The Kiss
Kathryn Harrison's memoir of her childhood and early adult years depicts a triangle of love and deception among herself, her mother and her estranged father. Her father leaves home when she is only six months old and rarely returns during the next twenty years. But after she becomes a beautiful young lady, he repossesses her as both his daughter and lover.
Kathryn's grandparents, with whom she and her mother lived, had a lot to do with her parent's divorce. Several years later, she was left with the grandparents when her mother moved into her own apartment, leaving no phone number or mailing address.
Her father, then an ordained minister, reestablished a close relationship with Kathryn while she was in college, which didn't set well with either her mother or grandparents. On one of his visits where the small family was reunited, his ex-wife had him sleep with her, even though he had remarried and had fathered several children. Kathryn knew what was going on in the bedroom, but the next day when he French kissed his daughter goodbye, she realized she was involved in a lover's triangle. He began seeing her regularly and phoned her several times each day. She was too confused to remain in college. "When the preacher in my father speaks," she observed, "I lose what's left of my power to defend myself." His words about God, "frightened me more than anything he could say about sex."
For a while Kathryn lived at her father's house, with his second wife and children. This complicated their new relationship even more, and they had to meet out of town to avoid his family, or members of his church. Finally, "when I give in [to sex]," she admits, "it's almost a relief...[like someone] holding tight to a ledge, at last lets go."
Not until the death of her grandfather, and then her mother, did she realize her father's "expression of love" would always be physical, to reassure him "of my commitment to him." To appease her mother before she died, Kathryn had her own long hair cut off, which was also her way of telling her mother and herself "...that my sexual life is severed as well."
In The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison (Harrison is her married name now, but she uses no names in her memoir) writes an outstanding account of a painful and traumatic period in her own life, which other victims of incest seldom make public.
In an earlier novel, Thicker Than Water, Kathryn tells a compelling story of a young girl's problems with her mother and grandparents, which relates closely to her own childhood.