Sins of The Father

Kathryn Harrison is an extremist. At least, that s what one of her best friends calls her, joking a lot of us want to sleep with our fathers, and find partners who at least remind us of them, but you go and actually do it! Black humour, indeed. Particularly given the fact that if you look deep into Kathryn Harrison s eyes as she laughingly relates this tale, you will see not just creases but cracks. And if you buy that old line about the eyes being the window to the soul, you also will see how deep those cracks go, right down to a point where her body was, for years, split from her soul. And all because of a four-year incestuous relationship Harrison had with her father and which is the focus of her latest book, The Kiss.
Tellingly, perhaps, the response to the book has been divided along gender lines. Male journalists specifically Michael Shnayerson in Vanity Fair and Ed Vulliamy in The Guardian have used the book to examine the socio-political implications of the cult of self-revelation currently growing at a rapid pace, particularly among women writers. Other men, she says, have viciously attacked Kathryn Harrison for writing this memoir, while women seem more willing to address the emotional and spiritual questions the book raises .
Kathryn Harrison lives in New York with the writer, Colin Harrison and their two children. She has previously published three novels, A Thousand Orange Trees, Exposure and Thicker Than Water, with each of the latter becoming a New York Times Nominated Book. Her fiction has been described by Time Out as startlingly original and by the Times Literary Supplement as rich and complex, harrowing and compelling.

Joe Jackson: There is one key quote in the book: Who s normal? Normal is a mathematical concept. It has no bearing on human personality or relationships. Is this really something you want to pass on to readers?
Kathryn Harrison: No it s not. Because, as used by my father it was very manipulative. But, as with a number of his manipulative comments, I think it also happens to be true. There is a norm we are all clumped around but some of us trail off, in either direction, on the curve of personality. My father was purposefully not trying to understand what I was saying about the effect our relationship was having on me. He then went on to another statement that was both true and very manipulative, when he said that any other man who knew about this would leave me. But, although for many men, that might be true, it wasn t true of the man I married, Colin, who I met a few months after I broke it off with my father, though Colin has said that it was like meeting a woman trapped in a block of ice and that he had to apply a blowtorch to me!
Did he burn you? Or was it a pleasant blow-torch experience?
Well, it certainly melted the ice! Yet to get back to your point about the difference in terms of the gender response to this book, men, in general, have been more angry, threatened, venomous. And conceptualising the whole thing does seem to have become a way for men to avoid deal with the issues in this book, on an emotional level certainly, that Vanity Fair piece, Women Behaving Badly.
That article compared you not just to female writers such as Caroline Knapp but also to Candace Bushnell, in terms of her book, Sex And The City.
I didn t read Caroline Knapp s Drinking: A Life but I know what it s about, so that s okay. But there are no comparisons between myself and Candace Bushnell, none. On her book she has a picture of herself half-naked, wrapped in sheets and he said I was having a picture on this book, which isn t true. He also quoted anonymous sources who said that this book was written in four weeks, that I was a mercenary slut who wanted to capitalise on shock value and that the whole thing had been concocted by my agent.
The Kiss intercuts past and present in a way that seems very deliberate.
Yes. Because that is how I live. I don t experience time in a linear fashion. For example, I still am very much aware of how I felt as a child. That moment when my mother died and that released me from my relationship with my father was just the beginning of a long, tortured period of self-examination. Yet at some point there was a window of clarity, in terms of who I am and who we are, in my family, and in the larger family. And somehow that moment of clarity arrived at the same time as the voice of this book, which is very spare and stripped down to absolute essentials. Also, I think there is an archetypal aspect to this book. And I believed that the more I could strip down the bones of this story, the more those archetypes would become apparent. Some of the more serious reviews have compared the book to Biblical writing, in which there is hardly a spare description. And also to Greek tragedy, where there is an inevitability to everything.
At one stage, you say that your father had a lifeless , unresponsive body beneath him as you both made love?
He was mad about that.
Mad about what?
He thought that was insulting. But then, he was a monstrously self-involved person.
The sister of the subject of the movie Shine is, apparently, suing its makers, claiming misrepresentation of the father. Could this book be a misrepresentation of your father?
I heard she is doing that, yes. But in terms of my book, this is a very honest account of how I perceived things, though he could write a book that said, equally honestly, from his side, she liked it, she never said she was unhappy. Everyone would write different stories.
Do you think you may need to see your father again, and have some form of reconciliation in order to finally let it all go?
