Rating: 
Summary: Maudlin navel-gazing
Review: I read this book to battle insomnia after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Towers, fomerly visible 20 miles south of me. Maybe that's why it seemed even more irrelevent than it normally would -- downright pointless. This story of a spoiled upper middle class white girl, the daughter of another, grandaughter of another, will not resonate with anyone who's ever had to take hard knocks in life.
If the girl had ever been made to do a minimum wage job, like other adolescents,she wouldn't have had time to obsess about anyone in her family. As it is, it's hard to relate to someone whose every whim is met by overindulgent grandparents. She moves to New York after college, living on family donations. If she'd had to scramble for an entry level job like the rest of us, she'd have been too busy to run around, obsessing about herself and her father. To me, it's no less self-indulgent or more worthy of recording than a drug habit.
Later she lives off Daddy, all the while sleeping with him, for a year out in the midwest. Then her mother and grandfather die (remember, this never ever happened to anyone else before, right?) and then she's off to grad school, funded by who?
This whole book reinforces the sense you get that literature is so bad now because it's limited to the endeavors of spoiled rich kids like this. Oh, the prose, by the way -- the same you'd get in any college creative writing workshop -- tearful, gimmicky, generic, cliched all the way.
Rating: 
Summary: A gut-wrenching read
Review: I'll never forget this book, but not because of the odd father-daughter affair. "The Kiss" is more about Harrison's mother, and this is the story that will intrigue and sadden you. The last segment of the memoir, after she ends the relationship with her father, is the most poignant and straightforward of all. It is here that Harrison reveals not only the still-raw scars that remain on her soul, but how the pain helped her to grow.
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Summary: Come on Katherine! Gimme a break!!!!!!
Review: Harrison has a complete command of the English tongue, and she does know how to weave poetically, both with angelic and surgical precision at one time. She is powerful! She knows what a novel is, and to the core. I feel that she prepared herself for a long time until she finally -valiantly- dared to give us "The Kiss," (i.e."Exposure," "Thicker than water") There is no doubt that all the "episodes" in the novel are factual in the writer's life, or have become so by the magic of her mind and hence are true. And she is faithful at describing them to us -her enslaved readers- until it comes to her real feelings and sensations; then, she runs away and keeps hiding from us the tenderness of the avid heart as well as the abyssal desires of the protagonist for the discovered or re-encountered father. When it comes to that she holds on to cheap psychological clichés, she "lies" and rationalizes. She does not tell us of her "falling in love". Mother and father souls are disected masterfully, with beauty and rigor, with a penetrating eye, with balanced passion, with collected reason. They make sense always. Even when they are pathetic they are always human, touchable beings, flesh and spirit. You can love them, want them, despise them, be enraged at them, suffer with them. They are, certainly, your neighbors. They are true! But the heroine "dissociates" herself in "parts" whenever she consumates her sexual encounters with the loved object, whenever her "lover" looks at her like "no one else ever did", whenever she remembers "the kiss". Come on! This is not a story of "abuse". This is a tragic love story albeit a "forbidden" love story. The encounter is, in the end, among two powerful souls. And many times you cannot tell who has the most power. The precise insights of her vision of the characters around her makes her the most potent of them all. Harrison is very brave, but not brave enough to show us the true crevasses of her yearning heart, to describe the true wants of her tortured body, to show us her true erotic passion for her father. When it comes to that she withdraws, she reduces the immense and beautiful size of the protagonist to a mere clinic case. If you'd believed her then, you'd almost feel the need to "report" somebody to the local D.A. What a waste! If she would have dared, O God, "The Kiss" would have a been a work for the centuries!
Rating: 
Summary: Believable
Review: Incestuous non-tittilating memoir filled with pain, confusion and sorrow. Harrison's bleak and honest account of her childhood/adolescence is haunting.
Rating:
Summary: Chilling and Excellent
Review: A beautifully composed story, this book tells a frightening tale of control and abuse. Unlike what many may think - this is a not a sex story. I read this book from start to finish without putting down, even though it was a suspense story, which normally precipitates that dedication. This book is not for the squeamish, nor for those that are used to buryig their heads in the sand. It let me understand more about myself and others. Everyone should read this book.
