In Her Own Words Interview with Salon about COMMITTED
I was born in Los Angeles, on March 20, 1961. My mother was 18, and so was my father. As they had no jobs, and no money, they were forced to live with my mother’s parents. After I was born, my mother had what was later referred to as a “nervous collapse,” and her parents took this as their chance to dissolve what had been a shotgun marriage and force my father to leave. They told him they’d assume all responsibility for my upbringing if he relinquished all claims on me. So I grew up with my maternal grandparents. My mother lived with us until I was five; then she moved to her own apartment. If it seemed she’d managed to escape her consuming, predatory mother, the illusion had worn off by the time I was in grade school. My mother never went to college; she never remarried; she never made enough money to support herself. She was the daughter her mother wanted, the one who would never be independent, who would never really leave my grandmother. My father, always a good student, set out to prove himself a success. He wasn’t going to be the failure my mother’s parents had predicted. He earned two master’s degrees, one in history, the other in religion, and got his doctorate from Garrett Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. A minister, he remarried, and with his second wife had three more children, none of whom knew that I, or my mother, had ever existed. I saw my father only twice when I was a child; neither occasion was a happy one. From ages 2 to 17, I attended The Buckley School in Los Angeles, from which I graduated in 1978 as valedictorian. I attended Stanford University from 1978 to 1982, where I earned a bachelor’s degree in English and Art History. I wasn’t as slavishly devoted to my GPA in college as I had been in high school; I was tired of studying as hard as I had before and, having left my childhood home, I finally began to see some of the causes of my unhappiness as I grew up. College was a period of upheaval for me; I experimented with drugs; I lived with far less self-discipline and academic focus than I had before. By the time I was in college I’d had an eating disorder for years, not with the level of self-awareness I would have had today. In the seventies, no one was talking about young women starving themselves – not yet. But by the time I was 18 I finally had a name for what had happened to me, and I began to realize that my relationship with my emotionally distant, critical, and terribly unhappy young mother had been not only painful, but damaging – in some ways annihilating. Anorexia had become a surrogate mother, a consuming if not embracing one, a set of exacting standards that I could, with effort, satisfy, as I could not satisfy my real mother. When I was a junior in college, my father reentered my life. He came to California on the occasion of my 20th birthday. He stayed for a week, a guest at my mother’s apartment. At the end of the visit he kissed me, not chastely. I’ll never know how obviously needy and manipulable I appeared to him, but – given my history with my mother, my failure to win her love or even her approval – he managed to pressure me, eventually, into a sexual relationship, one that lasted four years, ending when my mother died, in 1985. My relationship with my father was a tortured one, for both of us, I believe. It damaged his family, and contributed to the collapse of my own, unfolding in tandem with the grave illnesses of my grandfather and my mother. My grandfather died in 1984, at the age of 94, in the aftermath of a serious fall. My mother died of breast cancer less than a year later. She was just 43. I graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1987, and from Iowa City I moved to Brooklyn, New York, with Colin Harrison, also a graduate of the workshop. We married on October 28, 1988. My mother’s mother moved east and lived with us until her death, two months before her 92nd birthday. She got to see her first great-grandchild, Sarah, born in 1990. We also have a son, Walker, born in 1992, and a younger daughter, Julia, born in 2000. And a dog, four cats, a rabbit, and a tank of fish. The
Ledge interview by Stacey Knecht KH — Yes, that’s right. It was my own fantasy when I was fifteen that I was going to be a veterinarian, because I love animals and I find medicine interesting. One of the things that’s fun about writing is that you can pursue the fantasy that you didn’t get to do in real life. I was doing the research – I had a really hard time getting vets to agree to talk to me about their work. I called my own vet and said, ‘I was wondering if I could hang out with you for a little while and see how you work, and he said, ‘Uh... Why?’ and I said, ‘Well, you know, I’m writing a book...’ Most of my experience is that people have really liked that. But across the board: four vets, very unwilling. My own vet disappeared completely. Didn’t return my calls. So I gave up on him, and then finally a friend of mine offered up her own vet, sort of strong-armed him into it somehow (laughs), and we hung out together. But he had nothing to say. Nothing at all! And I realized, hey, vets don’t talk much, and they have patients who don’t talk! Vets don’t even like talking! So I thought, there’s not much I can do with a character who doesn’t like to talk. So I sort of overcorrected and made Will a shrink, he’s hyper-articulate, can’t stop the flow of words.
KH — Are you familiar with the novel that comes from? The Death of a Beekeeper?
KH — It’s a wonderful book. You really have something to look forward to. It’s – literally – about the death of a beekeeper. It’s a man who... who has cancer, although he doesn’t really acknowledge that until maybe two-thirds of the way into the book. He’s ill, and you know that he’s ill, and he’s often in pain, and the book is really about his musing about his past, and about his relationship with his ex-wife. They have no children, and he’s totally estranged from her. I suppose he could call her and let her know that he’s ill, but he doesn’t. There’s a very interesting passage about him and his wife and the kind of relationship they had, which was characterized by dishonesty – especially on the part of the wife, who would lie for no reason. I think, actually, when reading it, I immediately recognized it as the act of somebody who was trying to create privacy for herself, and who felt sort of scrutinized, so she would lie about little things that didn’t make any difference, like ‘What did you do this afternoon?’, ‘Oh, I went to the movies,’ when in fact she’d done something else. Not what one could consider at all a malicious lie, simply a lie to disguise oneself, or to create privacy. There was also a section in which he talks about the fact that he and his wife had an unspoken agreement that they wouldn’t ever look each other in the eye.
