Generally Horrible Questions: Kathryn Harrison

For anyone who's bothered to read more than one post on our little blog here, it should come as no surprise that we're both huge fans of Kathryn Harrison's writing.  Her book The Kiss helped to define the contemporary confessional memoir and established Harrison is one of the premier writers at work today.  With her new novel Enchantments, we took the opportunity to reach out to Harrison and she obliged us with an interview.  Enchantments tells the story of Rasputin's children, who go to live with the Tsar's family after their father is murdered.  The Tsarina Alexandra hopes that they possess some of the healing powers of the Mad Monk in helping her son Alexei--nicknamed Aloysha--cope with his hemophilia.  Though the girls aren't mystics, Marina (nicknamed Masha), the older of the girls, becomes the friend and confidante of Aloysha and tells him stories to distract him from the pain of his disorder and the uncertainty of survival during the Russian Revolution. We asked Harrison about books, Russian history, Rasputin, and her works.  If you like smart, talented writers, you should be reading Kathryn Harrison.

Generally Horrible Questions: Kathryn Harrison

1. What's the latest book you’ve read that you just can’t stop talking about?

I’m working on a biography of Joan of Arc, so all the books I’ve been reading for the past year have pertained to her, or to her time and place. I’m surrounded by stacks of them: translations of the transcripts of the trials that sent her to the stake and posthumously reversed the guilty sentence; interpretations of what it means to hear and see angels; history books like Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages; cultural anthropologies such as Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe by V. R. Hotchkiss; old standards on religion & mysticism—Frazier’s The Golden Bough, Wm James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, Jung’s The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious by …. books that fascinate me but that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend to another reader. [On the contrary, this is a reading list that would make a terrific syllabus for a college course--one we'd like to take.]

2. Your historical novels are incredibly rich in detail. Is it true that The Seal Wife, The Binding Chair, and even Enchantments are in some way tied to your grandparents?

Yes, I was lucky to have been raised by grandparents whose very different early lives unfolded in exotic places. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know stories my grandparents told me, stories that will inform my writing forever. It began when I was very young, at bedtime, in the dark, when I was falling asleep, that liminal time, consciousness slipping toward the fantastic, toward dreams. And as an only child, who spent a great deal of time alone, I entered those landscapes when I was awake and daydreaming, there were no other children to distract me, to pull me back into the present world.

3. The Kiss was recently re-issued by Random House. Originally published in 1997, how do you imagine it would be received and reviewed if it were to just be released in 2012?
I think it would play out the same way again: different journalists, reviewers, but the same basic response. What’s different now?

I remember bumping into Molly Haskell about a month into the original publication, and when she asked how I was doing I admitted I felt bewildered by the whole fracas, and that I’d imagined the quality of the writing would have protected me from critics anyway. She just laughed and said, That’s the very thing that’s making them angry—because it’s too well written. It’s a book they’d like to dismiss, but they can’t.

I hadn’t understood that—I’d worked to make it true, but I didn’t see the price of succeeding: anger. Not from everyone of course. It was strange, as a writer, to be told it was a topic that wasn’t for literature. Not for a writer like me to own.

I think it would still be a book they couldn’t dismiss. It would still make people angry. I hope it would. 

4. I’ve read _______ and I am so ashamed?
There is no book I’m ashamed to have read.   

5. I have never read ________ and I am so ashamed?
There is no book I am ashamed not to have read. A few I wish I could read in the original language. Especially Japanese novels.

6. Which of your books would make the best movie?
Exposure has been optioned, over and over, and there has been interest in The Seal Wife. Those two strike me as more easily translated into film.

Directors have asked about rights to The Kiss ever since it was published, but I never considered selling that book. Too easy to sensationalize, to destroy the control I exerted over the subject.

7. What book or author would you recommend for the first-time reader of Russian History?

Father Grigory Rasputin

Off the top of my head? Maybe Hoskings’ Russia and the Russians. There’s so much Russian History. One could start closer to our own time, with Pipes’ Concise History of the Russian Revolution. It might be more fun to read Massie’s biographies of Romanov Rulers; he sets the context so well that it’s a form of reading history.

8. Where you able to find or read any of Marina Rasputin’s memoirs?
All of them. Dreadful. Whitewashed portraits of her father. But who could blame her?  

