Kathryn Harrison was shamed for her 90s memoir of an ‘affair’ with her father. Today, we know better
- Written by Emma Maguire, Lecturer in English and Writing, James Cook University
Our cultural touchstones series looks at influential books.
In the era of social media and the selfie, it’s hard to imagine a time when the sharing of intimate personal stories was new – at least, on a large public scale. But in 1997, when Kathryn Harrison’s now-classic memoir of father-daughter incest was published, the 1990s “memoir boom” – which has ebbed and flowed, but never entirely receded since – had just begun.
In The Kiss, Harrison narrates the experience of meeting her estranged father for the first time since she was nine, at the age of 19, and being groomed into a sexual relationship with him.
“You were 19, you were an adult, you were not innocent,” American television host Charlie Rose told Harrison in a 1997 interview. One reviewer advised her to “shut up”. She was accused of being “a liar, an opportunist, a traitor to all segments of her family, an unfit mother”.
And despite the memoir not graphically or explicitly depicting any of the sexual abuse, The Kiss was maligned for airing “dirty laundry” that did not belong in the public domain.
In the late 1990s, public discourse about abuse and sexual consent was shaped by rape myths and victim blaming.
As a result, Harrison’s public disclosure of her complex personal experience of incest meant she became an unwilling poster girl for criticisms of the so-called narcissistic, oversharing memoir boom – rather than being acknowledged as a survivor. One sympathetic writer at the time referred to what she went through as a “witch trial”.
In today’s post-MeToo landscape, Harrison’s story would likely have found a more receptive audience. Now, we know about how power dynamics complicate consent, and we understand incest as a serious and unfortunately common form of sexual abuse.
This makes now the perfect time to revisit Harrison’s memoir: as a work of art, and for what it can teach us about the complexities of her experience.
Not marytring herself
“I knew that people would go after her,” said Mary Karr, whose 1995 debut memoir, The Liar’s Club, is often credited with kick-starting the nineties memoir boom. “Not for having it happen, but for writing about it and […] for not martyring herself, for not being more broken, for not taking more of the pose of the victim.”
The rise of memoir almost immediately prompted grievances, centred on the so-called narcissism and attention-seeking of writing as the autobiographical “I”. Karr said this was somewhat inevitable, fitting within “a history” of new literary genres or forms of writing being devalued as “low”. She said: “A sonnet was seen as really low rent at one time among poets”.
Memoir, especially memoir written by women, continues to occupy an uneasy place within the literary landscape, but it offers valuable spaces for marginalised groups and silenced stories to find audiences – and to speak back against dominant cultural narratives of race, class, gender, sexuality and ability.
The Kiss
Harrison’s artfully told memoir describes how she was abandoned by her father and then her mother, left to the primary care of her grandparents. After feeling unwanted and unloved for most of her life, Kathryn is overwhelmed by her father’s attention and affection when he returns to visit, when she is 19. Harrison describes their initial meeting:
“Don’t move,” he says, “Just let me look at you.”My father looks at me, then, as no one has ever looked at me before. His hot eyes consume me. I almost feel their touch. He takes my hands, one in each of his, and turns them over, stares at my palms. He does not actually kiss them, but his look is one that ravishes.
During the first days of their meeting, Harrison’s father showers her with attention and affection, and cycles rapidly between expressions of fatherly love and seductive advances. Kathryn craves his fatherly love so deeply, she abides his inappropriate behaviour.
This pattern continues as she moves away to college. Harrison narrates how her father relentlessly pursued her, dominating her social life with phone calls and visits until she was so isolated, she became mentally and physically unwell and unable to attend classes.
The sexual relationship begins some time later, depicted by Harrison as her caving in response to her father’s unrelenting manipulation and insistence. He “pleads and threatens”, and reframes the act of sex between them as the “expression of love”, telling her she is tormenting him by withholding. She says, “he must possess me physically, for only that will reassure him of my commitment to him”. She fears he will stop loving her without such “assurance”.
In a textbook example of predatory manipulation, he says:
Is it possible that you don’t realise my devotion? You say I’m disrupting your studies, but don’t you see that you’ve wreaked havoc in my heart! Only you matter to me!
Harrison reacts with behaviour we now understand as trauma responses: “I fall into what feels like a stupor […] my essence distilled into a safe, impermeable core far within my body”. Eventually, she sees no way out except to give him what he wants: “the exhaustion of withstanding his desire is not supportable.”
Control, isolation and taking advantage
In telling the story of the sexual relationship, Harrison describes another effect of trauma: the gaps in memory created when a traumatic event is suppressed. She writes, “In years to come, I won’t be able to remember even one instance of our lying together”.
She remembers tiny details like trees outside a window, the colour of a motel room carpet. “But”, she says, “I won’t be able to remember what it felt like. No matter how hard I try, pushing myself to inhabit my past, I’ll recoil from what will always seem inmpossible”.
Harrison’s memoir depicts the trauma of living through this abuse and manipulation. Her father is described as a controlling force:
We fight over any independence I exhibit, whether of body, of mood, of thought. We fight over the clothes I wear and whether they might show any other man a snatch of the flesh my father considers his own.
And the way the abuse isolated her:
From the start, we’ve had to meet in rooms like the one we’re in, rooms for addicts and prostitutes, people who exist outside the social contract […] I have no life or will apart from his.
