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Who

A prolific author of both fiction and non-fiction, Harrison is best known for her 1997 book The Kiss.

Backstory

After a dysfunctional childhood in Los Angeles where she was raised by her grandparents but neglected by her young mother—a situation to which she attributes her years of anorexia as a teen, and subsequent vulnerability to her father's seduction—Harrison went to Stanford and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She gained worldwide notoriety in 1997 with her book The Kiss, an unflinching account of the affair she had with her father—from whom she'd been more or less estranged since birth—between the ages of 20 and 24. She's also published six novels, one additional memoir (about exhuming her mother's body and having it cremated), a travelogue, and a biography of Saint Therese of Lisieux.

Of note

Harrison's work has polarized critics. The Kiss was glowingly blurbed by acclaimed memoirists Tobias Wolff ("Only a writer of extraordinary gifts could bring so much light to bear on so dark a matter") and Mary Karr, but provoked bile among certain male critics: Jonathan Yardley, in the Washington Post Book World, deemed it "slimy" and "repellent," while in The New Republic, James Wolcott took Harrison to task for writing such a book as a mother. While her post-Kiss books have inevitably failed to garner as much as attention as her dad-on-daughter tell-all, her 2006 novel Envy was fairly well-received, and prompted Bookforum to describe her as "one of the finest and most fearless storytellers writing today." In 2008 she'll publish another nonfiction book, While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family, about a little-known murder case from 1984.

Personal

Harrison is married to Colin Harrison, a novelist and editor at Scribner. The couple, who have been together since meeting at the Iowa Writers Workshop in the mid '80s, lives with their children—two girls and a boy—in a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Soundbite

Of her husband's opinion of her work, Harrison says: "We're two writers who live together, and we know that we each have to be free to write what we will. For all that, I think that he's on some basic level sort of astonished and possibly appalled."