The Magazine

Pants on Fire!

A Review of Kathryn Harris.

Mar 24, 1997, Vol. 2, No. 27 • By MARY EBERSTADT
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How did you while away the first half of your twenties? Did you study? Did you work? Did you hang around with your boyfriend or girlfriend? Did you meet up with your long-lost father and embark on a four-year sexual relationship that began in an airport, continued in motel rooms, apartments, and other intriguing places (Grandpa's house!) across the country, and ended only after a final year during which you took up residence in his house, surrounded by his second wife and children?


If that last question has set you to nodding vigorously, then you probably are well aware already that the publishing world has finally got the book for you. The Kiss: A Memoir, by three-time novelist Kathryn Harrison, has been the object of one of the most successfully orchestrated publicity campaigns in literary memory. Harper's magazine (where the author's husband, novelist Colin Harrison, is deputy editor) published a portion of the work over two years ago, and the New Yorker purchased rights to run an excerpt before publication. The Literary Guild and the Book-of-the-Month Club both bid on it and the latter won. The canny business reasoning behind all this scrambling for advantage now appears quite sound. For insofar as we are all either apologists for incest or deplorers of it, here is finally a book over which people will choose sides.

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