No. I used to have that kind of death-bed fantasy, in which I d hear he was dying and I d arrive which is very safe because he s dying, right? and the two of us would say to each other what we needed to say, whatever that would be. As in, he would probably apologise, say he didn t understand what that relationship was doing to me. But this book has finally ended the relationship in a way that it wasn t over until the whole thing wasn t a secret any longer. Even in those ten years since we had contact with each other, as long as this was my secret, internally, it had a psychic life that smouldered. And I feel that for the first time in ten years, if not more, my father now is out of the house, as it were. Yet I still don t think I m ready to meet him. I wouldn t seek him out. And I don t think he would seek me out. He just might read this book and say this is not how I remember it.
You were 20 when it began; he was 39. Do you believe that when people who are parents sleep with lovers half their age they are partly making love to their own children, by proxy?
I think so, sure. And I think children make love to their parents by proxy. A very close friend of mine did call me an extremist , saying she had an affair with her professor and knew a number of people who had sought out men resembling their fathers. But she said, you just don t know where to draw the line, you really take everything too far! And it s true. I have no talent for moderation at all! But parents and children are attracted to each other, sexually. That s why we have a taboo.You wouldn t need such a strong taboo if the desire didn t exist.
Many women also seek their father in other men. In marrying Colin did you marry your father, in any way?
Well, he s not like my father at all. He s more like my grandmother.
Were there ever moments where the lines blurred, in terms of who you were actually making love with?
He is sensitive and careful but in moments of intimacy there is always a blurring of lines, from partner to partner. There has been a little of that but nothing that has been traumatic or destructive. But even friends ask, doesn t what happened with your father intrude on your relationship with men? . There haven t been men, there has only been my husband.
In the book, you recount the tale of how you went back to your boyfriend in college and told him about that kiss your father suddenly gave you in the airport, after you d met him for the first time in ten years where he pushes his tongue into my mouth: wet, insistent, exploring . You asked if he thought it was weird, and his response was Are you fucking kidding! I somehow suspect that his response is typical of how many people will react to that graphic description of the kiss (even moreso than the notion of your father giving you head).
When I think back, myself, if there is one moment, one transgression that I come back to it is the kiss, always. Because it was the first thing and because it was so shocking and because once that had been done, everything else just fell, like dominoes, afterwards. There was some part of my fate sealed with that kiss It was a profoundly transforming experience whereas when my father performed oral sex on me, what shocked me even more so, as I say in the book, was that he would do this in his mother s house.
There is practically no aspect of celebrating sex in your book. Is that denial? As you did consciously decide to embark on this relationship and, at least at first, give yourself to your father, surely there were moments of sexual pleasure?
It s true I don t celebrate the sex in this book but I do say, at that point, in a motel, that I remember the heat of his kisses and that I kiss him back the way he wants me to. That was genuine erotic excitement for me too. When I was just kissing him, when it was dangerous and consummation hadn t happened, there was excitement, no doubt. Because it took months for there actually to be a consummation. But the sex itself was not good. I didn t like it. I did respond in a passive manner.
What had happened between that first kiss and consummation?
It had become increasingly apparent to me that my father was a very controlling, possessive person. I loved him but he didn t want me to have anything else in my life, except him. No boyfriends, for sure. He also was very judgmental about my life, which did include, for example, some recreational drug use. He thought those things were terrible and that my whole lifestyle was something he wanted to change. It was a very claustrophobic relationship and the power balance was totally unequal. During intercourse, I often had this image that he and his flesh had somehow grown and grown and grown and I felt almost like a fly on this wide expanse of his flesh. And felt that he obliterated every other aspect of my life.
That is an accurate metaphor for what actually happened, in that his flesh did grow bigger and you died psychically. I know you choose not to use the word rape in the book because you don t want to be seen as a victim but, nonetheless, many women do respond in much the same way to a rape experience.
I know. And it is a mystery to me why some women are broken by these experiences and some aren t. But in my case I should say that while I did not, ultimately, want the relationship with my father to be physically consummated, I really did need to know, from my father, that I was beautiful, a desirable woman. So even though I didn t want sex with my father, it was a price that came as part of the whole relationship. And the relationship did give me things. It is a grey story, not black and white. My father affirmed me, as a woman. He looked at me and did find me desirable in a way that I had not been desired by anybody. My mother was a very difficult mother to grow up with and living in that house I really had grown up feeling that I was lost in a swirl of undesirability.
In the book you even claim you, at one point, starved yourself into a state of anorexia to recapture my sexuality from my mother.
