SOURCE: "Literary Conceits," in The New York Times, April 6, 1997, sec. 4, p. 19.

[In the following essay, Wolff defends memoirists as undeserving of the harsh criticism that they often receive from reviewers.]

The reviews of Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss are enough to make you think she had committed a crime in writing about her seduction by her father and the bitter sexual entanglement that followed. Michael Shnayerson suggests in Vanity Fair that her motive in telling her story was not, as she herself says, a matter of personal and artistic necessity, but a squalid grab for publicity and sales. The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley dismisses the entire book as "trash … not an artful word in it"—contrived "for personal gain and talk show notoriety."

James Wolcott, in The New Republic, brings the author up on charges of being not only a hack, but also a mercenary opportunist, a liar...