IN 1991, a novel called Thicker Than Water appeared. The writer was Kathryn Harrison, a blonde, hard working, reluctant socialite New Yorker in her late 20s. The story was of a young girl being brought up by her grandparents in a ramshackle Lose Angeles home, with only distant recollections of her father. She comes to know this monstrous man only too well, however, for once she reaches the age of 20 something odd and revolting happens: he kisses her passionately on the lips. The kiss develops into a fully fledged sexual affair, conducted mainly in motels across the mighty scenery of the southwestern deserts.
Harrison had written this sad, repellent tale after she had married, getting up at five in the morning before going to work as a slush pile editor. It attracted favourable reviews but little attention and fewer royalties. There was a bit of mumbling that maybe this was not fiction maybe the authoress was drawing on some dark and awful memory from her real life.
In an interview in 1993, Harrison said: "Issues of privacy and identity were very messed up in my family. People were absurdly conscientious about things like never opening somebody else's mail. But that was a cloak for the fact that other areas which should have been private were not. Even as a teenager, I had a lock on the outside of my door, not on the inside." Her second novel, Exposure, also meandered through the theme of a perverted father daughter relationship. This time the ambience was Lewis Carroll-esque: the heroine was the daughter of a photographer whose renown was based upon pictures he had taken of her when she was a child. The pictures are disturbing, and the young woman cracks up when she recalls the circumstances of their taking.
Now comes Harrison's fourth book, a memoir - a sensational memoir called The Kiss. We go back to the events of Thicker Than Water - only this time it's a present tense, dream like but horribly real, autobiographical recollection of the writer's sexual relationship with her father, from the age of 20 to 24. The galleys have achieved a kind of "haute filth chic" status in Manhattan literary circles.
Harrison tells how she was brought up in California. Her parents had met as virgins and her mother's pregnancy soon after was the reason for a shotgun marriage to her father, who left when she was six months old. Her mother - fed up with child rearing - also moved on five years later, so that, like the" heroine of Thicker Than Water, Kathryn lived with her grandparents' in a tumbledown home in Los Angeles.
She sees almost nothing of her father, and nothing at all between the ages of 10 and 20, when he visits her while she is home from college for a holiday. He turns out to be a Christian preacher. As he takes his leave, saying goodbye at the airport, he kisses her passionately: "My father pushes his tongue deep into my mouth wet, insistent, exploring, then withdrawn." Not exactly D. H. Lawrence, but the affair develops from there, with the bewildered, entrapped, enthralled Kathryn going to Stanford University, and moving to a grim subterranean apartment where she is pestered, stalked and finally molested by her father.
Just to complete the Freudian short circuit, he next persuades Kathryn to come and stay at his mother's house, where the relationship is consummated with oral sex. The affair develops, for the most part, on drives to beauty spots and in cheap motels. (Mercifully, details of scenes are scant). The now deranged Kathryn moves in with him and his family, lured by some disgusting proposition that God intended them to have a relationship.
The abuse (Harrison never uses the word, nor "rape" nor "incest") comes to an end when Kathryn's mother dies of bone cancer. This apparently shakes Kathryn to her senses. Then, on a writing course in Iowa, she meets the man who will become her husband, the ambitious young novelist Colin Harrison, and she later confesses everything to him. They have since produced six books - his very successful - and two very nice children. They are happily married. You'd think they'd be inclined to let the incest be.
But no. To add to the prepublication melodrama, publicity surrounding the publication of the book is being carefully stage managed in the worst traditions of publishing. The author - usually so anxious to feature in any magazine or TV show at the drop of a hat - is now being kept under wraps backstage until the volume is published in April in the US, and a few weeks later in Britain. Both Random House and Britain's Fourth Estate are anxious to choreograph arrangements so as to give the impression of a climactic frenzy upon publication. The New Yorker magazine will run an excerpt, but not yet.
