HER FATHER, HERSELF

KATHRYN HARRISON'S PAINFUL MEMOIR OF UNIMAGINABLE BETRAYAL

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, March 2, 1997

Page: N15

Section: Books

The outcry has focused upon detail as well as motive: If Harrison had indeed had a sexual relationship with her father when she was a young woman, how specific would she be in her recollections, written almost two decades later? And why would she tell all, or in fact much of anything? The woman is a wife and the mother of young children, after all. Was ``The Kiss'' written for the money, as some reports have suggested, or from some dark version of the longing for catharsis that every writer knows? Its taboo subject notwithstanding, was it a ``real'' memoir (read: literary) or did it represent a new nadir in the realm of auto-pathography, telling a story better left untold?

Much of this line of questioning is irrelevant and disingenuous, and has about it the whiff of keeping the ladies quiet. We rarely, for instance, ask whether William Styron did it for the money when his memoir on depression and alcoholism appears. Nor do we wonder (in print, anyway) whether Philip Roth is trying to excavate personal demons by attributing them to the blackguard characters of his fiction. When poet Michael Ryan wrote his 1995 memoir, ``Secret Life,'' recounting childhood sexual abuse and his own ensuing predatory impulses, most of the response in the press praised the author for his candor as well as his literary ability. Women writers too often receive another kind of scrutiny, particularly when they go public with an exceptionally naked version of the truth.

Perhaps more germane, much of the content of ``The Kiss'' has been told before, through the translucent veil of fiction in Harrison's first novel, ``Thicker Than Water'' (1991). No such quasi-artistic armor exists in ``The Kiss,'' which is a searing, deadpan chronicle of a horrid story: For several years, beginning when Harrison (her married name) was 20, she had a blinding, all-consuming sexual relationship with her biological father, who had left her and her mother when the girl was an infant. A minister who had remarried and fathered two more children, he visited his first daughter only twice during her childhood, then reappeared when she was in college, nearly to destroy her life. ``Every day is a drowning,'' she writes about her psychological state in the midst of their liaison. ``Except for brief spasms of weeping that leave my face as wet as if I actually have, for a moment, broken the surface of some frigid dark lake, I feel nothing.''

That present tense tells you something of the immediacy of Harrison's recollections, which unfold with a riveting sense of doom. The father Harrison describes -- he remains unnamed, and she has been out of touch with him for years -- is an emotional monster: a man who sobs with desire for his daughter, sends her more than 800 pages of love letters and insists that she has replaced God in his pantheon of worship. The unstoppable force of his seduction is the chief momentum of ``The Kiss,'' which after a while begins to take on the numbing internal logic of the damned. But readers of Harrison's novels (particularly ``Exposure'' and ``Thicker Than Water'') won't be surprised by the near-hopeless story recounted here; her fictional women endure their own hells, including what can be manifest symptoms of sexual abuse, from shoplifting to exhibitionism and bulimia. Harrison's self-destructiveness included deliberately cutting herself and a few halfhearted suicide attempts; the real wonder while reading this book is that she survived to build the life she has.

But before her father arrived to take his daughter into such perilous waters, there was an original betrayal, or void, that left her vulnerable to such devastating need: a mother who shunned her, wounded her continually, and left her when she was 6 to be raised by her maternal grandparents. The girl of course worshiped and loathed the mother she could never fully have, finally turning all that unmet yearning into a vacuum of loss filled by her father's overpowering attention. The ensuing contract of destruction they made together was a partnership in mutual desperation, aimed at a woman who had rejected them both. Harrison already suffered from the self-loathing and good-girl perfectionism of a deeply neglected child; her father, for his part, was dangerously ill with his own set of problems. This is the vortex into which he led his daughter: ``I'm afraid you may be frightened by this admission,'' he wrote her, ``but I have ruined an entire box of envelopes substituting your address for mine and mine for yours.'' Described here with the wrenching neutrality of a set jaw and not a little charity, Harrison's father emerges, even on his best days, as a walking personality disorder -- his own life defined by black holes of need, narcissism posing as love, and boundaries as murky as a Louisiana swamp.

Harrison had the good sense to write ``The Kiss'' with the most bare-bones approach imaginable, letting the awful force of her story dictate its lean style. Devoid of prurient detail, it is a spare, painful book that saves its most dramatic words for the day she capitulates to her father's need, when ``God's heart bursts, it breaks. For me it does.'' How do you ever come back from a moment like that?

It would be wrong to call ``The Kiss'' redemptive or transcendent, and it rarely strives for any poetic reach beyond its own dark perimeters. But there's little indication that Harrison wanted or expected that kind of literary outcome from writing this memoir, which is really a kind of logbook of private horror and survival. I wouldn't presume to know why Harrison chose to tell this story, or whether it will bring her infamy or six-figure deals. Because the young woman she describes is so fragile, so mercilessly plundered by the man she should have been able to trust, I do hope it has finally brought her some peace.