That is what I did. So something about the relationship with my father was positive, gave me affirmation that maybe had to come from him. So, although there was a great deal of cost to that relationship, I also think that, as a woman, I grew up because of it.
Isn t that a dangerous thing to say? Apart from remaining lifeless for years sexually, your everyday life also fell apart because of your father.
Sure. And I had to put myself back together in every sense, at a point. So, no, it s not what I d recommend for anyone wanting to take a crash course in growing up!
You are, obviously, an obsessive. Even before you met your father again, at 20, you were obsessed with his absence.
It was ridiculous. I am obsessive. But this raises another point which is that what has become apparent to me is that the real erotic attachment in this book is to the mother.
And grandmother. There is a lot of eroticism in this book, woman-to-woman.
Absolutely. And that runs through my family. But my grandmother, for example, had a real block against homosexuality, probably because she had a sister who was a lesbian. That was a family scandal. Yet she was wildly negative about homosexuality in a way that couldn t have been only about her sister. She was, in practice, heterosexual but she was constantly accusing me of being a lesbian, as a teenager, and of having relationships with women.
Did you explore lesbian relationships?
Yes. But later. In college, before and after the father. Three and a half relationships! No, I m being facetious. Seriously, there was exploration along these lines in college and then, later, a period of homosexual confusion after I left school and after my father.
Did you tell your father about your same-sex explorations?
He was already on my case, as I say in the book, calling me a slut that time in the restaurant! I wasn t about to tell him I was also a lesbian! (laughs) And, in truth, I think it was just experimentation.
Confusion of a sexual nature homosexual or otherwise surely must have been heightened by the circumstances of your deflowering , which took place in front of your mother. As in her demanding that a doctor insert a diaphragm inside you, even though that meant breaking your hymen with a number of what you describe as plastic penises .
People accuse me of making this up, but I didn t. That s why I say I couldn t believe it when I saw those things in his hands. And the fact that they were green! I don t think it necessarily would have been better if they were flesh-toned but there was something about green I found particularly shabby! But yes it was shocking and disturbing that my mother would do that and even accompany this sixteen-year-old into the room.
So, did she watch as you were deflowered ?
I don t know because I had my eyes covered. But all of that certainly added to the network of sexual confusion in my life, no doubt.
As with many men, or women, having relationships with partners who are married to someone else, you obviously paid scant attention to the pain your relationship with your father was inflicting on other people.
That is true. Later, I wrote to his wife and apologised. But one of the reasons the book is in the present tense and has that sleep-walking quality in which the emotions are numbed back is because I was trying to recreate the obsessive, selfish, destructive nature of this relationship, that didn t take into account the effect it had on the other people in our lives.
The most devastating example of that is, when your mother is dying from cancer and wails at you, her tongue loosened by morphine the accusation You did this to me! You and your father are killing me.
The truth is that my mother also was a person who was not very able to talk to me, about our relationship at all. She was quite frozen, at that level. And she had come to a point where she realised she was going to die and realised she had that problem in terms of communication. And she did, finally, want peace and to take leave in a way that didn t involve raking up past mistakes and confusions. Even so, I was very fortunate in terms of that other moment when she also was on drugs and said, you are going to be very angry with me, after I m dead. Because, in that, there was some acknowledgement of I was a bad mother and I m sorry. And, actually, the sex with my father was just symptomatic. That s not what remains painful. What remains painful is the betrayal of my mother.
Do you think you did kill her in the sense that her cancer could have been accelerated by your actions with your father?
Definitely, cancer can be accelerated by stress. So, yes, there were many times when I did believe I killed my mother. In the intervening years I have passed through a number of phases in relation to this. I ve gone through the phase where I ve preferred to believe that I was a victim of circumstances in all this, had no responsibility; a victim of my father and a victim of my mother. But I ve also been through the flip side, which is, yes, that I was a wicked person and did kill my mother. But now I see that the truth is somewhere between those two poles.
And also, at last, I have a great deal of compassion for the young woman I was at 20, who was unable to turn down love in whatever nature it was offered. Because I was terrified that my father would withdraw from me and I couldn t stand that idea, especially given the fact that he d left home when I was so young.
At whom is your anger directed more? Your father, your mother, yourself?
I am sometimes angry at my father, of course. And my mother, because she was a bad mother. But certainly the self-loathing I once felt has eased. It s malarial, comes back in fits, every once in a while.
To me, one of the greatest betrayals, and violations in this whole story, is when your father, as a preacher, uses the presence of God as a weapon to break your will.