KH — Ever. They didn’t ever look at each other. I myself, around the same time that I was reading the book, had done an exercise with my own husband in which you have to look into each others’ eyes, and realized how seldom people really do make, and keep, eye contact, and that there are many people who simply won’t let you do it at all. You can try to pin them down and they just squirt out from under you. So I was thinking a lot about that, and what it means to look at somebody and to be seen, and to know yourself as ‘seen’, and how there are times in your life in which you want to be seen, and want your presence acknowledged by that interaction. And there are other times in your life when you absolutely don’t want to have your eyes met by another person’s eyes. I think human beings are poised between two terrors. One is to be known, and the other is to not be known. And each of them presents real fear, there is a sense of horrible loneliness, of being completely bereft if you are never really known – not the face that you present, but who you are. On the other hand, there are times in which the idea of being known, at least by certain people, is equally frightening. The vulnerability it implies is also scary. The species is caught between a rock and a hard place. I’m very much aware of this in myself, because I think that I mostly... when I think about my life as a parent or as a member of the community, I seem to be somebody who slips through without very many interactions with people. I’m never the ‘class Mom’, and I’m not the one who’s present and there –
KH — Yes. I think because I like the anonymity, I like the fluidity of being able to pass through various circumstances. On the other hand, the counterbalance is that I have a sort of peculiar career, in which I can be totally naked in front of strangers... A book itself, when you think about it, is a strange thing. It’s a silent interaction – I mean, there’s a lot of words in it but they’re not spoken aloud – a silent interaction between me and somebody I don’t know, and on the page I can say anything, it gives me the opportunity to be completely stripped bare. In fiction and in non-fiction, I’m somebody who really wants to vivisect myself, to really just cut it open and to show. There is something in me that I suppose is exhibitionistic, but there’s also that insistence on being known, and being understood for who I am, and that’s sometimes more important than people’s approval, or affection. There’s always been – I think largely because of the relationship that I had with my mother, I’ve always had the sense of not being able to... of always having to push a relationship, so that I am seen completely and that there’s always that sense of, well, now do you love me? Now do you see who I am? Because my relationship with my mother was always so much the opposite. I was always trying to figure out what she wanted, and how to be attractive or lovable, I was constantly shape-shifting...
KH — It was exhausting. On some level it sort of broke me. By the time I was through with my mother, it was like: Okay, I give up! (laughs) I performed every act of self-alchemy I could, and I still didn’t secure her love, and now... I give up. Not gonna do that anymore. So all these things run through the book, and I think are evoked by that quote. Gustafsson’s novel is very unusual, it reads like a memoir, although I don’t think it actually is a disguised memoir – it just has that weird immediacy...
KH — No, you never really do.
KH — As opposed to ‘godless’.
KH — Probably. We live in sort of a weird time, especially if you examine the whole issue of ‘being seen’, because there are so many ways to be seen nowadays, we have so many means of recording things. When I was working on my second novel, Exposure, I had been to somebody else’s wedding, and I suddenly realized, with a sickening impact, that I was involved in what was actually some sort of production, that the transaction between these two people, in front of a priest, would’ve had far less meaning for the participants if they hadn’t had it recorded, caught on tape, so that they could replay it to themselves and see it. Since then, I’ve actually seen people redo parts of things for the tape of the wedding. Like, let’s go back and do the cake-cutting – which is grotesque, in a way, but also sort of sad, because you realize that people are so dependent on these images they can create that they’ve taken precedence over the actual experience.
KH — Yes, they’re making it perfect. They’re actually compressing, or making ‘instant’, the process of memory. Over the years, you or I might polish an event, so that it looks better than the reality. But this is actually being done in the moment – ‘pre-done’, for the process of happy memories. So I wrote about that a lot – that was one of the major aspects of my second novel. But I’ve always been fascinated by the whole idea of the whole idea of it. We used to be creatures who believed that it was dangerous to have your photograph taken, because it would steal away part of your soul – now I think it’s actually the opposite, that we rely on photographs, or being on television, or being in front of an audience and filmed, as a way to actually get a soul. That you’re real-er, having been recorded. That maybe your wedding never took place, if you didn’t have the document that you could see. I imagine that now, in a secular society, where I’d say that the minority of people have a strong faith and an idea of themselves as creatures with a Creator, or a God who sees into you, who sees all – that maybe we just have this sort of helpless desire for being seen. Having been deprived of it in one form, we want it in others. I actually... I have this new quasi-addiction..... there’s this website called notproud.com – it’s confessions, and they’re all divided up into the Seven Deadly Sins. Plus ‘miscellaneous’, which I really like (laughs).
KH — Yes! And you can go on, and either read confessions or make confessions. And one of the things that’s actually sort of interesting is that people don’t always know how to categorize their sins! You know, I’ll read something and I’ll think, oh my God, that’s not Gluttony! Or there are some that are truly miscellaneous – you can just imagine people musing to themselves: Hm, I don’t know if this should actually be under ‘Lust’ or ‘Greed’... But, well that’s just part of it. The other thing is that it’s totally anonymous. And you can tell by reading them that they are true, they’re not made up for any reason. They have that unmistakable feel of: oh, yeah, that’s a real confession.