Harrison did, however, give a reluctant" interview to the wry and witty New York Observer newspaper. "For me," she says, opening on a lofty note, "writing is a transaction by which I try to come to terms with myself, and in this case my past. We'll see if I'm laying the tinder at my own stake." This is very unlikely indeed, since it is impossible not to see the retailing of Kathryn Harrison's twisted affair as the perfect mass media coup. Harrison has come to inhabit the claustrophobic maze of New York's media and literary cocktail circuit, and is now apparently happy to be wealthily marooned in it forever, even if it is as Manhattan's circus freak.
Harrison used to work her way through the publisher's slush pile - she knows what does not get published. Her husband and knight in shining armour is, conveniently, deputy editor of Harpers magazine. So he knows both how to grab the attention of glossymag editors and how to get money from publishers: he has just signed a £1 million deal with Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for his next two books.
No surprises, then, when the Christmas issue of Harpers featured a quaint, sad, piece by Kathryn Harrison: "Long after my classmates had outgrown Santa Claus, I still believed in him. It was a secret, potentially embarrassing faith. . ." It just so happens that despite his commissioning clout at Harpers, Colin Harrison is now writing an article for Vogue - a rival of sorts - about what it it is like to be married to a woman who had an affair with her father.
And it also turns out that it was not actually Kathryn Harrison's idea to write The Kiss in the first place - it came from her agent, Amanda "Binky" Urban, who astutely spotted the business potential of her client's incestuous affair. "It was my feeling that there was something that she needed to exorcise," claims Urban, adding: "We had a long talk about her children, and how it would impact on them." The Manhattan luvvies, however, have been eager to serenade the book's sincerity and its expiation of pain, rather than talk about money. "I liked it," said essayist Philip Lopate ominously. "It kept circling around this notion of power... a stronger adult overcoming a younger person and having her in his thrall." What?!
Some potent voices, however, have been less than impressed. Among them is the magazine Vanity Fair, main rival to Harpers for lebensraum on New York coffee tables. An article by Michael Schnayerson sounds the sceptics' alarm, asking how cathartic and necessary Harrison's book really is when in her first novel, as it turns out, she does more than touch on the subject of incest. She actually tells the same story of the incestuous affair that she recounts in The Kiss." There will be handsome payment, as well as a price to pay. Vanity Fair quotes Harrison as parodying Andy Warhol: I didn't go into my first publication with unrealistic expectations. If you're not aware of the sheer volume of books coming out, you have no idea beforehand that it's not even 15 minutes of fame, it's more like 15 nanoseconds of attention that your work will get in the marketplace." But not this time. "Hard luck stories are okay," says one editor at Riverhead Books, "issue memoirs are better and issue memoirs by articulate, attractive memoirists those are the best." Babbling one's intimate innards is hardly new in American literature, and it has a record of success. The current phase of the frenzy to confess in chic circles dates back to the post war years, and the poetry of Anne Sexton - such verses as her Ballad Of The Lonely Masturbator and Menstruation At Forty.
The revolutions of the 1960s made sure that public and pubic self disclosure became a good way to ensure personal gain.
It's not all sex: indeed the Harrison chronicles fit nicely into a spate of gut spilling books about other self obsessive tribulations. Elizabeth, Wurtzel did well out of her Prozac Nation, about depression. Then there was Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, about mental derangement and Caroline Knapp's self explanatory Drinking: A Love Story.
The line between literature and the Oprah Winfrey show, on which people tell the cameras about their sexual and relationship problems blurs indeed, the self obsessive authors are competing for airtime with Oprah's guests and often they are less interesting, which is quite an achievement.
SLOWLY, slowly the "taboos" are supposedly lifted by the splurge books, and society liberalised and even liberated as the "issues" are supposedly dragged into the open. The reality is that social and psychological problems fester until some celebrity catapults them into the arena of national debate where they enjoy - as Kathryn Harrison will appreciate - 15 nanoseconds of scant and anecdotal attention, before being superceded by the next splurge confession.
"This is the kind of stuff famous people used to try to hide," says the commentator Regina Barraca. "Now they hire publicists to make sure we all know."