She is her own best subject

Before our current, enlightened age of child-rearing, parents driven to distraction by their offspring’s whining were apt to threaten a grim proportionality: “You pipe down, or I’ll give you something to cry about!”

Kathryn Harrison, who burst into full frontal literary view with her fourth book, “The Kiss,” an autobiographical account of a father-daughter affair, is certainly nobody’s crybaby. At 9 she cauterized and skinned her tongue with dry ice; at 15 she starved herself (in her horror of carbohydrates, even spitting the Communion wafer out in her fist) from solid to Twiggy-thin. She has given birth to three children without analgesics. (Coincidentally, we are sisters in this last, and I can attest to the unembellished accuracy of her report, “Labor.”) But Harrison, grown up and looking back, will not pipe down.

Judging by the 17 essays collected in her new volume, “Seeking Rapture: Scenes From a Woman’s Life,” every turning of her girlhood held a surfeit of pain-filled things, long before the seduction by the prodigal father. Through childhood, aggressive silence was her chief defense. Now Harrison aims, over the distance of time and often with dazzling accuracy, for unflinching display of motivations. She orders the chaos of memory under a klieg light of confession from which no detail, least of all the humiliating or bizarre, can hide.

“Since the same woman raised us, mine was not the typical Los Angeles childhood any more than my mother’s had been. My grandmother emphatically disapproved of all things American and encouraged me to form myself in contrast to the children around me.” Leaving aside the dizzying question of how one defines the “typical Los Angeles childhood” -- aren’t thousands of kids being raised here at this moment by their doughty grandmas? -- this remark holds a key to the future author’s development. The Nana in Harrison’s case is a splendid character, a full novel’s cast in herself. She was “ ‘born a Jew’ ... ancestry being one of the inconveniences she feels she has overcome” and subsequently “cared for” on a sumptuous estate in Shanghai’s International Settlement before entering a tempestuous career as unattainable flirt and heartbreaker.

Nurture wins hands-down over nature as young Kathryn, only child of the only child of this volatile refugee ex-pat, grows up under grandmother’s aegis. Proud, yearning and loathing of her own perceived imperfections, she is marked by the unearned punishment of flighty parents conspicuous in their absences. The “primal scene” in these psychogrammatic sketches from a young life is surely that of Mother moving out for good. Kathryn’s 6-year-old heart simply breaks on the wheel. “In the afternoons I sat in the closet of her old room, inhaling her perfume from what dresses remained; each morning I woke newly disappointed at the sight of her empty bed in the room next to mine.”

Written decades later, it is an excruciatingly poignant reliving. Many of the pieces in “Seeking Rapture,” whether they were composed with a unifying theme in mind or not, chronicle and catalog the symptomology of early loss. “Keeping Time” concerns a hoard of watches and clocks and the punctuality imperative, the title essay (the collection’s richest) connects renunciation, self-mutilation, conversion and power in a child’s mind, “The Supermarket Detective” confesses teenage binge-shoplifting without a dollop of shame.

Other pieces parse Harrison’s adult record vis-a-vis her own children -- where she has battled to make amends for the sins of her parents, where she has fallen short. And where she has succeeded in loving. Topics of this kind seem to figure prominently in the current American zeitgeist: While reading “Seeking Rapture,” I chanced on a biographical piece by Judith Thurman on the performance artist Vanessa Beecroft. Beecroft is a self-outed exercise bulimic whose acclaimed staged “events” often involve near-naked fashion models and whiffs of sadomasochism.

Beecroft grew up with a demanding, childish mother; her father left when she was 2. Taking a step back for perspective, Thurman muses on how a human being’s early emotional starvation is dealt with either defensively by self-starvation or aggressively by accomplishment and seduction or both -- but always with a sense of hollowness at the core. For a moment I thought Thurman was responding to “Seeking Rapture.”

The excellent news for Harrison, if nowhere explicitly stated as such, is the way circumstances drove her on the one hand to find release in art, specifically in writing, while on the other providing her with superior tools: a good parochial school education, a dose of cultural elitism, a childhood addiction to books. Her writerly powers range from forte to delightful pianissimo, as in this description of a spinster attending a cat fanciers’ meeting: “ ... spinning [cat]wool in her lap while the other women talked and ate. If she sat in a beam of sun, cat hair floated in the air around her, settling onto the surface of her untouched coffee.”

Such fastidious recall is a Proustian gift. With all due regard for her achievement as a novelist, Harrison appears Proust-like in another respect: She is her own truest subject, an unending wellspring of emotion and restless quest. If to write means to share the full measure of one’s experience, any reader of these essays is well-served.