KH — Right, exactly. And they’re not edited, so some of them are not particularly sophisticated, or even grammatically correct, and the only thing that I think is removed is names, which would identify other people, and I believe that in this day and age it’s still not okay to refer to things like having sex with children. Maybe in a couple of years, but for now, that particular confession is not allowed. There’s a lag time, so that if you make a confession on the 20th of September, you might not see it there till the 29th, because they’re reading through them. It’s surprising, actually, how many people take part – the confessions come in at all hours of the day and night.
KH — I think it’s that same thing again, about being seen, being known...
KH — No, they don’t, actually. But I think it still ties in with peoples’ desire to be known and not known, simultaneously. To be known by somebody, even though you don’t know who.
KH — I actually think the book might just as easily have been called Betrayal. In fact, that might’ve even been my first choice –
KH — Well, there’s the Harold Pinter play, Betrayal, which is such a good one, and one that still exists in people’s minds, so I didn’t want to get it all confused with that. And in terms of a title, Envy is... You know, titling something is an entirely separate art.
KH — Yes, exactly. It’s impossible. And I don’t think that I’m necessarily so good at it, but Envy is how this one ended up. But I never sat down and said to myself, okay, now I’m going to write a book about envy.
KH — Of course. Which is why it was okay, or feasible, to call it Envy. I don’t think envy is necessarily my deadly sin (laughs) – we can move on to that later...
KH — Probably pride, which is held to be the grandmother of them all anyway, so... It’s a tricky one, pride – they’re all tricky, but pride can so easily become a tragic flaw, and usually does. A certain amount of pride is useful, but it’s not the kind of thing that you can really control. Anger is another one that I’d associate with myself more.
KH — Anger? No. One doesn’t. Well in fact, in this day and age, with therapy, it seems more like a goal!
KH — If we had to mark one on my forehead, yes, I’d definitely take pride. And in this book, Will would have lust, I suppose, and his brother would have envy. And, let’s see... Carol... she might be anger, very well disguised – that’s one of the tricky things about anger, there are a lot of incredibly angry people who are very good at hiding it, even from themselves.
KH — Oh, yes. Jennifer’s a real piece of work.
KH — Yes, the ‘bad girl’!
KH — Yes. I suppose she’s the female version. Because Mitch isn’t any fun! Mitch is just dangerous. And we’re really used to men who are destructive, whereas it seems to un-sex women, so it was fun doing that with Jennifer, because she’s clearly so sexual, and so destructive. You don’t often get to read about women like that, or play around with them as a writer, because they’re highly unusual, and in terms of literature, or narrative, and how we expect things to be resolved, we expect that person to be punished. Which is why Jennifer was fun. She came in like a wrecking ball and ruined Will’s life and then just passed through the book and went on – to ruin someone else’s life, presumably!
KH — No, but I do remember the first time that this happened to me. I was writing Poison, a novel that was set in Spain in the 17th century. That was a nervous-making process for me, because I never anticipated working on a story that was set in a different time and a different culture. What happened was, I was on my way to visit my grandmother, who, in the last couple months of her life, was in a nursing home nearby where we lived. I stopped in at a junk store – because I find them irresistible – and I was just going through these dusty volumes, and I picked up a book called Carlos, the Bewitched, which was about the last Spanish Hapsburg Carlos II, who was completely crazy. It’s a period of history that I find fascinating, the peak of Catholic hysteria and the fear of witchcraft. I read the book, and felt sort of outraged, because here was the queen of Spain, who had been a princess at the court of the Sun King, and she’s married off in a political alliance to this very unappealing, unattractive, horrible, insane man. It took ten years for her to get pregnant and bear a child, because Carlos was impotent. And then they killed her! She had a miserable life in Spain. I mean, on the face of it, to be a princess in Europe seems like it must’ve been a pretty good deal, but in fact, she was just traded off as chattel. Everybody in Spain hated her, and was suspicious of her. And then she was murdered. And nothing was preserved of her, not one recorded statement, so she existed, to me, like a silhouette. I ended up obsessing about this woman. I had actually started another book, but I’d be in the library and I would end up going into the history stacks and always trying to find a reference to her, and there would be maybe a sentence here and there... she would always be maddeningly elusive.
KH — Marie Louise de Bourbon. She was the niece of Louis XIV. I kept looking her up and I became increasingly fixated on this woman, which is sort of odd – and really inconvenient (laughs). So then I thought, oh, well, what the hell, and just started writing about her, because I seemed to be thinking about her all the time anyway, and I would have this sense of panic when I was conscious of what I was doing – how can I possibly be setting a book so many years ago, I didn’t even speak Spanish, so in a lot of cases I couldn’t go to the original documents. And then, I was doing research, and I discovered that there was a silk industry in Spain, in the 17th century, which struck me as odd, because I’d always completely associated the silk industry with China. And it failed. They tried it domestically, and they also tried it in the colonies. It was possible to grow silk, but it wasn’t successful. Not successful enough to pursue. So out of the silk research – which was really a tangent, but one I found interesting enough to pursue – this character, Francisca, who was the daughter of a silk grower, just sprang to life and started running the whole show! It was the first time this had happened to me as a writer, and I felt sort of panicked... But then, after it happened again in The Binding Chair with the character who became the main character, the Chinese woman – also somebody who sprang out of research – and then again in The Seal Wife, and now, writing this book, when Jennifer showed up, I felt almost relieved. It was like: Oh, yes! This really strong-willed woman who’s gonna push the story along. And obviously it’s something that comes out of my own unconscious, but it’s something that is so unconscious... these women – and it’s always been a woman so far – these voices arrive and have a life that seems separate from mine and my own intentions for the story I’m telling.