Rating:
Summary: morally reprehensible
Review: Harrison has talent as a writer. Unfortunately, understanding that this is a 'true confession' leaves me with little sympathy for the author. She was 20 when the affair started, however, I wonder if she had the moral consciousness of a 3-year old, or if she was as much a sociopath as her father? From her telling, it seems the incest was motivated by a rage toward the mother, both by the husband and the daughter. All three individual's are so completely self-absorbed as to act with only pointed hurt toward one another, while trying to justify their sadism by proclaiming their own victimhood. I wonder what would motivate a person to reveal something that portrays herself in such a horrific way, is it a desire to shame herself in public........or sell books?
Rating:
Summary: The Kiss
Review: Kathryn was very young when her father left her and her mother. His visits after that were very infrequent. As she grows up, her and her mother drift farther and farther apart, and she eventually begins to live with her grandparents. When she is twenty years old, her, her father, and her mother decide that it is time to meet again. Her mother still secretly is in love with Kathryn's father, and is constantly trying to make moves at him. When Kathryn meets her father, they realize all their similarities, and she falls again in love with him. Their love starts as a normal father to daughter relashionship. Then, at the airport as Kathryn's father was leaving, she went to kiss him goodbye, and the kiss turned into more than just a father to daughter kiss. After that kiss, Kathryn's entire life would change. She knew the kiss was wrong, but she couldn't avoid her fathers devouring eyes. Kathryn cut herself off from the rest of the world, and her and her father's relationship escalated. This book was unlike any other that I have read, because Kathryn Harrison said the things that so many people have been afraid to talk about. This book really held my attention. I couldn't put it down until I was finished. Kathryn's use of words pulled me right into her mind, and I felt as if I was listening to her tell her story first hand. I would recomend this book to anyone who is interested in dramatic reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Unreadable
Review: When I picked up this book, I thought it would be an interesting. Hell, having an affair with your dad is as messed up as it gets. The way Harrison writes is very annoying and distracted me from the main point. Apparently, she thinks describing everything around her constitutes a plot. I read a couple of chapters and couldn't go on.
Rating:
Summary: A startling story with a deep underlay of sorrow...
Review: This 1997 memoir by Kathryn Harrison is the true story of her incestuous relationship with her father. Her parents were divorced and there had been little contact throughout her childhood, but she had always been obsessed with him. Then, after visiting her in college when she was 20, his kiss good-bye was passionate rather than fatherly. That was the beginning. Ms. Harrison's writes in the present tense, with brief flashbacks and flash forwards, her language seemingly simple and yet poetic. Always, it is startling with a deep underlay of sorrow. The reader shares her turmoil, her guilt, her attraction to her father as well as her repulsion. She's a victim, although a willing one, anorexic, bulimic and sad. I've read two of her other books, "Poison" and "The Binding Chair". I loved both of them. And now that I've read this memoir, I've come to know her more and understand the deep well of discomfort which is present in her writing. Now a wife and mother, and a writer of some renown, I admire the courage it took for her to write this book and come to terms with the demons of her past. A mere 207 pages of large print, this book can be easily read in one sitting. Like her other books, it's not a pleasant read but yet very worthwhile. I definitely recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Harrowing Loneliness
Review: I have read, and liked, Kathryn Harrison's beautiful books, Thicker Than Water and Poison, so when The Kiss was published, I was more than a little dismayed. Why, I asked myself, would a beautiful and talented writer like Harrison want to "cash in" with an exploitative piece of tripe like this? I really wasn't sure I even believed the events Harrison was writing about had even happened, but for now, I would give her the benefit of the doubt. Then a friend, knowing I was a fan of Harrison's, gave me a copy of The Kiss. It was too perverse to read, I thought, and I threw it in a closet. But, eventually, morbid curiosity got the best of me and I read the book. I was both shocked and pleased. Shocked at what the book portrayed, and pleased to find that Harrison wasn't "cashing in" on anything. The Kiss is a wonderful book, and, it is wonderfully written. It is spare, revealing, raw, dignified and one of the most harrowing evocations of loneliness I have ever encountered. Harrison was an only child whose father deserted his little family when Kathryn was only six months old. Her mother, who was severely depressed, spent her days in bed, a black satin mask shielding her from the outside world. Kathryn, as a tiny girl, would spend days at her sleeping mother's bedside, dropping shoes, slamming hairbrushes, peering inside the sleep mask, willing this unwilling mother to please wake up and love her. The mother didn't. At the age of six, Kathryn