Donna Tartt called the novel “Exquisite, exhilarating, and harrowing.”[6] Harrison's memoir The Kiss documented a love triangle that developed involving her young mother, her father, and herself.
[7] It described her father's seduction of her when she was twenty and their incestuous involvement, which persisted for four years and is reflected in the plots and themes of her first three novels, published before The Kiss.
[8] In The New York Times Book Review, Susan Cheever wrote, "The story of an intellectually powerful man and his consuming desire to ravish an innocent, almost preconscious, young woman (sometimes his daughter) has often been told—Zeus, Lewis Carroll and Humbert Humbert come to mind—but Kathryn Harrison turns up the volume, making this ancient immorality tale a struggle between good and evil, between life and death, between God and the Devil.
"[15] After Michael Shnayerson published a critical account of the book in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker canceled an excerpt that it had scheduled.
[16] In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr dedicated a chapter, "The Public and Private Burning of Kathryn Harrison" to discussing The Kiss controversy.
Her grandmother, of the Sephardi Sassoon family, was raised in Shanghai, where she lived until 1920, her experiences there inspiring Harrison's historical novel, The Binding Chair.
"[19] She lives in New York with her husband, the novelist and book editor Colin Harrison, whom she met in 1985, when they were enrolled in the Iowa Writers' Workshop.