Kathryn Harrison

Kathryn Harrison
Photo by Joyce Ravid
Born	(1961-03-20) March 20, 1961 (age 55) Los Angeles
Occupation	author
Nationality	American
Spouse	Colin Harrison
Website
kathrynharrison.com

Kathryn Harrison (born March 20, 1961, in Los Angeles, California) is an American author.

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.

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 writer and memoirist Susan Cheever wrote of the book, "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.