Kathryn Harrison

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Kathryn Harrison
Born	1961 (age 46–47) Los Angeles
Nationality	American

Kathryn Harrison (born 1961 in Los Angeles) is an American author.

[edit] Biography

Harrison was raised in Los Angeles by her maternal grandparents. She graduated from Stanford University in 1982 with a BA in English and Art History and received an MFA from the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop in 1987. She lives in New York with her husband, the novelist and book editor Colin Harrison, whom she met in 1985, when the two of them were enrolled in the Writers' Workshop. They have three children, born in 1990, 1992 and 2000.

The bestselling author famously documented a disturbing triangulation that developed involving her young mother, her father and herself in the memoir The Kiss, which described her father's seduction of the author 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. While much of her body of work documents her tortured relationship with her mother, who died in 1985 -- the essays collected in Seeking Rapture: Scenes From a Life, a second memoir, The Mother Knot, as well as The Kiss -- she has also written extensively of her maternal grandparents, both in her personal essays and, in fictionalized form, in her novels. Her grandmother, a Sassoon, was raised in Shanghai, where she lived until 1920, her experiences there inspiring Harrison's historical novel, The Binding Chair. The Seal Wife, set in Alaska during the First World War, draws on the early life of her British grandfather, who spent his youth trapping fur in the Northwest Territories and laying track into Anchorage for the Alaska Railroad.

Harrison has published six novels, three memoirs, a travelogue, a biography, and, as of June 2008, a book of true crime. She is a frequent reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, and her personal essays have been included in many anthologies and have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Vogue, O Magazine, Salon.com, Nerve.Com, More Magazine, and Bookforum, and other publications.

[edit] Bibliography

Fiction: Thicker Than Water (Random House, 1992), Exposure (Random House, 1993), Poison (Random House, 1995), The Binding Chair, (Random House, 2000) The Seal Wife (Random House, 2002) and Envy (Random House, 2005).

Nonfiction: The Kiss: A Memoir (Random House, 1997), Seeking Rapture: Scenes From a Life (Random House, 2003), The Road to Santiago (National Geographic, 2003), Saint Therese of Lisieux: Penguin Lives Series (Penguin Books, 2003), The Mother Knot: A Memoir (Random House, 2004), "While They Slept: An Inquiry into the Murder of a Family" (Random House, 2008).