9. The character of Masha in Enchantments is a Russian version of Scheherazade. Which of her stories to the hemophiliac prince Aloysha is your favorite?
Perhaps the courtship of his parents—Alexandra’s cloud. And I had fun with the coronation, the chance to transform an outright disaster/tragedy into a spectacle different from the historical one. In terms of the life she was trying to eclipse, I felt the tsar’s cutting down the trees in the way that he did was one of the more successful metaphors. I felt satisfied (well, almost) with that scene.  

Rasputin's daughter is the woman with the crop.

10. Rasputin’s daughter lived an incredible life before and after the revolution. She was a cabaret dancer, a lion tamer who travelled with the Ringling Bros Circus, and even survived a bear attack in Peru. Do people live those kinds of lives anymore? Can we blame cable television…please?
I’m happy to blame television for many things, but I don’t think it can kill the imagination, or the spirit, of adventurers. Or even of discriminating viewers. The particulars might change—circuses not being what they used to be, for example—but there will always be extraordinary lives. (And there is great cable TV. A couple of my favorites: Six Feet Under, Twin Peaks—better than most movies.) [If not for Twin Peaks Liz wouldn't talk to logs....]

11. Liz or Gianna?
I have to go with Gianna because she’s not as tall. [Hath not a giantess eyes? Hath not a giantess hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a shrimpy one is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? ...And beside, the correct answer is always Liz.]

12. Perhaps we are mistaken, but is this the first time you’ve ventured into the realm of magical realism?
I think so, yes. Although I can point to antecedents in Poison.

13. Worst job you’ve ever had?
At seventeen, in a nursing home, as glorified candy-striper. Drastically depressing.

The Romanov Family

14. Do you think there’s a version of a contemporary Rasputin influencing a country’s leader today in the way that the mad monk impacted Romanov Russia?
Probably, but I don’t know who. [We nominate Gianna for this role.  She would make a great womanizing, prophetic, cult leader--fully worthy of assassination.]

15. Favorite of the “Golden Era” of Russian literature: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Pushkin, Bulgakov, or Chekhov?
I return to Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita more often than to any one book by the others, but I do love Gogol and Dostoyevsky. Tolstoy is a bit too rational for my taste—I prefer the feverish, and the playful, and the impossible. [And we love giant, talking, devil cats!]

30 Day Book Challenge: Day 26

Day 26: Favorite Non-Fiction Book



Technically, non-fiction



I hate "non-fiction" as a category.  Are we really to assume that The Oxford English Dictionary and Penis Pokey belong in the same category?  And for that matter, isn't The Feminine Mystique non-fiction too? It's stupid.  (I hope Gianna didn't pick Penis Pokey.  I haven't looked at her choice yet.  I'm safe, right?....I should be safe, but she does love to be inappropriate.  Do you all understand how difficult it is to put together this little blog?)

Gianna:

This should come as no surprise but I am going to sort of cheat. Some of these questions if answered truthfully...well, you would repeat books and what fun is that? So in an effort not to repeat books, and also in order to talk about books that maybe don’t get talked about enough in my opinion, I am going to pick a really controversial book as my favorite non fiction book. [Crap.  It's Penis Pokey, isn't it?  And not Gianna is going to give me hell.] Let me say however this book is absolutely one of my favorite books.

The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison. Oh, how this book surprised me. I was working as a receiver at a bookstore when this book came in and I read the jacket copy, and you know, I am not made of stone…adult daughter has affair with father? Sold. I am going to read that book. Congratulations, you found your audience. But nothing could really have prepared me for that book. It is completely heartbreaking and it drains you. It is one of those books you don’t forget, and not because of the subject. Harrison is such a beautiful writer (if you haven’t read anything by her please pick this up, or Seal Wife or Exposure); this book very easily could have been a disaster. It is not. It is beautiful and terrible and hopeful.

I am surprised more people have not read this memoir. Random House just published a new addition so I hope to see it in more bookstores. Gail Caldwell wrote a really great review of The Kiss, and here is a small piece from it:

Harrison had the good sense to write The Kiss with the most bare-bones approach imaginable, letting the awful force of her story dictate its lean style. Devoid of prurient detail, it is a spare, painful book that saves its most dramatic words for the day she capitulates to her father's need, when ``God's heart bursts, it breaks. For me it does.'' How do you ever come back from a moment like that?

One more thing about Kathryn Harrison…balls o' steel. She was vilified in many places for writing this book, which as you can imagine pisses me off.

Liz:

Penis Pokey.

Just kidding.

I listed a bunch of my favorite history books on the day we talked about books that turn us on, but in an effort to avoid repeats I'm going to pick another work of narrative history that's on par with those other favorites.  I don't know if this book officially is my favorite non-fiction title; I don't know that I have a favorite.  However, The River of Doubt by Candice Millard is pretty darn wonderful.

