’s grown up blonde beauty, so like his own. Her father, asked by the grandparents to disappear, fails to see Kathryn for years on end. Her immature mother makes a point to display her resentment. Kathryn, the accidental child of two teenagers, is raised by her elderly grandparents. But this line from The Kiss kept coming back to me, of your mother, you wrote: I. 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.Years later, a woman relates the affair she had with her father A story both of taboo and of family complicity in breaking taboo, The Kiss is also about love - about the most. An audio interview with author Kathryn Harrison on Fogged Clarity. 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. This item is available to borrow from all library branches.
Kathryn harrison the kiss story arc archive#
Scars are stories, history written on the body. The item The kiss, Kathryn Harrison represents a specific, individual, material embodiment of a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Internet Archive - Open Library. Exquisitely and hypnotically written, like a bold and terrifying dream, The Kiss is breathtaking in its honesty and in the power and beauty of its creation. The road always stretches endlessly ahead and behind us, so that we are out of time as well as out of place. Books and quotes by Kathryn Harrison are collected at. We quarrel sometimes, and sometimes we weep. I feel his fingers in the hair at the nape of my neck. Author Harrison (Poison, 1995, etc.) has written thinly disguised versions of these episodes in her novels (Thicker than Water, 1991), but the reality is both more gripping. Ever since the Maid of Orleans led her people into battle, her story has been told and retold by great artists of every era, including William Shakespeare. He tips it up and kisses my closed eyes, my throat. A mesmerizing true tale of a love affair between father and daughter, that in this talented novelist's hands takes on the mythic proportions of a Greek tragedy. 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.