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Article: Critics' choices for Christmas: Madeline Marget.
- Article from:
- Commonweal
- Article date:
- December 6, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Commonweal Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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When Kathryn Harrison's memoir The Kiss (HarperCollins, $11, 207 pp.) was published in 1997, I didn't want to read it. Reviews described it as the story of a young woman's sexual relationship with her father; it sounded self-exploitive to me. This year I discovered I had made the mistake of judging a book by its coverage. Intricate, clear, and eloquent, The Kiss is about villainy and love, terrible sorrow and wrong. Though it can serve as a social and psychological document (students of the church's sexual-abuse scandal, take note), it is much more than a collection of facts and interpretation. It is a tragedy.
Harrison's parents married at eighteen, when her ...