I agree that my father violating me, at that level, was monstrous, to an absolute degree.
But it was more extreme in your case because you are the product of a religious background. Jewish family, initiated in Christian Science at the age of three, converted to Catholicism seven years later. You even related to Saint Dymphna to such a degree that you, at one point, cut off your hair, as nuns do, as a form of denial of your sexuality, femininity.
All of that is true. And, as I say in the book, I did have that incredibly powerful, mysterious experience as a child, which turned me into a seeker. I still am somebody who is constantly waiting for, desiring, any sign of God, the divine. And that probably had to do with the fact that I knew that the father, who was missing during my childhood, was a minister. Now, if somebody told me God talked to me and said you are the person who was created for me I would think this is a person to be concerned about but back then, when my father told me exactly that I half-believed it. I couldn t dismiss it, couldn t say, he s crazy. And he was an incredibly charismatic, seductive person, who could really speak and make you believe it. He was a preacher, and a good one. Did he believe what he was saying? Or was he crazy? Nowadays it is preferable for me to believe that he was crazy rather than believe he was just so manipulative that he would use that to entrap me. Because, yes, that is truly evil. To pervert somebody s faith, and use somebody s desire for God as a way of having sex with you.
Tori Amos once told me she used to long to fuck a priest, but later realised what she really wanted was to fuck Christ himself, take him off the cross, make him sweat and tremble beneath the power of this particular woman. Given the oppressive nature of religion, in relation to women in particular, can you relate to this longing?
Yeah, I have a big priest problem! I definitely find them sexually attractive in a totally inappropriate way, though it s not something I ve ever acted on. As for taking Christ off the cross and making him tremble I can see how a woman, who felt oppressed by the figure of Christ all her life, would want to do that. And, actually, as a child, after I converted to Catholicism, I realised that Christ on the cross is an incredibly erotic figure. That s not just my imagination.That s how he is presented. That man on the cross is almost always beautiful and sensual and wearing nothing but a loincloth, for God s sake! And very vulnerable. So any woman, on some level, erotically, can respond to a man who is as open as he is and nailed down!
So when you made love with your father did you confuse him with Christ?
My religious interpretation of that had more to do with mortification of the flesh that I was giving myself over to be tormented and if I could do it with a pure enough heart it would become a transcendent experience. In other words, if I could just turn myself over to my father, in as pure a sense as possible, without any anger, then there would be some hot light of holiness that would come through it all.
Do you think your father was seeking a similar sense of transcendence through making love to you?
Definitely. As I said, he told me that God was revealing himself, through my beauty. And I probably bought into a lot of this because of that base in Christian Science you referred to earlier. Christian Science legitimises denial, the concept of mind-over-matter and the idea that there is no objective evil in this world. That evil is subjective. That it is only what you perceive. So my Christian Science was partly the cage that trapped me with my father, because I was able to say to myself, you re thinking wrong of him. In other words, I was trained to believe that the only evil that existed was within my perception. In that sense, Christian Science raises denial to an art form! And this makes for quite a terrifying combination with Catholicism. It s a wonder I wasn t lost forever!
So, this whole story really is, in essence, about the distortion of the religious impulse, isn t it?
Yes, But in relation to sexual abuse in the Church, how uncommon is that? In fact, someone in the States challenged me on the fact that this book could be trivialised and abused by certain groups who might use it to legitimise certain actions. But my response was. What book is that not true of? Including The Bible?
Do you still believe in God?
Yes.
After what you ve been through in the name of religion?
The religious impulse is a huge and complicated impulse. And it is distorted, to some measure, in every person. If it is pure and divine then, necessarily, in our faulty human way we always distort it. But, yes, there was a period when I lost faith. Not just in God but in everything, as a consequence of that relationship with my father. As I say, without exaggeration, I was dead to the soul. Not just sexually.
So, in essence,The Kiss is a holy book, especially for those of us who don t believe in God?
I m really happy to hear you say that, because I think it is, too. Having created it, I can t say I think it is holy but it definitely is about religion, about faith.
There is the sense in which your story can be seen as symptomatic of the absence of not just the father in a family, but of God in the twentieth century. And the extremes to which one woman would go to replace the God-force.
I think so. And I do refer to my journey as a falling from grace. I also purposefully use the image of falling, all the time, even when I describe intercourse with my father. So I do see the book in this sense, definitely. To tell you the truth that, to me, is what The Kiss really is all about. Falling from grace. n
The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison is published by Fourther Estate at #14.99.