was sent to live with her Grandmother while her mother moved to a nearby apartment. Missing her mother, Kathryn would go to look at the dresses her mother had left behind. One day, folding herself into a beautiful sun-gold dress, this little girl summoned the courage to ask herself, "If a dress like this was not worth taking, how could I have hoped to be?" Far from being bitter over her husband's abandonment, Kathryn's mother remained romantically fixated on Kathryn's father. He visited when Kathryn was only five and she can remember her mother's intense interest in him and the way he would "arrange" them for his own family photographs. As a teenager, Kathryn became severely anorexic. She tells us it was a sign of rebellion against her mother's blatant sexuality. Her breasts disappeared, then her hips, then her periods. When her mother took her to a gynecologist to be fitted for a diaphragm, prior to going off to college, Kathryn endured one the most bizarre situations I have ever encountered, in "life" or in fiction. Suffice it to say, if you read this book, it will certainly shock you. When Kathryn was twenty, her father again visited. Although he was remarried and had children with his new wife, Kathryn was well aware that her own mother had been carrying on secret sexual encounters with this man. "She uses his curiosity about me, and mine about him," Harrison writes, "as the excuse to plan a reunion that will include her. If this is the case, how bitterly she will regret the ruse." Kathryn's father did visit and while he was there, he slept with Kathryn's mother. It was Kathryn, however, who drove him to the airport to catch his flight home. And it was there that her father first kissed her goodbye. But this was no ordinary kiss, at least not ordinary for a father and a daughter. "He touches his lips to mine," Harrison says. "I stiffen. My father pushed his tongue into my mouth: wet, insistent, exploring, then withdrawn." Yes, she was old enough to know better, and, in fact, she did know better. But life and the circumstances under which she had grown up, the needs that had still gone unmet--all of these and more converged at the moment of that kiss to propel Kathryn Harrison over the edge of reason and place her in her father's power. Never light-hearted and carefree, Kathryn quit college and fell into a deep depression, one she describes as a "cold, sinking torpor." She lived alone in a basement apartment, talking to her father on the telephone for hours each night as her persuaded her, isolated her and finally seduced her. He was, after all, all she had. Even the love letters he sent her, she later discovered, were replicas of ones he had sent her mother twenty years earlier. They slept together, father and daughter. "God gave you to me," was her father's explanation, as if this made things alright, as if this was all the explanation that was needed. Kathryn, depressed and impressionable couldn't see her father for what he really was--a selfish, self-centered narcissist who would use anyone and anything to further his own needs and wants. Readers who are looking for all the gory details won't find them in this book, for Kathryn remembers very little about having sex with her father save for the fact that it definitely was not good and it definitely made her feel more alone than she had ever felt before. To her credit, Kathryn's mother, suspecting the truth of what was happening, put aside her own vanity long enough to take Kathryn to a psychiatrist. There, the young Kathryn put on the performance of a lifetime and robbed her mother, not only of her father, but of the only human being in whom her mother could confide. The worst, though, was yet to come, and it would be a long time before Harrison could free herself and write The Kiss. The Kiss is not the first book to chronicle adult incest nor is it the most famous to do so. Anaïs Nin reportedly slept with her own father, but Nin was a notoriously unreliable writer, albeit a very good one. It doesn't help, either, that we really have no signposts in the world of incest literature. Many of us find dinner with our mother and father an excruciating experience; almost no grown man or woman wants to sleep with a parent. Wisely, Harrison offers no excuses for her behavior as she knews there are none. She knows it was wrong and she knows it was ludicrous. But human behavior is usually inexplicable, the good, the bad, the mundane and yes, the ludicrous. Harrison has let the facts stand or fall as they may; her usual lyric prose is pared-down and she resists any temptation to go over the top. The result is that The Kiss is a harrowing account of loneliness and deprivation, the worst nightmare any child could ever imagine. One of the keys to Harrison's own healing is to be found in the book's dedication to "Beloved 1942-1985." "Beloved" is Kathryn's mother, now deceased. After years of roiling over her mother's faults and the wrong that was done to her, Kathryn Harrison finally found peace and reconciliation. She became "beloved" to her mother and her mother became "beloved" to her. This is a painful and painfully honest book, harrowing, sad and lonely. But, ultimately, it is the chronicle of one woman's courageous triumph, a triumph that can be appreciated by any other woman, abuse survivor or not. For is there any daughter among us who cannot say, with all honesty, "If things had only been a little different, it could have been me?"
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