SOURCE: “Father, We Have Sinned,” in Observer, April 13, 1997, p. 17.

In the following interview, Harrison reacts to the critical controversy and personal attacks prompted by the publication of The Kiss.

When Kathryn Harrison was 20, her father kissed her. He pushed his tongue inside her mouth, “wet, insistent and exploring.” And with that kiss, she says to me, she “crossed a line, like a line of fire.” She became unspeakable. Now 35, she has written an appalling memoir: “a bridge of words back to the place to which I can never return. But I didn't know that people would hate me so much for it.”

For several years, Harrison had an affair with her father (she never calls it abuse, instead she calls both father and daughter “dishonourable,” “treacherous”). He was a preacher who had been absent since she was six months old, was still desired by her mother (who also...