Karr was one of a few critics who saw, even in 1997, that Harrison took more responsibility for events than she should have. “I still thought of her as a child with a parent who was taking advantage of her.”
Harrison is an accomplished writer, and the memoir is beautifully written. The prose is spare, details vivid, and Harrison creates an atmosphere rich with pain, longing, and the haziness of childhood memory.
Some contemporaneous critics wondered if it was “too artistic for the truth”. But Harrison’s artfulness in telling this harrowing story should be admired. Her skill allows her to precisely capture and convey a victim’s perspective and experience, shot through as it is with emotional contradictions, confusion and the effects of trauma.
Memoir is a space for victim testimony
Gendered violence – including sexual assault and abuse – is not treated like other kinds of crime. Victims are often treated as suspicious from the outset, as Harrison was when her memoir was published.
They are blamed for the violence perpetrated against them. The system is so ill-equipped at meting out justice that despite the World Health Organization’s estimate that one in three women experience physical or sexual violence, in Australia only 1.5% of reported sexual assaults result in a conviction. Victims are often retraumatised and revictimised by the process of reporting what happened to them.
This is no accident.
In their book How Many More Women, human rights lawyers Jennifer Robinson and Keina Yoshida explain that existing laws around sexual and gendered violence have been adapted from much older laws, which treated women not as subjects or citizens, but as property. Therefore, crimes against them were treated similarly to property damage.
Human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson: our laws around sexual violence come from laws that treated women as property.
Lukas Coch/AAP
Despite decades of feminist and human rights reform, existing Western legal systems were created to protect the interests of wealthy, white men. Testimony within the court system is highly structured and regulated according to the values of this legal system, they explain. Much of a victim’s experience is often left out of the record, making juries unable to consider it.
Memoir and other forms of public testimony outside of legal systems provide an alternative space for victim testimony to be heard.
In a memoir, a victim has more control over how they shape their narrative. They choose which details are relevant. They are not forced to endure cross-examination as part of the process of telling their story. They are less likely (most of the time) to be treated as suspicious.
But it doesn’t always happen this way. While the contemporary reception of women’s memoir is much less antagonistic than in the heyday of the memoir boom, this process of attacking women who testify in public spaces has a long history – also connected to judicial systems.
“Witness tainting” is where a victim-survivor is attacked, smeared, doubted and her story undermined in order to invalidate her claim, or cause it to fail in official spaces. The phrase was coined by Leigh Gilmore, a scholar of writing and feminist theory. The stigma around memoir, she argues, operates as a form of witness tainting, used to discount the stories women tell about violence and abuse.
This happened to Kathryn Harrison, whose memoir has become infamous as a “misery memoir”. To this day, The Kiss is her most well known work.
Post-MeToo memoirs
The #MeToo movement has brought into the mainstream the language to communicate and understand the complexities of sexual violence. We have since seen an explosion of women’s memoir about sexual and gendered violence.
Bri Lee’s Eggshell Skull (2019) took aim at the legal system’s failures from the inside, from the position of a child sexual assault survivor, training as a lawyer while mounting her own case. Australian of the Year Grace Tame wrote about her childhood sexual abuse by her teacher – and her resulting activism – in her memoir, The Ninth Life of a Diamond Memoir (2022).
Lucia Osborne-Crowley first joined the dots between sexual trauma and chronic illness in her memoir My Body Keeps Your Secrets (2021), where she revealed her childhood sexual assault by a gymnastics coach and teenage rape by a stranger. Then, in 2022, she combined her writing skills with her experience, as a “trauma-informed” journalist covering the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, which this year became a book, The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell.
Unlike in 1997, when The Kiss was published to widespread derision (as well as literary acclaim), these memoirs (and Osborne-Crowley’s reportage blended with memoir) have been largely received as positive contributions to the public conversation.
Memoir allows writers to tell their stories in full, in ways that show the complexities of their experiences. And because memoirs uses the techniques of fiction – narrative voice, metaphor and poetics – they invite us to identify and emotionally connect with protagonists. We are invited to share the inner thoughts, emotions and aftermath of sexual trauma, and thus to better understand the costs and complexities of these crimes.
We’re ready to read The Kiss now
The Kiss offers one such opportunity. The conversation around incest is particularly sensitive. It has struggled to gain a foothold, though a significant portion of sexual abuse is perpetrated by family members: 35.6% of child sexual abuse in Australia is perpetrated by a family member.
The Kiss shows how coercion and vulnerability trouble notions of consent, and how young people are particularly vulnerable to manipulation by older abusers.
The culture may not have been ready for Harrison’s memoir a quarter of a century ago, when beliefs about victims of sexual violence were permeated by misogyny, misunderstanding and prejudice. Remember the public mockery of Monica Lewinsky in 1998, when her affair with Bill Clinton, as a young White House intern, was exposed.
But I believe we are ready for it now.
Today, we have a chance to read this memoir in the way it deserves to be read: as the testimony of a survivor. Harrison’s story can teach us about how abusers manipulate and coerce young victims. And it has the potential to open an overdue conversation about incest, as a next step in post-MeToo activism.
Authors: Emma Maguire, Lecturer in English and Writing, James Cook University 
