I posit that her reasons are identical to those of long-venerated memoir masters like Richard Wright, Mary McCarthy, and Vladimir Nabokov—to get the story right.
Like some of us, Harrison at first set out to tell her story in fiction, books she’d later rue as untrue and feel honor-bound to correct. Before The Kiss, the subject of incest insinuated itself—“it kept intruding”— into her first three novels. But she particularly hated how, in her first, she located the daughter squarely among the innocent.
I wrote The Kiss in many ways as a response to my own first novel, Thicker Than Water, which was held to be autobiographical. The woman in the story, Isabel, has an affair with her father, but Isabel was younger than I was at the time. She was more passive, sweeter, more of a victim. When I finished that book I wanted to disown it. I felt I had betrayed my own history. I was dishonest in a way that has been inordinately painful to me over the years.
Fiction, rather than bringing events into sharper focus for Harrison, had blurred them further. She was driven to make it right—not squinting-through-your-eyes-looking-through-your-fingers right, but right as only ruthless scrutiny can make it.
She felt fiction had so falsified her tale that “I’d obeyed the cultural silence to keep quiet about incest.” So for those who think a writer can flip a switch and go from nonfiction to novel based on social convenience, I’ve got some bad news. Your psychological proclivity determines which better fits your story. That decision grows from the nature of your character. Autonomy in such choices is a fairy tale.
Of course, fiction can be ruthlessly honest—or it can smear Vaseline on the lens and obscure. A real novelist tells the greater truth with a mask on. I once suggested to Don DeLillo that he write a memoir, and he recoiled. But even black-belt proser Martin Amis undertook his memoir, Experience, about his author father, Kingsley Amis, from “a desire to speak, for once, without artifice.” For some subjects, fiction won’t do. To free herself from the topic as an artist, Harrison turned to memoir. “It wasn’t a decision, it was a helpless act.”
Before and during the book’s creation, Harrison spent five years in analysis. Folks don’t undertake that process to make up a pretty bedtime story starring themselves, but to find out what the hell happened. When Harrison announced the move to nonfiction to her husband, he said, “I feel like the chemo has begun.” To finish the book, she did a slog of sixteen-hour days over six months. “In therapy, the window had come open, and I didn’t know how long it could stay that way.”
So many reviewers deemed her motives venal, but if you deduct the cost of mandatory therapy to get through the story in her heart before undertaking the book’s writing, she’d have made more money working a deep-fat fryer, which might have also been more fun.
But with such personal reasons for writing, why publish it at all?
To understand, you’d have to marshal some empathy for any rape or incest survivor. It’s through shame and silence that a perpetrator seeks to capture someone else’s soul, sentencing her to lifetime collusion with him. “On top of everything else,” Harrison told me, “I was supposed to keep my mouth shut forever.” Either she published her story or remained complicit with her seducer, which meant actually being allied with him against herself. Publishing the book was a way to reclaim “what was left of me.”
Harrison is a study in the courage a book can demand from its scribbler. From page one, you can hear her resolve to treat her young self—to my eye, anyway—to fairly unblinking scrutiny. The voice has the brutal detachment of a traumatized girl in a dissociative state during a rape. Or like some doomed prisoner speaking from inside an iron mask. Which—psychically speaking—seems apt.
We meet at airports. We meet in cities we’ve never been to before. We meet where no one will recognize us.
One of us flies, the other brings a car, and in it we set out for some destination. Increasingly, the places we go are unreal places: the Petrified Forest, Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon—places as stark and beautiful and deadly as those revealed in satellite photographs of distant planets. Airless, burning, inhuman.
Against such backdrops, my father takes my face in his hands. He tips it up and kisses my closed eyes, my throat. I feel his fingers in the hair at the nape of my neck. I feel his hot breath on my eyelids.
We quarrel sometimes, and sometimes we weep. The road always stretches endlessly ahead and behind us, so that we are out of time as well as out of place.
