Rise and fall of the tell-all

In the earliest days of the 1990s, a young writer named Kathryn Harrison wrote her first novel, “Thicker Than Water,” about a young girl, Isabel, in Los Angeles. Isabel lives with her eccentric Jewish grandparents and doesn’t meet her father until late in adolescence, when they begin a tortured sexual relationship. Her mother, who appears occasionally and unlovingly throughout Isabel’s young life, dies of cancer toward the end of the book.

Sound familiar? Perhaps like a book you may have read, or read about, or heard obsessively discussed on television for a spell? Well, you may be thinking about a book with the same plot and the same author but a different character name. That book was called “The Kiss.” And the protagonist was named Kathryn Harrison.

In the six years between those books, a shift occurred in our cultural landscape -- not the gradual rearranging of tectonic plates, but a climate-altering meteor slamming into publishing offices and book review desks around the country. During the early ‘90s if a writer wanted to write about her experience, she, like Marcel Proust, had to rely on the veiled autobiography in which truth posed a fiction, the roman a clef as old as literature itself. And this summer, stately historical autobiography and paper-wrapper tell-all have melded for the first time in the form of Bill Clinton’s tome “My Life.”

That dichotomy -- books required by teachers versus those hidden from parents -- existed until Susanna Kaysen and Mary Karr took command of the bestseller lists with their respective true-life stories about institutionalization and child abuse. That was before writers had agents waving away their ideas for “dysfunctional family” novels and pushing them to write it “true.”

Harrison saw an opportunity to write the truth of her life as truth -- which, in her case, actually is stranger than fiction. And for some time, literary-scene cocktail parties in Manhattan and book club teas in Montana could talk of little other than this affair between a self-starving blond college student and her minister father.

“Is there a way to tell a stranger that once upon a time I fell from grace, I was lost so deeply in a dark wood that I’m afraid I’ll never be safe again?” she wonders in the book. With the explosion of the memoir craze, Harrison found a way to tell every stranger who read her book or tuned into prime-time interview shows or read nearly any magazine published in the country for some time. Her unsmiling publicity shots were ubiquitous, from Vanity Fair to the Weekly Standard.

Like any trend of any variety, from est to disco to trucker hats, a moment inflates and then deflates. Currently, reality television has overwhelmed the crafted word to deliver a fix of other people’s impossible truths. While book deals are still struck regularly for autobiography, “There’s a general mode of cautiousness about memoirs,” says Charlotte Abbott, book news editor for Publishers Weekly. She points to Ann Patchett’s top-selling memoir of her friendship with poet -- and memoirist herself -- Lucy Grealy as the benchmark for personal writing this summer, a story of friendship rather than abandonment, commitment rather than rape.

But the Boston Globe’s Kate Bolick, who writes a column devoted to memoirs, says she hasn’t detected a backlash against confessional writing. As she sees it, memoirs have just lately shifted toward what she calls “self-defamation,” a form of confession. Stories have veered away from the passive look-what-happened-to-me genre to the active check-out-what-I-did voice.

“All memoirists have to struggle with how they’re going to represent themselves, which usually means concealing flaws, but these days people seem to be choosing to not only reveal them but revel in them,” she says. Bolick notes that David Denby’s recent book, “American Sucker,” is an exercise in “painting himself a fool” and that Brad Land’s own frat-boy story, “Goat,” is a portrait of the self as “thin-skinned and weird and ‘unmanly.’ ”

And Bolick has seen what she regards as one of the quintessential examples of self-defamation: Random House recently published a book called “The Mother Knot” in which she says the author “paints herself as morbidly self-involved and nearly hysterical about it.”

That author? Kathryn Harrison.

The infamous author of the book perhaps unanimously identified by critics, professors and literary gossip hounds as the tell-all to define all tell-alls is back to tell some more. In the seven years since “The Kiss” was released, the perceived cooling of the memoir market has done little to keep Harrison from mining her own confessions. Last year saw the publication of “Seeking Rapture,” a volume of 17 personal essays, mostly, at bottom, meditations on motherhood and daughterhood. Harrison says she wrote “The Kiss” mainly about her relationship with her mother, though it was the affair with her father that, for plain reasons, got all the attention. “My father is a chapter in my relationship with my mother,” she says.