KH — Yes. Exactly. And now I actually kind of like when that happens. I feel that it gives a story or a narrative a sort of integrity, a life and a purpose and a vision of its own. It seems whole. Like in Frankenstein – the lightning bolt that pulls everything together and brings it to life. And also out of my control, in the same way that the monster is now out of Dr. Frankenstein’s control. What’s going to happen next? And this issue of inspiration – does it come from without or from within – is one that I’ve thought has a religious aspect. When you think about, well, what is your sense of God? Is it something that is completely within you, something that comes out of your unconscious, or is there, in fact, a force, outside of you? I’ve been seeing an analyst for many years, an older woman, and there was a period of time in our dialogues in which we had a lot of conversations that were totally indeterminate, about ‘What is God?’ She’s one of the few analysts who actually does believe in God, which is the only reason that I ever stayed with her, because I don’t think I could see somebody who was an atheist. I could see an agnostic (laughs), because I’m, like, well, I’m constantly worried about this question. There are times in my life when I feel quite atheistic, or when I become, firmly, a secular humanist. And then there are other times in which faith is sort of restored to me, or imposed upon me again. I have a lot of questions about both those periods, and I associate a particular kind of comfort with each of them, and discomfort, and I think that in the end, I just end up in a position of confusion. I’m in an endless, slo-mo, spiritual crisis that’s never resolved. Which is fine! Because it’s interesting. But I’m like Will, in that sense, because I’m constantly sifting through experience, puzzling through.. That passage about Will, about his mental solitaire and sifting through experience to try and discover a universal plan in which God ‘resides’ – that’s totally me. That’s completely my experience of being a conscious being – which is mostly uncomfortable. (laughs)
KH — I think I’m one of those people who strives towards consciousness and intends to be as fully conscious as possible, at all times, and who also finds it distinctly and horribly uncomfortable, because if you’re conscious, or at least, if I’m conscious, I’m also conscious of mortality. That we’re all going to die, and that the life that I am so involved with and the people that I love... it’s all about loss. Consciousness, as a human being, is really almost always, every day, about dealing with loss. That’s really painful. On the other hand, I don’t want to fall asleep. And I find the world that I live in frustrating, because I think the aim of most of my countrymen is to be asleep as much of the time as possible. Certainly that is at the heart of our consumer society. It’s all narcotic. Watch this, buy this, if you have your hair cut like this, if you’re wearing the right pair of pants, or see this movie, or do this – it’s this constant distraction from what’s really going on, which is that we’re all dying.
KH — (laughs)
KH — I think people write about what they’re afraid of, and once you have children, it’s impossible not to, at moments, be terrified of losing one. And to be mystified by how people navigate a loss so huge, and so transforming. When you think about who you might be on the other side of that kind of loss... I think you don’t even know. You can’t picture that self. You can think of who you might be after your dog died, or after you lost your house, or your job, but in terms of losing a child, it’s so huge that it seems impossible to sustain, and yet we do know that there are people who have lost their children and do survive – their lives are blighted forever, but they’re still there. And I guess I was always interested in the fact that couples who lose children usually also lose the marriage that produced the child.
KH — Yes, well, anecdotally that’s been true, in my experience. I mean, the only people I know who have lost children have also gotten divorced afterward. And it makes perfect sense. If you’re always forced to share that one, huge, agonizing experience with that person, then I think there might be many reasons why you might not want to spend the rest of your life with that person, because it’s just.... it’s too much pain. So I was interested in that, as a writer, in thinking about what happens to a marriage after a child dies. And I originally started the book from the point of view of the mother. The first part of this book was about fifty pages, told from the point of view of the mother, after the death of a child. I had the drowning section, but it wasn’t told from the father’s point of view, and several other sections... and I just sort of stalled out, or backed off, I just couldn’t go any further. I put it aside for a while and worked on another book. Envy was actually interrupted a couple of times by non-fiction projects. So it was written over a longer period of time, and had more external things thrust upon it. For example, Will’s father is very much my husband Colin’s father, who died while I was writing this book. And I had an unusually close relationship with my father-in-law – far more intimate and intense than most daughter-in-laws and father-in-laws. So it was hard to lose him, and I think there was comfort for me in sort of conjuring up this shadow of him...
KH — Exactly...
