Career
Harrison's memoir The Kiss documented a love triangle that developed involving her young mother, her father, and herself. It described her father's seduction of her when she was twenty and their incestuous involvement, which persisted for four years and is reflected in the plots and themes of her first three novels, published before The Kiss. In The New York Times Book Review writer and memoirist Susan Cheever wrote of the book, "The story of an intellectually powerful man and his consuming desire to ravish an innocent, almost preconscious, young woman (sometimes his daughter) has often been told—Zeus, Lewis Carroll and Humbert Humbert come to mind—but Kathryn Harrison turns up the volume, making this ancient immorality tale a struggle between good and evil, between life and death, between God and the Devil." In The New York Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called the memoir "appalling but beautifully written." In The New Republic, by contrast, James Wolcott strongly criticized the work, asking at one point, "Did she call him 'Dad' in bed?"
While much of her body of work—the essays collected in Seeking Rapture: Scenes From a Life; a second memoir, The Mother Knot; and The Kiss—documents her tortured relationship with her mother, who died in 1985, Harrison also has written extensively of her maternal grandparents, both in her personal essays and, in fictionalized form, in her novels. Her grandmother was raised in Shanghai, where she lived until 1920, her experiences there inspiring Harrison's historical novel, The Binding Chair. The Seal Wife, set in Alaska during World War I (and which critic Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times called "mesmerizing"), draws on the early life of her British grandfather, who spent his youth trapping animals to obtain their fur in the Northwest Territories and laying track into Anchorage for the Alaska Railroad.
Harrison has published six novels, three memoirs, a travelogue, a biography, and a book of true crime. She frequently publishes reviews in The New York Times Book Review. Her personal essays have been included in many anthologies and have appeared in Bookforum, Harper's Magazine, More Magazine, The New Yorker, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Vogue, and at Salon.com, Nerve.Com and elsewhere.
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