Truth in 82 pages

And now, a slim volume devoted exclusively to the pain, exhilaration and guilt of maternity has sprung from Harrison’s mind and keyboard -- just when we thought there could be nothing more to know.

“The Mother Knot” begins when, soon after she has weaned her youngest daughter, Harrison’s son is hospitalized for asthma. His condition generates a wellspring of guilt in Harrison, who suffered asthma herself, which gushes back to her memories of another hospitalization -- her mother’s. “An electronic clamor muffled groans and cries and returned me to my mother’s bedside, to her tubes and her wires and her suffering -- and to my panic at losing her before we could manage a reconciliation or even an honest farewell,” she writes.

During the course of the book, written in the months surrounding her 42nd birthday, Harrison decides to manufacture a new farewell with her mother, dead two decades. She spends more than $3,000 to exhume the body from a Los Angeles cemetery and have it cremated. Her mother’s ashes are shipped to New York, and Harrison, alone, drives them from her Brooklyn brownstone out to the North Fork of Long Island, where she says the Lord’s Prayer and scatters her mother’s terra-cotta-colored dust into the Atlantic.

Between her son’s illness and her mother’s final departure, Harrison succumbs to the frightful pull of anorexia and depression -- both themes in her life, which we know from her heap of previous personal writing. And all in just 82 pages.

Why write again and again about her family trauma? “It was never a decision. People make the mistake of assuming writers are a bit more calculating than they are. I’ve never had the choice to write anything I’ve written,” Harrison says at a cafe near her home, warming her hands around a cappuccino. When “The Kiss” was published, plenty of critics understood her need to write about her painful parental relationships, but many rejected the notion that she publish such writing. Why expose her children to her past so publicly, reviewers wondered. Why not merely commit it to a journal?

Like many memoirists, Harrison has never kept a journal. “I think people who keep journals do it so that someone will find it one day,” Harrison responds with an ironic lilt. “I don’t think there’s any truly private writing.” But these days such critics might wonder not only why she publishes but why she does the very things she writes about. Her pre-publishing past is one matter. But, some people might wonder, are the acts of Harrison the famous memoirist acts that exist merely to be written about?

Harrison says she has no apparatus to understand how she tends to guide her life without memoir. “I only understand things through writing them,” she says. And in writing, she provides something that can be read, so that others may understand their own lives.

This, she says, is the public benefit to confessional memoir. She remembers the added pain of being an anorexic teenager in the mid-’70s, long before the disease had any public life. “I thought I was the only one,” she remembers. She says that sharing her pain creates a community for readers who may believe that they are alone, as she was. “The point is to share an experience which is human,” she says, no matter how dysfunctional it may seem. “It might not be the norm, but this way you know it’s not outside of humanity.”

A family revealed

When Harrison met her husband at the Iowa writer’s workshop more than 15 years ago, neither one could have guessed that her writing would take such a first-person-personal turn. Now, Colin Harrison -- a novelist and executive editor at Scribner -- is often thought of as half of a literary couple known for much more than their writing, or as James Wolcott once named them in the New Republic, “the Sonny and Cher of dysfunction.”

“It was an incremental thing,” Harrison the husband says of his wife’s decision to place her true life at the center of her writing. Though gradual, it was a move that both Harrisons admit has caused great discomfort for their family but that as an editor who pushes people to write from their deepest depths, he has said he has no choice but to support. “Occasionally we’ll have a witty repartee and I’ll say one of us should write that down, but we never do,” he says.

The Harrisons have recently discussed the next work to mine her ongoing themes of parents and death -- a book about the recent death of Colin’s father. But such writing, in the end, will be a way into only a vivisection of the writer herself. “That’s really my goal whenever I’m writing. To cut myself open as far as I can and see what’s there,” she explains. And regardless of the lukewarm climate for memoir publishing compared with the glut of the “Kiss”-buzzing mid-’90s, there will continue to be a marketplace of confessions, especially written by our most headline-catching confessors.

“I suppose that confessional writing in some version or another will continue along in tandem with our taste for ‘reality,’ until we either get entirely bored or there isn’t too much more to be confessional about.” President Clinton may feel he’s adequately relived and relieved his life in his 958-page Song of Himself. But for Harrison and her brethren there are many books yet unwritten, and for their agents many book deals yet unmade.