My in-laws both had these awful hats, and they really did look like
upside-down flowerpots... You’d think, why are you wearing
those things?! Colin’s parents were actually two of the most
attractive older people, like a Geritol ad... His father, in particular,
was ridiculously handsome. My son Walker was sort of the inspiration for Luke – Walker used to be obsessed with Tintin, and he’s also really obsessed with sports’ heroes, and Luke’s room, with the Yankees and stuff – that’s very much Walker’s room, the child himself is not really Walker, but all the stuff around him is definitely taken from Walker. And Will, although he’s much more like me in many ways than he is like Colin, a lot of what I used in Will’s character is borrowed from my husband’s. For example, the part of the drowning chapter in which it’s said that Will is always a very careful person, everybody always wore their seatbelt – that’s very much Colin,. And the boating accident itself is one that we had, Colin and I, which is so unlike us. We were vacationing with Colin’s parents, and we had the use of this little Sunfish. And there was that little chart on the wall, which we didn’t even bother to look at, we just went off with the boat, I didn’t know how to sail, and Colin did, it was like, oh this is really fun... and then we were about to come back and we hit a rock, we actually damaged the sailboat, and I got hit in the head with the boom and went under – not long enough that I had to be rescued or anything, but there was a period of time in which I was under the water and I thought, oh, this is how people die so easily in boating accidents, and then it was like: SWIM!!! And I popped up in the water and Colin was in a total panic, because I was underneath and he hadn’t found me, he’d been going all around the boat, and finally we embraced in the water and said, what’ve we done? It was so stupid. And so not like my husband. How could that happen? We came home rather shamefaced, and turned the boat over twice on the way back, we were so shaken. It was one of those things that was scary enough that I thought about it for years afterwards, about how family life can be shattered in an instant by something so totally dumb. So you can see all the pieces of the book beginning to come together. But I couldn’t write it from the point of view of the mother, because I think I was just too threatened by it. I literally couldn’t imagine it. I don’t know who that person is – me, on the other side of that kind of loss. I just hadn’t ‘met’ her. But I could sort of make a guess as to who Colin might be, aided in this moment by his father’s death. Because as his father was dying, I had this conversation with Colin in the kitchen, in which I said to him, I am so sorry, there’s nothing I can do here, I can’t change any of what I want so badly to change, but if there’s something I can be doing for you now while your Dad is dying, tell me, don’t just assume that I know, tell me what to do. And he said – completely true to my husband – he said, have sex with me every night. And I looked at him and I said, really?!, and he said, yes, have sex with me every night, that will help. And I thought, of course, that is the only way, it’s so completely a no-brainer, and yet I wouldn’t have gotten there by myself somehow. They say people always fuck after funerals. And I thought, well, you know, that makes sense... you have to conjure life, it’s the only response that you have to death. And so it seemed to me that in the wake of losing a child, Colin could be somebody who would be really fixated on sex, and that that would be a male response to grief. But the female response would be perhaps more closed off, and self-protective, and that if you took these two people together – the wife, who’s dutifully saying, okay, take my body, and then not being there, how that would frustrate the husband and make him feel even more lonely, if physically satisfied.
KH — I don’t know... I guess I don’t think about that sort of thing while I’m writing it. That’s the sort of thing that publishers and agents think about: Oh God! The death of a child! Why do you have to do that, Kathryn?
KH — On
some level, yes. It was like, alright, okay, you’re not making
things easier for us here... But then, I don’t usually make
things easier for people. Nor do I think it’s my role.
KH — (laughing) Are you asking me to comment on that? While you were reading that I had this ridiculous image of myself in mountaineering gear, on some sort of rock face, with pitons, chipping my way up to plant my flag – because she must! Ridiculously heroic. I’m not ever going to be writing the polite, domestic little
novel. Part of that is an accident of fate – I landed in a
family which would not really allow me the luxury of contemplating
polite, domestic events. Also, I think, just because of my own nature.
I feel strongly that we’re here for a limited amount of time
and we have the limited capacity to read and think and speak, and
so I’m not going to waste that on small, gentler happier themes.
Which is not to say that I don’t rely on having a great number
of gentle, polite, domestic, happy events – most of the fabric
of my life is quite normal and undramatic. In fact, I think that
if you’re a writer you really depend on having a rather stable
and undramatic life, because you have to get work done. It gives
you the freedom to act out on the page.
As the author of six novels and five nonfiction works, Kathryn Harrison has two distinct identities in the literary world. She is perhaps best known for her memoir The Kiss (1997), a devastating account of a family triangle involving Harrison, her elusive mother, and her absent father, who only entered the author's life when she was twenty, and then seduced her into a four-year affair. For the past fifteen years, Harrison has also enjoyed a remarkable career as both a historical and a contemporary novelist; she is as assured describing the inside of a nineteenth-century Shanghai brothel as she is evoking a crystal meth–driven shoplifting spree in Manhattan's Bergdorf Goodman department store. Her ability to train an unflinching eye on some of the more frightening aspects of eroticism and the human psyche, combined with her uncommon wisdom, distinguishes her as one of the finest and most fearless storytellers writing today. Envy (Random House) is Harrison's first novel with a contemporary setting since Exposure (1993), and her second to feature a male protagonist. Set in the Brooklyn brownstone neighborhood of Park Slope, the novel depicts the midlife crisis of psychiatrist Will Moreland, a man whose ten-year-old son has recently died in a boating accident. His grief is wreaking havoc on his marriage and his libido, as well as dredging up unresolved business with his estranged twin brother, Mitch, who hasn't spoken to him since the night of Will's wedding. Late in March, Harrison came over to my Park Slope apartment, not far from her own house—it's the neighborhood we both call home. In talking about the new novel, we touched on the potential dangers of the therapist's office for both the client and the shrink, and the way women can win the battle for power between the sexes. Then we broached the topic of book reviewers: Harrison revealed herself to be as honest as she is gracious, even when discussing one of her fiercest critics for the first time in print. —KERA BOLONIK
