SOURCE: “The Awful Truth,” in New York Review of Books, Vol. 44, No. 14, September 25, 1997, pp. 13–15.

In the following excerpt, Halpern compares specific passages from Thicker Than Water and The Kiss, noting the similarities in the subject material.

The response to Kathryn Harrison's memoir, The Kiss … illustrates how one's expectation defines one's reception—how what a book is called determines how the reader reads it. The Kiss, as everyone knows by now, is about Harrison's four-year affair with her father, a pastor, which began when the author was twenty. The book is written in a cool, hypnotic monotone, as if the writer were unattached to the events she records (and therefore not culpable). “We spend our nights in motels not so much sordid as depressing. Sordid has a style and swagger these places lack, rooms with curtains cut from the same orange fabric as the bedspread, ceilings of plaster textured...