Kathryn Harrison on Writing Versus Therapy

It is a rigidly controlled book. It came at a time in my life when I’d been in therapy and analysis for years and just beating at the whole thing. I wanted to know what my culpability was. I literally had this fantasy of a pie graph of all the players involved, and this much is your fault, this much is your fault. I wanted that. I wanted to know exactly how bad I should feel. At some point, God bless my analyst, I hit the wall. I realized that all of this cerebral going around and around and around was not only failing to produce the desired effect, but was preventing me from approaching my own history. There was one moment, where I thought, there’s only one thing I can do with this, and that’s to tell the story. I know how it happened.

From a Days of Yore interview with Kathryn Harrison, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, The Kiss. In the quote above, she’s talking about the process of writing that book, which is about her incestuous relationship with her father. It’s a daring book to say the least. I guess at some point, she had to just tell her story in book form instead of talking around the issue in circles. There is no neat resolution to one’s own past, no solid answers that can wash away a trauma.

The interview was conducted by my friend and former classmate Kassi Underwood, herself a talented writer.