SOURCE: “The Sins of the Father,” in Spectator, Vol. 278, No. 8803, April 19, 1997, pp. 38–39.

In the following negative review of The Kiss, Hastings applauds Harrison's courage in publishing her controversial memoir, but argues that the work is stilted and poorly written.

The story Kathryn Harrison tells in The Kiss is so terrible that I felt guilty at being bored by it. The experience of her miserable childhood and her incestuous relationship with her father is appalling in every detail, and yet she recounts it with such portentous solemnity, in such a laboriously elevated style that I entirely failed to be moved.

When Kathryn Harrison was six months old, her parents divorced, she and her mother moving in with her grandparents. Her mother, a cold, discontented woman, was incapable of showing affection and coped with her chronic depression by spending much of the day asleep under a satin eye-mask. A little...