Bookforum: Grief is the catalyst for Will Moreland's unraveling, after he loses his son, Luke, in a drowning accident. But envy seems to further propel his crisis. It bonds him with his twin brother, Mitch, a world-champion long-distance swimmer. He's also jealous of an old lover he runs into at a college reunion, who has a daughter that may or may not be his. And he envies his wife, Carole, her ability to grieve privately and calmly. KATHRYN HARRISON: And he also envies his father, who seems to handle life with much more grace than Will. I titled the book after I'd finished it. I didn't set out to write a book about envy, so Envy was more an instinctive than a conscious choice. I'm not sure how strictly realistic my novels are. Mitch, whom we never see, is less a real person than a doppelgänger for Will. Will is cerebral; Mitch is all body. Mitch's face is disfigured; Will's isn't. Mitch never appears, but he's talked about a lot and he's a very powerful presence. BF: And submerged in water. KH: Yes, swimming in the unconscious, if you will. Of course the book has a lot to do with psychoanalysis, and is about betrayal as much as envy. Betrayal would have been an adequate title—it's sexy. But it's not quite as sexy and final and sad as envy. BF: Envy evokes grief. I suppose betrayal does, too. KH: But envy is more active, dangling possibility as if something's still in play, whereas with betrayal, the story is over. BF: Losing a child has a destructive impact on Will and Carole's sex life. She won't face him anymore while having sex or allow him to pleasure her. The deprivation feels punitive, as if Carole is telling him that he doesn't deserve to experience joy. He believes she blames him for their son's accident. KH: He believes this partly because he's riddled with guilt. He says of his wife, "It's as if I'm just this guy who happens to be attached to this dildo she's using." She's not really present when they have sex. And she's always so serene, so good at repelling any of his observations or attempts to penetrate her on any level other than sexually. As a result, he's always wondering how much of it is in his head and how much of it truly exists. BF: Is he displacing his desire to win back Carole's trust by, paradoxically, fantasizing about his clients? Sex would seem to require a component of vulnerability for him, as if he had to resolve something for someone else. KH: There is displacement of his desire for Carole, and also I think sex is a natural response to bereavement. They say people often go home and fuck after funerals. What mortal response does Will have to death, other than using his body to affirm life? Also, he's stuck in that spot where he's not getting the emotional consummation that he wants from sex with his wife, and thus is left in a constant state of desire and neediness. There's a lot more to sex than fucking. BF: If that's all it was, he'd be satisfied with his situation with Carole. KH: In that sense, he's sort of like the character Bigelow from my last novel, The Seal Wife. BF: That novel's
set in 1915 in Anchorage; Bigelow's a weatherman obsessed with KH: Bigelow was tortured because she made herself so unavailable to him. I think women are very good at shutting men out in a mean way, removing themselves from their bodies. In the eternal power game between the sexes, men are capable of physically brutalizing women, but women are more emotionally devious. They're inclined to punish men in ways that are so passive—so much more about absence than aggression—that it's impossible to fight back. BF: This is your second novel to feature a male protagonist. Why did you decide to tell Will's story, and not Carole's? KH: It's too easy for me to be a woman on the page. Being inside a guy's head is totally different, so it's more challenging, and more fun. That's the cerebral answer. The truer answer is that the position of the tormented man trying to break through to a withholding woman is deeply familiar to me, because it is a trope for my relationship with my mother. As a child, the focus of my desire was a cool, emotionally mute woman who always managed to elude both my touch and my understanding. I wanted to know my mother, but I couldn't. So I know what it's like to be rebuffed by a female object of desire. BF: Jennifer is a new client who upends Will's world. He's vulnerable, and this young, smart-as-hell, rock-chick vixen comes in with tales of her raunchy exploits that send him reeling. In a weird way, he desperately needs a catalyst like her. KH: Jennifer
is delightful because she is amoral and has no sense of shame and
gets away with everything. You rarely encounter such a person in
a book. When you do, she usually gets punished. But not Jennifer.
She cuts a swath through people's lives and moves on—she is
a force of nature! If you've ever been a patient, you realize what's
possible in that room, in terms of what you can say, which is anything.
It's potentially complicated and very risky in there, and not just
for the patient. For those who go for an hour BF: What is it about eroticism that you are trying to resolve through your writing? All of your novels are concerned in some way with its power, and the perils. KH: Whether
it is conscious or unconscious, I find myself trying to correct
the incredibly vanilla standards of what our culture considers attractive,
because I find them to be so lifeless and plastic. What is erotic
is often surprising, alive, offbeat, and weird—and very individual.
In The Binding Chair, an Australian Jewish philanthropist named
Arthur Cohen unexpectedly falls for May, the very woman he had intended
to save and reform. He is drawn to her bound feet, which he never
imagined possible. He sees them unwrapped—people are never
really allowed to see them unwrapped—and they're not pretty.
