Kathryn Harrison

At 63 years old, Kathryn Harrison physical status not available right now. We will update Kathryn Harrison's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Kathryn Harrison (born March 20, 1961 in Los Angeles, California) is an American author.

She has written seven books, two memoirs, two collections of personal essays, a travelogue, two biographies, and a book about true crime.

She contributes regularly to The New York Times Book Review.

Background and education

Harrison's maternal grandparents raised her in Los Angeles, California, after her teenage parents divorced when she was a child. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1982 after attending the Writers' Workshop at Stanford University.

"My grandmother, the one who raised me, grew up in Shanghai," Harrison emailed interviewer Robert Birnbaum. Solomon Benjamin Sassoon's father was a man of the family, but he was too embarrassed to use Sassoon to open doors for him, so he renamed her father as Solomon Sassoon. He was born in Baghdad, one of Sheik David Sassoon's many descendents, and he went from there to Bombay/Mumbai, then Hong Kong, and then Shanghai. He had a small brokerage and made and lost, as well as a small fortune that paid for my education, among other things, before it was entirely frittered away.

Personal life

She and her husband, novelist and book editor Colin Harrison, whom she first met in 1985 while attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop, live in New York. They have three children.

Source

Career

The New York Times and The Boston Globe both lauded Harrison's debut novel, Thicker than Water (1992), highly praised. "Impressively in charge of her content, she will be heralded as a promising new writer," Publishers Weekly announced. "A promising debut, praised in particular by its eloquent voice," Kirkus Reviews wrote.

Exposure, which was released the following year, was similarly lauded. Donna Tartt wrote "Exquisite, enthralling, and harrowing."

In Harrison's book The Kiss, a love triangle arose that involved her young mother, her father, and herself. It chronicled her father's seduction of her when she was 20 years old and their incestuous involvement, which has persisted for four years and is reflected in the plots and themes of her first three books, which were published before The Kiss. "The tale of an intellectually gifted man and his insatisfaction with an innocent, almost young woman (sometimes his daughter) has often been told" in The New York Times Book Review, but Kathryn Harrison adds to the list, causing this ancient immorality tale a contest between God and the Devil." Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a New York Times columnist, called the memoir "appalling but beautifully written."

In comparison, James Wolcott scathingly criticized the work in The New Republic. With "airbrushed" words that "leave wistful little vapor trails of Valium," he described it as "the oddest piece of kitsch." Harrison was not an innocent child victim at the time of the crime but rather a consenting adult. "Did she call him 'Dad' in bed,'" he asked. Wolcott characterized much of the book's prose as "poor Sylvia Plath." Jonathan Yardley wrote in The Washington Post, "The Kiss" was "slimy, repulsive, brief, and cynical." "Colorless," "boring," and "numbing," Salon's Stephanie Zacherek said. Mauen Dowd wrote in The New York Times that the book was an example of "creepy people writing about scary people." Alex Beam's book "a memoir of French-licking her father" was described in Slate. The New Yorker pulled an excerpt that had not been planned after Michael Shnayerson's critical review of the book in Vanity Fair.

Mary Karr's book "The Public and Private Burning of Kathryn Harrison" addressed the Kiss controversy. Harrison's gender is believed to have fueled the outrage.

Though a large portion of her writing — Scenes From a Life and a True Crime: A Mother's Child — chronicles her mother's traumatic association with her mother, who died in 1985 — Harrison also wrote extensively about her maternal grandparents, both in her personal essays and in fictionalized form in her books. Her grandmother, of the Sephardi Sassoon family, was born in Shanghai, where she lived until 1920. Her book, The Binding Chair, was inspired by Harrison's historical novel, The Binding Chair. The Seal Wife, a British grandmother who spent his youth trapping animals in Alaska to obtain their fur in the Northwest Territories, and she's laying tracks into Anchorage for the Alaska Railroad, set in Alaska during World War I.

"These intimate essays, which investigate the underlying aspects of Harrison's psychology, wield a strange heft," The New York Times Book Review said.

Source