Millard tells the story of Theodore Roosevelt, former President who had lost his bid to return to the White House, and decides to engage his mid-to-late life crisis by traveling to the Amazon.  Teddy Roosevelt, jungle explorer.  TR puts together an expedition including his son Kermit and Brazil's most famous explorer of the time and they set off into the middle of the rain forest to chart the course of a previously unmapped river.  Roosevelt's hubris almost kills him, and the doomed expedition encounters piranhas, rapids, indigenous peoples, and any number of perils.  The River of Doubt rivals Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air as one of the greatest adventure books ever written, but what makes Millard's book special is that she creates such intensity and life for her story without the benefit of first hand experience.  She's a terrific storyteller and she brings to life a mostly forgotten period for one of this nation's favorite subjects.

Birthday: Back to the Future, Books, and...a Basket of Beans.





Ernie Cline and his Delorean.

So my birthday passed a couple of weeks ago, and the party person I am...I celebrated by working.  I traveled to Austin to attend a bookseller luncheon with Ernest Cline, the author of the upcoming novel Ready Player One, a book that celebrates the joyfully geeky 80's culture.  How enthralled is the author with period pop culture?  He spent his book advance on a Delorean (the Back to the Future car) and then installed a flux capacitor.  I have no 80's music nostalgia at all, but I do love me a vintage video game, and on the drive home that afternoon I recalled that my first Nintendo was a joint birthday gift the summer that we turned 11 (the joy of the twin joint gift, joint birthday cake, joint birthday party), a gift we never expected because our parents disapproved of video games.  Coincidentally, our great grandmother died that day too, but the Nintendo seemed more significant. 

Most people won't give me books for special occasions because I already have so many.  Two notable exceptions growing up were a couple of Christmases for which I received the Anne of Green Gables box set and a copy of The Hot Zone.  Both impacted me--Anne gave me a smart, outspoken "kindred spirit" to follow on adventures, and The Hot Zone...reinforced my monkey horror.  It's still the scariest book I've ever read.  Nothing says "Merry Christmas Lizzie!" like monkeys carrying Ebola into the US; I dreamed about bleeding from my eyeballs for months after reading it.

Gianna and her friends occasionally will have book exchange parties, an awesome idea.  Each person brings a copy of a book that possesses special meaning for him/her, and then the participants talk about the books, why they're special, and then exchange.  I think Gianna brought Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss.  (She might not have, but Gianna loves this book.  Nothing says "Party at Gianna's House!" like a literary memoir about an incestuous relationship.)  One of the best parts of my job involves finding readers for the advance reading copies of forthcoming novels, and occasionally I will love a book that I'm also selling so much that it feels like I'm sharing a personal treasure with a fellow book lover.  There's a little novel just published called The Upright Piano Player, a quiet, contemplative book in a perfect package that redefines the idea of summer reading.  One of my colleagues called me to ask if I'd read it back before our sales conference months ago, and through his enthusiasm it became an overall rep favorite.  It deserves a wide readership.  Check it out.

My sister and I don't exchange birthday gifts most of the time.  It just seems strange.  We do typically get together around the time of our birthday, usually for an Astros game (though I'm a book nerd and she's an aerospace engineer, we both love baseball).  We going to see the Astros lose to the Red Sox in a few days. 



And the Astros games bring me around to what Gianna gave me for my birthday.  Between innings, Goya, the Mexican food company, sponsors a shell game contest on the jumbotron involving a baseball hidden inside a can of beans and shuffled around.  It's hilarious.  Even better, though, is the prize for the lucky fan who gets to play: a gift basket of Goya products.  I think it's awesome--go to the game, win beans!  I have wanted to be the lucky contestant for years.  My pal Gianna has attended enough Astros games with me over the last few years that she knows of my gassy obsession.  And then she surprised me. 



That's every Goya product Gianna could find.
It weighs about 30 lbs.



Never mind that I don't cook; I'm going to display this prize on my dining room table for years.  The Antiques Roadshow will visit my area in 2041 and I'll haul in my gift basket and have it appraised, and they will marvel at it.  I will bequeath my Goya gift basket to a literacy foundation and they will take my vintage beans and sell them for books and create the Liz Sullivan literacy center and in the lobby will be a mural of fart-inducing products, books, and Gianna and it will be magical.  Like the musical fruit.



Give books for birthdays.  Save the ozone layer from noxious gasses and other beany perils.