But pretty doesn't factor in eroticism. Eroticism is the opposite
of pretty, just as a beautiful woman is not a pretty woman, because
beauty depends on an edge of BF: After Luke's death, Will's father, Henry, takes up photography. Is this his way of grappling with loss, making things constant and immortal by seizing them on film? KH: Aren't most human endeavors a response to the consciousness of mortality? With photography, on some level you can seize and fix a moment and have it forever. There are other ways to record a moment—you can write about it, or paint it—but a camera seems to promise actually keeping the moment itself. Ultimately photography is no more or less adulterated than other art forms, but it gives the illusion of being more real. BF: In nearly every one of your novels, the protagonist is either unable to have a child or loses one. Envy is the first novel to feature a protagonist with a surviving child. Will and Carole still have their daughter, Samantha. KH: [laughs] Apparently I've reached a point of optimism! BF: You have three great, healthy kids that you've written about in your essay collection, Seeking Rapture, so devoted readers recognize that this fear isn't drawn from your personal experience. What is it about this theme that has you writing about it over and over? KH: Nothing in my personal reproductive life has been in any way disappointing or traumatic. But I'm scared of happiness, and health, and stability. I'm always aware of how much I can lose. And once you have a child, you can't imagine existing on the other side of losing that child. Is it possible to survive such an event? I drop one of my kids off at school and think, Today's the field trip to Staten Island. Hmm. Bus. Bridge. And my mind starts spinning: What's going to happen? In all likelihood, nothing. But every day is a leap of faith. Here are these creatures that were once inside your body, then held in your arms, and then you're expected to entrust them to other, seemingly responsible grown-ups. They might do their best, but there's fate. The world acts upon them. BF: You've written three historical novels. In fact Envy is the first present-day novel you've written since Exposure. How does the writing process differ? KH: One process sort of relieves the other. It's both more complicated and simpler to work on a book set in another time and place. We tend to confuse historical fiction with history. But it's far less factual than you might imagine, because a writer uses the past as a canvas onto which she can project her own, necessarily contemporary concerns. A novel set in the present doesn't involve the same kind of research, but you do have to find a way to gain perspective on your own time, which is difficult. Of course, research is something I enjoy because it puts off the act of writing. And it's fun. I don't read many historical novels. One of the problems with a lot of historical fiction is that if it's not a bodice ripper, it's often a novel that's top-heavy with research. If I'm following a character through a building in the pages of a novel, I don't want to know the history of the Otis elevator. BF: I have to admit that I skim over those long, arduous passages. I really just want to know the people. KH: When you
write something set in the past, you may end up using only 5 percent
of the facts you've worked so hard to gather. So if writers tend
to overexplain, BF: A. L. Kennedy, in a recent interview in these pages, said that while writing fiction she could be more emotionally revealing than when writing memoir. You've written four memoirs, and your first novel, Thicker Than Water, is very close to the story in your first memoir, The Kiss. I recently reread Thicker Than Water and found it more intense and disturbing than the memoir. KH: It is both intentionally and unintentionally more revealing than nonfiction. When I described my grandparents in Thicker Than Water, for example, I depicted my grandmother as being really tall and my grandfather as a diminutive man. In fact the opposite was true, but in terms of the force of their personalities, my grandmother was the larger figure. On the other hand, one of the motivations for writing The Kiss was that I had fictionalized the story. Because Thicker Than Water was a typically autobiographical first novel, with aspects changed around and disguised, I felt disappointed in it and in myself: I knew that there was a story that was real and one that needed to be owned. To novelize a story of incest is to participate in the societal imperative to always lie about it, to say it's not happening, or that you made it up. For that reason, I wanted to disown that novel as soon as it was published. The Kiss is intentionally stripped-down because I wanted to reveal that archetypal triangle of the parents and the child. The shell-shocked, present-tense narration reveals some of the experience of being in a relationship like that, in which you are in a kind of cottony, emotionally vacant state—it's the only way you get through things like that. In a sense, the books are separate truths that, in the end, complement each other. BF: A lot of reviewers were merciless when The Kiss came out. Most of the memoir—and Thicker Than Water for that matter—evokes the experience of a child being deprived of something as primal as parental love. Some of the reviews bypassed this and made a beeline for the more "sensational" aspects, taking you to task for being twenty when your father seduced you, and questioning the veracity of your story and your motive for writing it. They judged you personally and invited readers to do the same. KH: It's the power of taboo. It's almost like an autoimmune response. As you know, certain critics were venomous, mean in a way that has nothing to do with book criticism. But the publication of The Kiss was disillusioning in the best sense. It was painful at first, but ultimately useful in that it stripped away naive fantasies that I'd had. Going into publication, I imagined that some people would be angry with me for who I was and what I'd done, and I could accept that because I'd been angry with myself. BF: Did readers initially presume that someone had molested you as a child? KH: Maybe. But isn't it reductive, even silly, to limit the age at which it's possible to be abused by a parent? To say, if you're under eighteen you're a kid, and if you're over eighteen, you're not? In relation to your parents, you're always a child. And I was naive about the media. I genuinely believed all journalists were honorable. [laughs] It never occurred to me that I'd be quoted out of context in order to distort my meaning. I wasn't prepared for slander, for people to say, "She did it for the money. Random House paid this huge advance." Random House didn't. They accepted the memoir in lieu of a novel that had been under contract for years, without any extra advance. The one thing that infuriated me was being called a liar. How ironic to finally come clean only to be accused of dishonesty. In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley wrote, nastily, "If, by the way, anything herein actually happened as she claims it did. . . ." He also called the book "slimy," "repellent," "meretricious." The fact that the review—plus an Op-Ed piece!—was so hysterical in its hostility turned out to be a saving grace. I mean, a critic has to have an agenda to take the people who blurbed the book to task: Tobias Wolff, Mary Karr, Robert Coles, and Mary Gordon were all sentenced by Yardley to "perdition eternal." In the end it was laughable. But at the time it wasn't very funny. BF: The experience sounds devastating. KH: You have a choice to either laugh or cry. I cried before, and now it seems funny. I even look forward to certain events, hoping to meet some of these people and say, "What a pleasure to [laughs] finally look you in the eye." But, in the end, do I give a fuck what any of these people think about me? BF: I hope not. But for some more careless reviewers, criticism has become a spectator sport. Too many times, we see a critic veer off the page to ream an author for the facts of his or her life. KH: This is the point that Andrea Dworkin made before The Kiss came out. She said, "It's all very well to say who cares? But in fact people publish lies, and other people will read them, and then other people believe what they tell them. Pretty soon there's a whole group of people who believe something false about you. And that is actual damage." Over time, the junk falls away and things reveal themselves. I have faith in that.
