Harrisonĭescribes with submerged fury and sadness what it means to be a daughter and how it feels to be a young girl yearning for a love that probably doesn't exist even in a perfect family.
Writing in affectless prose that reflects the shutdown in her feelings, Ms. ''In years to come,'' she writes, ''I'll think of the kiss as a kind of transforming sting, like that of a scorpion: a narcotic that spreads from my mouth to my brain.'' But this story is notĪbout her body or brain, it is about her soul, the soul of a young girl and the terrible injury inflicted by the man who should have been its protector. Harrison's powerful, disturbing new book, the story of an affair she had with her father when she was a college student with a slender body and long, long blond hair and he was a stocky, handsome middle-aged preacher. He picks up his camera case, and, smiling brightly, he joins the end of the line of passengers disappearing into the airplane.'' My father pushes his tongue deep into my mouth: wet, insistent, exploring, It is no longer a chaste, closed-lipped kiss. I pull away, feeling the resistance of his hand behind my head, how tightly he holds me to him, the kiss changes. Harrison writes of her father's departure after a weeklong visit when she was 20 years old - the first time she had seen him in 10 years. ''A voice over the public-address system announces the final boarding call,'' Ms. Kathryn Harrison's memoir, ''The Kiss,'' is a book like this. The work reverberates with similarities to our own experience, and with differencesįrom our own experience, so that in the end it gives us a new way of looking at the world. Every now and then, though, a writer looks back with such bold clarity that it's as if we were living right along with the story. For a writer, memory is treacherous and preciousĪt the same time. One look backward can turn you into salt, or cause the loss of the woman you love.
In 2002 USAToday recognized us as \"1 of 10 Great Old Bookstores\", and we have been featured in numerous other newspaper and TV stories including Washington Post and CSpan.Kathryn Harrison remembers the affair she had with her father Our retail stores have always been places where a reader can rush in looking for a title needed for a term paper that is due the next day, or where bibliophiles can get lost \"in the stacks\" for as long as they wish. A merging of the old and new is where we started, and it is where we are today. ALL kinds of books from 95 cent children\'s paperbacks to five figure rare and collectibles.
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