The Kiss: A Memoir

The Story

In this extraordinary memoir, one of the best writers in America today transforms into a work of art the darkest passage imaginable in a young woman's life: an obsessive love affair between father and daughter that began when Kathryn Harrison was twenty years old. Exquisitely and hypnotically written, like a terrifying dream, The Kiss will literally take your breath away, for the power and beauty of its creation, and for the shocking truth it reveals, a story both of taboo and of family complicity in breaking taboo. Kathryn Harrison was six months old when her father left the family, yet in his absence, this lost father haunted her youth. When Kathryn is in college, her father comes back for a bizarre family reunion -- and an affair begins with a kiss, a descent into a maelstrom, during which Kathryn Harrison nearly loses her sanity and her life.Like William Styron's Darkness Visible, The Kiss is a stunning writer's remarkable re-creation of the secret at the heart of a life, by the author whose previous novel, Poison, was called 'powerful and hypnotic' by The New York Times, and 'a masterpiece' by Lucy Grealy.