Hello! I finished reading Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss and am riveted. I love her strength and her prose is beautiful. While reading it, I noticed the metaphors she uses wind around one another. For example, her alienation takes on different forms: the settings are sparsely populated, whether they describe the places she meets her father, her grandmother’s household, or her college life. The isolation opens up the availability for another metaphor, where she is trapped like the bug she left fighting for freedom under the glass on the kitchen counter. The idea of a bug invading the home parallels her family’s secrets like an infestation they have resolved to live with.
Harrison’s control over her prose is maintained with authorial reflection that is matter-of-fact. She begins with simple sentences that are common to the reader and then manipulates that common ground to reveal a normalcy that is grossly adjusted, taking her experiences of abandonment and betrayal from sadly commonplace to shockingly horrible. The horror is not developed through hyperbole or a “this is what happened to me” attitude but a raw truth that allows the reader to experience their own emotions, leaving an impact much greater than the sum of facts Harrison lived through. Her writing has inspired a change in my own. After a second read to examine her writing style, I am beginning to learn what is wrong with my own and have begun writing without unnecessary dialogue and real truths that stretch beyond the surface occurrences to develop what I know and, as I believe all writers do, must tell. I find myself moving beyond what I know to say and writing what I want to say. That she had so much courage to write this book gives me the courage to write about things I have been hesitant to voice; however, I think that is one of the greatest things about CNF, that we can read about one another’s experiences and learn from each other’s ability to heal and forgive. I am absolutely going to write a critical paper on her writing, which has illuminated not only her book but the others I have read thus far as well.
