Customer Reviews

The Kiss: A Memoir

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Obviously, there is nothing pleasant about the topic of this memoir, which surrounds Kathryn Harrison's sexual relationship with her father. "The Kiss" is disturbing, intense, and reads like a very bad dream. Reading the book was like watching a very bad car accident...I couldn't turn away. Also, I was struck by Harrison's bluntness and honesty, and admire her for having the courage to share this horrific tale.

The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison is a book length memoir that consists of unnamed unnumbered chapters, each of which contains several short separated scenes. The book depicts the narrator's feelings of alienation and abandonment while growing up, mostly due to an absent father and a self-absorbed, unaffectionate mother whose presence is sporadic. Raised primarily by a stern, overbearing grandmother, this lonely, love-starved child becomes prey to her father's perverted desires when he does finally enter her life, and for several years is enslaved by both her need for his love and his power over her, further alienating herself from school, friends, family and any kind of "normal" life. Only after the death of her mother is the narrator, now an adult, able to find the strength to break free of her father's influence. Through the book's descriptive dramatic scenes, the reader is able to feel emotions of shock, sadness, betrayal, and loneliness, but Harrison also uses recurring symbols of fire and masks to convey these diverse emotions.

When a collection of essays spans a number of years, the use of recurring objects as symbols can be beneficial to achieving a particular reader response as well as serve as a reminder of previous scenes. In The Kiss, the reader is first introduced to the "mask" image when, as a child, the narrator would watch her mother sleep behind her sleeping mask and feel as shut out and terrified as if her face itself were a mask, "one mask under another." The "mask" is reintroduced when, as a teenager, the narrator creates her own "masks" to hide her feelings and vulnerability and again when she makes the conscious decision to "shut out" her mother "the way that she denied me as I stood for hours by the bed where she lay, her eyes closed and hidden under her mask." The symbol of the mask continues to reappear throughout the memoir. After the narrator has been drawn into the secret affair with her father, she can't help but feel as if she and her mother are now rivals for the same man's affections and refers to "the masks that divide us." When she sees her reflection in store windows, puddles, and dressing room mirrors, she stares at her own face, especially into her own eyes, trying to find herself in there the way she would wonder as a child if her mother had really still been behind her sleep mask. The final mask reference occurs during the scene when the narrator's mother lies in a coma. Here the narrative comes full circle, and the reader is taken back to the child watching her mother sleep behind her mask. This time, however, we see the child lift the mask to reassure herself that her mother is still in there, and she is rebuked for it. The pain the child feels at being rejected is the same pain the adult feels now that her mother is slipping away from her forever.

Harrison also uses fire as a symbol in The Kiss, to convey the constant gnawing burning need for parental love and acceptance always denied to the narrator. The first reference to fire is when, as a teenager, she is invited to spend some time in her mother's new house and sees the bedroom that has been decorated, not according to her tastes but generically, by someone who has neither knowledge nor concern for the likes and dislikes of her own daughter. The painting on the wall is of a chair in the woods, behind which is an orange glow that could be either sunrise or sunset but which strikes the girl as "the light of an approaching fire." The next very telling use of the fire symbol is in a description of a photograph taken of mother and daughter, showing a love desired but denied by describing how the "tongues of flame from the gas log" behind them seem to come from "our clothes themselves." Later in the book, a scene with the three generations of women; grandmother, mother, and daughter; occurs in the kitchen when the grandmother turns on the gas jet to the kitchen stove and walks away to summon the narrator to light the pilot. The result is an explosion and burst of flames in which only the child is damaged when her eyebrows and eyelashes are singed. Finally, when she is driving west to move in with her father, who has already begun to molest and dominate her but will never be able or willing to give her the love she needs and wants, the narrator pulls her car over to watch a grass fire. Throughout the night, she follows its progress, repeatedly stopping the car and sitting on the hood to watch the line of flames as they eat through the grass until "the sun comes up and makes the narrow line of flames invisible."

Kathryn Harrison's use of fire and masks as recurring symbols not only emphasize the emotions of yearning and alienation experienced by the narrator but give The Kiss a sense of unity and coherence that otherwise might be more seriously lacking. Although there is an overall chronology in the book that begins before the affair, progresses through the affair, and ends after the affair has ended, the separate short scenes within each chapter skip back and forth through time in a way that can be distracting and even confusing to the reader. The third group of scenes, for instance, begins when the mother and father first met. Then the child is in second grade. Then her father is leaving (when the child is six months old). Suddenly, she's twenty, then five again, then ten - all within the same "chapter." I feel that when a writer is trying to capture the full sense of a particular theme or story, there needs to be some sort of inner chronology as well as an overall chronology. Certainly it may become necessary to flashback to an earlier time in a subsequent chapter or even within a single essay, but a constant skipping around becomes more of a stream of consciousness that can be too hard for the reader to follow. This choppiness and lack of "flow" is what might prevent a good reading experience from being a great one.