(One critic ventured that it might be “too true for its own good.”) In her memoir, Harrison has put art at the service of trauma and emerged with something that has the feel of neither. How intimate can the two get before congenital defects begin to show up in their offspring? In Thicker Than Water, Harrison moved away from trauma toward art and produced fiction with the disorienting strangeness of truth. There the similarity between Harrison’s two books ends, and the difference between them exemplifies a different form of incest: that between literature and psychotherapy. This man reappears and instigates an obsessive affair with his now college-age daughter. Her mother, in turn, yearns for the déclassé husband whom her parents had forced her to divorce, soon after she had had her baby daughter at 19. (It is echoed in Bloom’s new novel, Love Invents Us, for instance, although the narrator there succumbs to a teacher rather than a father.) Raised by wealthy grandparents in Bel Air comfort, the narrator of both novel and memoir endures a barren childhood and anorexic adolescence, yearning desperately for a mother who has brutally rebuffed her since birth. Familiar characters line up in the foreground: There’s the abusive father, the indifferent mother and, in the middle, the masochistic daughter. Harrison’s twin books are a disconcerting guide to a neo-Gothic family drama with proven drawing power in our post-feminist era. By proving that she is on intimate terms with the abnormal, Harrison joins a company of women that includes such fiction writers as Mary Gaitskill (a onetime stripper) and Amy Bloom (a therapist), as well as a burgeoning array of memoirists personally acquainted with the dark heart of Freud’s “family romance.” On the contrary, their biographies are a key to their authority in this realm of love gone awry. Harrison is the latest specimen of a newish literary vogue that might be labeled “the feminine perverse.” Those who chart this psychologically and sexually unsettling terrain are not supposed to be specimens of wholesome equilibrium themselves. “There was an internal imperative to deal with the subject now, and that need was confirmed by my husband Colin’s and my desire that it be published as soon as possible–before our children were any older and more aware of the media around them.” Is The Kiss a case of opportunism in a book market mad for memoirs, or a case of exhibitionistic masochism? The answer, of course, is both. “ The Kiss was a book I couldn’t avoid, rather than one I set out to write,” writes Harrison in a press release for reviewers.

At the time, she swore that Thicker Than Water was “completely a product of her imagination.” Now she says the story is completely the product of her unconscious. Writers regularly perjure themselves, too, though here again, Harrison’s brazenness is unusual. A memoir about her incestuous relationship with her father, it reprises her first novel, Thicker Than Water (1991), in which a woman named Isabel recounts an incestuous relationship with her father. Writers routinely plagiarize themselves, but rarely on the scale that Kathryn Harrison does in The Kiss.

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