‘You were not innocent’: Kathryn Harrison was shamed for her 90s memoir of an ‘affair’ with her father. Today, we know better

By Emma Maguire, Lecturer in English and Writing, James Cook University

Our cultural touchstones series looks at influential books.

In the era of social media and the selfie, it’s hard to imagine a time when the sharing of intimate personal stories was new – at least, on a large public scale. But in 1997, when Kathryn Harrison’s now-classic memoir of father-daughter incest was published, the 1990s “memoir boom” – which has ebbed and flowed, but never entirely receded since – had just begun.

In The Kiss, Harrison narrates the experience of meeting…

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