About Kathryn Harrison

A few weeks ago, Kathryn Harrison confessed to me that she "never considered writing nonfiction" when she began her literary career nearly twenty years ago. And had I not first seen her in 1997 at a party filled with book and magazine editors whispering about her then—forthcoming, mysterious memoir The Kiss, which would hit the stores a few weeks later, I might have doubted her. But the night we met, I encountered the already accomplished, celebrated novelist guarding herself as a first-time writer might in anticipation of her debut, with one arm barred across her stomach, her other hand clutching a drink like a glass shield. Perhaps she was steeling herself against the swirl of chatter that night, but in the coming weeks, The Kiss would meet with an unprecedented reception that neither she, nor anyone in that room, could have predicted.

Though it is a fact, it's become almost cliché, and an understatement, to say that The Kiss—Kathryn's disturbing account of a triangulated relationship with her elusive mother and the absent father who seduced her into a four-year affair—catapulted both the author's career and the memoir Zeitgeist to a new, explosive level. But The Kiss—with its spare, present-tense narration that carefully and eloquently evokes the experience of those years while lending voice to a subject society deems unspeakable—ignited an international firestorm of dialogue about the form as few other books had. The seminal memoir was rightfully praised, but it also became the subject of countless reviews, op-eds, and essays for years, as critics and self-styled literary pundits were locked in a debate over whether to commend or vilify the author, all too frequently judging her personally and not as a writer, for the affair and her courageous decision to reveal it.

Kathryn's memoir was not her maiden voyage into writing about the perils of sexuality: Her first three novels, Thicker Than Water, Exposure, and Poison, each brave the darkest realms of the forbidden. But she'd never before addressed it head-on in nonfiction until The Kiss.

"It was the book I planned not to write," Kathryn tells me over coffee one afternoon. "My first novel, Thicker Than Water, was completely autobiographical. The memoir became the thing that I had to do as a human being and as a writer because I felt in some ways compromised and also angry because [in writing it as fiction the first time], I had unwittingly complied with the social imperative that you always hear about incest, that I made it up. Because calling the story a novel is essentially saying it didn't happen."

Which is not to say that Kathryn has renounced fiction, not at all: Since The Kiss, the prolific author has published three more novels, two of which are historically based and inspired by the stories of each of her maternal grandparents. In the past decade, however, Kathryn has also established herself as one of our foremost critics—as a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review—and as a versatile master of creative nonfiction with five subsequent works of memoir (Seeking Rapture: Scenes From a Life, The Mother Knot), travelogue (The Road to Santiago, chronicling a pilgrimage with her then-twelve-year-old daughter to Santiago de Compostela), biography (Saint Therese of Lisieux), and, most recently, true crime (While They Slept, a Truman Capote-worthy inquiry into a horrific parricide).

"I like writing nonfiction," says Kathryn, now a professor of memoir at Hunter College's M.F.A. Creative Writing program in New York City. "I prefer teaching it to fiction, in part because the questions are more formal and intellectual, and therefore they can be analyzed and discussed more easily than fiction can, in a workshop with students. Questions of plot, of characters—those come pre-answered in nonfiction. With fiction, anything and everything can be changed," she observes. When Ploughshares invited her to guest-edit this issue, she had a choice among fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Although Kathryn's at work on a new novel, she opted for the latter because, though the material is finite, as she explains, "There are a lot of choices to be made when writing, and a lot of artistry involved. You're telling a true story, but you have to think carefully about how you tell it, and the order in which you reveal the elements—you have to have suspense, you have to shape it. It is certainly as much a crafted thing as fiction is; it's just that the questions are different."

Until now, Kathryn has never edited an anthology, but she relished the opportunity to bring together different interpretations of creative nonfiction—Thomas Lynch's friendship with the poet Michael Heffernan, a narrative that ends in verses written on a postcard mailed from Michigan to Arkansas; Lacanian psychiatrist Annie G. Rogers contributes a lyric essay—and writers she admires (e.g., Fae Myenne Ng, Louise DeSalvo, Martin Moran) with the new practitioners of the discipline, including a couple of her former students from the Hunter College program. "The thing that's been the most fun, actually, is being able to give a young writer a first or second acceptance. I remember my first time in print, the validation it represented, and I particularly love that I've had the chance to make that difference in a writer's career."

Kera Bolonik's essays, features, and reviews have appeared in New York, Glamour, Tin House, Another Chicago Magazine, Salon, and Bookforum, among other publications. She is currently at work on her first novel, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.