Author of the week: Kathryn Harrison

last updated 8 January 2015

Kathryn Harrison can’t stay away from family trauma, said Tara Ison in the Los Angeles Times. Best known for her memoir The Kiss, an account of a four-year affair she had with her father, the 47-year-old Brooklyn novelist has inserted herself into another clan’s horror story. Twenty-four years ago, when news broke about a troubled 18-year-old in Oregon who had murdered his parents and youngest sister with a baseball bat, Harrison was just another distant onlooker. But the killer left one sister, 16-year-old Jody, unharmed, and when Harrison learned recently that Jody was struggling to complete a memoir, she offered to write the story herself. Harrison says she saw in Jody Arlington a near contemporary who also “had a previous self who no longer exists.”

Harrison now finds herself acting as what she calls “a weird sort of liaison” between Arlington and Arlington’s imprisoned brother, Billy, said Laura Wexler in The Washington Post. “I have a relationship with the two of them and they don’t have one with each other,” she says. Harrison’s book about the Oregon murders, While They Slept, didn’t come easily. The first draft met strenuous objections from Arlington, and only with the fourth did Harrison win both subjects’ approval. By then, she had given up on her hope that the process would somehow trigger a family reconciliation. “You’re always looking for redemption,” she says. “There isn’t much in this story.”