Interview with Salon "Committed: Men Tell Stories of Love, Commitment, and Marriage "Edited
by Chris Knutsen
Bloomsbury Publishing Colin Harrison's essay "Incision" closes "Committed." Harrison's piece is not so much an exploration of his own marriage as it is a look at the end of another. He writes about the slow and painful death of his father, his recognition of the impact it has on his mother, and the way he and his wife, author Kathryn Harrison, expand their own relationship to absorb the grief and responsibility of mourning. Central to his tale is his wife's choice to look at an unhealing gash down the middle of his father's belly, and her warning to him that he should not do the same. Salon: Did you learn anything about your husband from reading his "Committed" essay? Kathryn Harrison: No, I knew him in that way already. I knew he was thinking a lot about his parents' marriage when his father was dying. For better and for worse, both of us are terribly earnest people who are not at all ironic about marriage. I think we took our marriage vows very seriously and believed we were and are together till death do us part. I never went through any process of struggle or decision-making before we got married. I knew this was my husband on the first date. And at that point I wasn't somebody who was looking to get married. How did you meet? We met in grad school at the Writers' Workshop at Iowa. We were at a reading together briefly. Then one day we were standing in the graduate lounge at the mailboxes and he came up to me and said, "So why don't we have lunch? How about next Tuesday?" And I said, "OK, sure." And he said, "Well aren't you going to write it down?" I was a little taken aback both because it seemed weirdly bossy and also sort of sweet. As if I'd forget. So we had lunch and agreed we'd have a real date the following Friday, which we did, and on Monday he handed me his house key and I moved in and that was it. I had just turned 24. He was the same. He was a year ahead of me, so he entered a doctoral program he had no intention of completing [in Iowa] to hang around me. Then we moved to New York and got married. I was pregnant a year later with my first child. Did it ever bother you to live here in New York in the land of single women as a married woman? No, I've often thought I must be really lucky. Certainly having that huge question of one's life settled early allows you more time and energy to work on other things. I've never looked at it as a question of how many people I won't be involved with. But I never was somebody who dated. I had one serious relationship and then another. I guess I'm somebody who's commitment-inclined. Why do you think that is? I don't know. My mom and dad were divorced when I was an infant so the only role model I had was my grandparents' marriage, which was not conventional. My grandmother had my mother when she was 43. And both of my grandparents were so eccentric I don't know what ideas I had from them about what marriage was. I know so many friends who when they got married, it was the culmination of so many fantasies. I was never that person. I didn't think that much about it until it happened. In my case, it was totally intuitive. Given that you went into this calmly, did you find any surprises in commitment? I don't think anybody can really anticipate what it's going to be like to be a parent. I don't think anybody is really prepared for the amount of time and energy and focus kids demand. Or for the amount of joy either. We've been married for 17 years and we've gone over a few bumps in which I thought -- I'm sure this is true of Colin as well -- "OK, so this is the person I'm going to be living with for the rest of my life; this is something I'm going to have to learn to cope with." Never moments where I thought, "OK, I'm outta here." Both of us were not only committed to each other in a pretty unqualified way from the beginning, but we've both been mystified by people entering into it with less commitment than that. We've known people who've gotten married with a "Let's see how it goes" attitude and I couldn't identify with that. You're someone who's written very openly about your personal life. How does it feel to have your husband doing it? I am much more comfortable writing about stuff like this than my husband is. Somehow when I'm writing personal essay or memoir I really intend to vivisect myself. It's not that I'm not a private person. But I think that there's some sort of disjuncture. I'm a very private person who uses means of self-exposure for expression. The issues are different for Colin. He's more self-conscious and more protective of his privacy and our family's privacy. But because we're both writers we've understood from the beginning that we each have autonomy as writers: that I can't censor him and he can't censor me. That doesn't mean we're not sensitive to each other. But I am trying to think of what he could say that would bother me, and I just don't know. But then again, I sort of have put us through a trial by fire, so I have a different relationship to this than many people would and I know that. You seem so calm about all of this. I think we are pretty calm about marriage. I guess we're just very certain. I know a number of people for whom certain fights lead to thinking or saying the "D" word: "divorce." I know that that's never popped into my head. I've never seen our marriage as something that might be over. When I think about the end of it, every once in a while, I think: Which one of us will go first? And then I think: How can that be? Who's left behind? And that seems an impossible thought. So you think of your relationship in terms of death? I think I'm somebody who thinks about death probably a lot. I'm not obsessed with it but I do think about it routinely. Do you think that's one of the reasons you were able to look at Colin's father's wound? I think his father asked me to look at it because he wanted my witness to what had happened. I don't think you could bear it by yourself, the consciousness of that kind of wound. I don't think he would have asked Colin because I think to ask that of his child was a different thing, it would have a different impact. Because of the impact it had on me I remember telling Colin there was no reason for him to look at it. I just didn't see purpose in that kind of pain. Do you think that your awareness of death goes hand in hand with your appreciation for your relationship with your husband? I don't know if I've ever felt that keen love for anybody without the twin feeling of "Oh my god what would it be like to lose you?" I don't know that I experience one without the other. Having children also changes your relationship to the idea of your death. I remember getting mugged about eight years ago and only having $40 on me and thinking, "Please let it be enough." And saying, "I have kids," and he had what turned out to be a toy gun. You're hostage
to the feelings that you have for people. I don't think there's
any way around that. I think that's why some people are afraid of
commitment. I guess it's the impulse to not put yourself in a position
in which you could lose them. |