She cuts herself no slack. It’s we meet, we quarrel, we weep. She speaks as an adult choosing, not as a girl with a gun to her head.
Rather than praise the obvious precision and grace of this prose, Vanity Fair’s Michael Shnayerson calls Harrison “a tease” for not making herself smutty enough. It’s a painful book but not a sexually explicit one—an almost impossible feat given the topic. (Actually, the most carnal scene in The Kiss paints Harrison’s disinterested mother standing alongside a gynecologist’s table as he deflowers the girl with increasing large penis substitutes so she can go off to college with a diaphragm, and not get pregnant at seventeen as Harrison’s mother had with her.) Shnayerson’s “Women Behaving Badly” rebukes those of us who had the temerity to write about sexual assault or other psychic travails at all.
The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley wrote three pieces lambasting Harrison: “It is a measure of the times that this book, slimy, repellent, meretricious, cynical, is enjoying the rapt attention of the gods of publicity.” He accused her not only of fabrication (“Harrison claims”) but of financial motives: “This confession isn’t from the heart, it’s from the pocketbook.” In the New Republic, James Wolcott equated the book with reenacting Harrison’s abuse on her three children. (In fact, Harrison and her husband chose to bring the book out while the kids were too young to twig to the media furor.) Shnayerson and Yardley and their fellows all used the same patronizing and pious tone critics once brought to scolding Charlotte Brontë for her novels’ excessive emotion. How dare she!
It’s hard for me to comprehend reading Harrison’s story with zero feeling for the daughter, particularly one who doesn’t sugarcoat her own role. Not only does the father cudgel a young woman desperate for his love into a sex act; he also claims she’s his forever because he’s polluted her: “Nobody will ever want to touch you after what I’ve done.” (He actually hopes she’ll bear his child so it’ll be 75 percent him!) Who could wish silence on a woman who’d had such a run-in?
Harrison may have written to reclaim her own future, but by breaking the silence about incest, she no doubt rescued countless others. Rather than vilify her, critics should’ve given her a medal for public service.
19 | Old-School Technologies for the Stalled Novice
Yes, I felt very small. The typewriter seemed larger than a piano, I was less than a molecule. What could I do? I drank more.
Albert Sánchez Piñol, Pandora in the Congo
It’s tough to keep going when you hit a roadblock in your own work. Many beginners just need to keep their heads in the game and their hands moving across pages till they gain traction. Some people tout writing exercises, but they never yielded squat to me. I’d encourage you to find intellectual enterprises to keep you studying craft. Maybe try some of the tools I’ve used to keep my ass in the chair, learning from my betters. Some of these involve writing longhand, shoving a gel-tip across an expanse. It will slow you down as typing can’t.
1.Keep a commonplace book: a notebook where you copy beloved poems or hunks of prose out. Nothing will teach you a great writer’s choices better. Plus you can carry your inspiration around with you in compact form.
2.Write reviews or criticism for an online blog or a magazine—it’ll discipline you to find evidence for your opinions and make you a crisper thinker.
3.Augment a daily journal with a reading journal. Compose a one-page review with quotes. Make yourself back up opinions. You can’t just say, “Neruda is a surrealist”; you have to quote him watching laundry
“from which slow dirty tears are falling.” And you have to look up something about surrealism to define it.
4.Write out longhand on three-by-five-inch index cards quotes you come across—writer’s name on the left, source and page on the right. (Stanley Kunitz taught me this circa 1978. I now have thousands of these, from which I cobble up lectures.)
5.Memorize poems when you’re stuck. Poets teach you more about economy—not wasting a reader’s time.
6.Write longhand letters to your complicated characters, or even to the dead. You’ll learn more about voice by writing letters—how you arrange yourself different ways for each audience—than in a year of classes.
20 | Major Reversals in Cherry and Lit
The idea that the looker affects the sight is taken for granted in every field of scientific enquiry today, but one needs to be clear about what it does (and does not) mean. It does not mean “everything is subjective anyway,” so that no clear and truthful statements can be made.
Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New
Warning label: For decades, lecture audiences have questioned me at length about the roller-coaster reversals of my second and third books, Cherry and Lit. I know nobody else’s reversals intimately enough to set them down. Some of this I’ve glanced past in other writing, and while repeating myself is anathema, the lessons belong here. Whether you’re a practitioner or not, if you can’t suffer another word about my own work, feel free to bound over this to the next chapter.
With my second and third books, I overturned my comfy takes on the past as I’d never done in Liars’ Club once I began it as nonfiction. In both later books, I kept bumbling into holes in my theories about my teen and early adult years, long-held ideas that had zero evidence in fact.
It started with Cherry’s first chapter as I tried to render saying a weepy good-bye to my old man before heading out to California in a truck full of surfers and heads. All my life, I’d relied on the premise that Daddy had abandoned me a decade before I took off. So I was shopping for a scene to show the reader his abandonment and perhaps dab a tear from my living eye as I did so.
But I could find no scene to exemplify his abandonment. I’d be at work, and he’d bring me a supper plate wrapped in foil. He’d offer to make me breakfast in the morning or to take me squirrel hunting or fishing; I’d say no. I was the one who shrugged his hand off my shoulder. I was the one who kept quiet Mother’s dalliances with a cowboy on a Colorado vacation. I was the one about to head for the California coast.
Of course, he drank like a fish, and his emotional stoicism made him the strong, silent type. And he ignored my mother’s madness in ways that didn’t protect us from her. But he never said he’d be somewhere for me and didn’t show up, and he hated like hell when I left home.
That about-face took me by storm, though. I’d spent decades discussing his abandonment in therapy, and it was true he’d drunk himself off a barstool when I was just twenty-five. But the view that he’d ever left me was tacit hogwash—a convenient lie I’d told myself to salve my own guilt about leaving him.
The other bubble that got burst in Cherry was the long-held conviction that I’d been supersmart as a teenager—a real brainiac. But foraging around, I found zero evidence for this. I bailed out of advanced math after tenth grade. My grades sucked—I got a D in art. For every great book I read (Anna Karenina), I took in ten crap counterculture tomes (Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice or Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book).
If I wasn’t smart, where on earth did I get this idea? Well, compared to the dope dealers I hung out and later roomed with—guys who did serious prison bids and who died young (knife fight, AIDS, gunshot to the temple, carbon dioxide in the garage)—I was a genius. Mostly, though, I was a fan of eggheads—my best girl pal was the smartest in school. She and two guys I dated seriously aced the big standardized tests and sifted through scholarship offers by the mailbox full. I only posed as a smart person.
But that reversal—rather than being something I’d hide—actually buffed up my material, because it exposed the schism between who I’d wanted to be and who I’d actually been. That’s the stuff of inner conflict and plot.
The book had been a burr in my head for ten years. I wanted it to fill a hole I saw in the memoir canon. Not only did girls not write about sex in high school—other than assaults or aberrant sex—they hardly rendered adolescence at all. Many pole-vaulted from childhood to college.
Men’s coming-of-age memoirs were jam-packed with adolescent rebellion, including early erotics—Frank McCourt kept “interfering” with himself and was seduced by an older woman in Angela’s Ashes. The child Harry Crews boinks an older girl under a porch.
Watching a girl in the library behind bookshelves, Frank Conroy finds in a glimpse of breast that the world has become “suddenly harmonious.” His poetic language eschews the pornographic but makes a masturbation scene first tender, then terrifying.
With exquisite care I made the necessary adjustments and delved into myself. Hello old friend. Companion in the wilderness. Gift-giver.
I moved a few books and found her, or rather found a piece of her, neck to breast in white cotton. . . . In this state, one sees with the clarity of a mystic. A breast, a wrist, a curved hip become images of pure significance, passing directly into the tenderest part of the brain.
While he’s in this state of intense focus, the view shifts and he suddenly sees that she’s weeping in anguish: “I recoiled from the peephole as if a needle had pierced my pupil.”
His scene in the chapter “Losing My Cherry” shows him transformed by the process.
Her sex was no longer simply the entrance way one penetrated in search of deeper, more tangible mysteries. It had become, all at once, slippery—a lush blossom beyond which there was no need to go.
Afterward, I lay still, dazzled.
But there was no comparable passage I could find among the women memoirists I admired. They just skipped over desire—puberty and masturbation were swept past, and sex arrived at a decent age in clinical portrayals.
Except for the aberrant—Maya Angelou in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings describes a childhood assault, complete with the guilt she felt about “the nice part”: “He held me so softly that I wished he’d never let me go.” But he’s only warming up to raping her so violently:
Then there was the pain. A breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart. The act of rape on an eight-year-old body is a matter of the needle giving because the camel can’t. The child gives, because the body can and the mind of the violator cannot. I thought I had died.
Her sense of culpability mirrored my own, and my conviction that she was innocent helped me start to think I might be too. “Mr. Freeman had surely done something very wrong, but I was convinced that I had helped him to do it.” (When the rapist was freed early and found kicked to death behind the slaughterhouse, I felt a sick sense of justice.)
Yet when Angelou’s in college and sleeps with a boy, there’s zero description. Kathryn Harrison’s college beau is likewise never described in any intimate way—nor her sexual reactions.
Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood comes closest to the subject, but she has more erotic feelings when she buys a book: “I was tremendously excited by this act. It was the first expensive book I had ever bought with my own money.” Compare this to her impressions of the married man she drinks and makes out with in a hotel.
I grew a little tired of his kisses, which did not excite me, perhaps because they were always the same. . . . I was only precocious mentally and lived in deadly fear of losing my virtue, not for moral reasons, but from the dread of being thought “easy.”
Later, when in How I Grew she loses her virginity, she’s also completely without desire as she makes out with her guy in a parked car:
I was wildly excited but not sexually excited. At the time, though, I was unaware of there being a difference between mental arousal and specific arousal of the genital organs. T
his led to many misunderstandings. . . .
In fact, he became very educational, encouraging me to sit up and examine his stiffened organ, which to me looked quite repellent, all flushed and purplish. . . .
Of the actual penetration, I remember nothing. It was as if I had been given chloroform.
This writing is physically removed and clinical—“genital organs” and “penetration.” I presume it was the age she dwelt in, but I couldn’t find any clues to her having a body at all. It was like the film they showed us on such things in health class circa 1960.
Embarking on Cherry, I was prepared to overhaul all the tepid writing about puberty that women from the more prudent past had used to glaze over desire.
But the minute I hit the page, I saw the problem. Male adolescence is mondo celebrated in our culture—all of rock and roll exists to cheer on guys grabbing their crotches and humping mikes as preamble to reproducing the species. And men have all these great childish words—chubbie and woodie—that permit them to sound full of desire yet oddly innocent. There’s no comparable language for girls. Applied to a prepubescent girl, the standard nomenclature just sounds violently wrong. The writing I was doing to represent my early feelings actually made me feel like some Lolita luring pedophiles.
Finally, it came to me: as I’d been working, I’d unconsciously superimposed my thirty-something libido onto my child self. The feelings felt “untrue” because they were. What I’d been leaving out was the hazy, soft-focus obsession with being loved that really preoccupied my girl self—all the sappy romantic notions that formed the basis of my early fantasies were completely G-rated. Being boy-crazy was not being sex-crazy. I didn’t fantasize being boffed into guacamole. Rather, I imagined the boy I liked at the roller rink skating over to me during the couples skate with one red rose.
How unsexy that was—uncool in every way. Yet that became my challenge, to create the trance state that comes of writing a boy’s name on your notebook ten times or watching him on the football field, imagining he’ll run over to give you a hug.