True Crimes: A Family Album

True Crimes: A Family Album

From acclaimed literary talent and New York Times bestselling author Kathryn Harrison comes a collection of provocative and illuminating essays. In True Crimes, conventional ideas of love, loss, forgiveness, and memory are transformedâ€”complicated, upended, and reimagined by one of the foremost memoirists of our time.

In essays written over the course of more than a decade, Kathryn Harrison has created a beautifully detailed and rigorously honest family album. With tenderness and wisdom, compassion and humor, Harrison writes about the things we donâ€™t always discuss, casting light on what lurks beneath the surface of everyday life, sifting through the artifacts of memory to find what haunts and endures.

Both serious and surprising, these essays capture the moments and impulses that shape a family. In â€œKeeping Vigil,â€ Harrison reflects on the loss of her beloved father-in-law, and how he managed to repair something her own father had broken. In â€œHoliday Lies,â€ she describes the uneasy but necessary task of lying to her children about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, withholding certain truths to protect their innocence. In â€œMini-Me,â€ she writes about how the birth of her youngest daughterâ€”who used to pry open a sleeping Harrisonâ€™s eyesâ€”finally allowed her to understand her own motherâ€™s complicated attitudes about parenting. And in â€œTrue Crime,â€ Harrison writes for the first time in the almost two decades since the publication of The Kiss about her affair with her father, and how she has reckoned with the girl she once was.

With gorgeous prose and unflinching self-examination, True Crimes is a powerful and unforgettable literary tour de force.

Praise for True Crimes

â€œI found myself mesmerized by Harrisonâ€™s nervy confessions: odd and idiosyncratic, as original as any personal disclosures Iâ€™ve read and yet not obviously calculated for inflammatory effect. . . . Here, as in all of Harrisonâ€™s nonfiction, thereâ€™s a magnetic and almost mystical weirdness roiling beneath a seemingly placid Âsurface.â€â€”The New York Times Book Review

â€œItâ€™s hard to think of other memoirists who match not just Harrisonâ€™s unsparing clarity of vision, but her empathy for both her loved ones and her tormentors. . . . Harrison is doubly gifted: She is able both to see her world with painful clarity, and to share this clarity with us.â€â€”New Republic

â€œRevelatory in its honesty about everything from her scorching childhood to the push and pull of marriage.â€â€”More

â€œA beautifully written and wonderful book about almost everything that means anything in life: love, family, loss and betrayal, death, joy. It is heartbreaking, funny, direct, elliptical, and somehow pulls a provocative healing thread of meaning from generation to generation, from husband to wife, and from life to death to life again.â€â€”Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D.

â€œIn these essays, Harrison approaches her own past as a mysteryâ€”at once elusive and unshakableâ€”and excavates its nuances with tender rigor. Her memories emerge less like artifacts and more like luminous veins of quicksilver, constantly diverging and reconnecting.â€â€”Leslie Jamison

â€œWith its sharp, haunting portraits, this gorgeous and unsettling book is like the most honest family album ever. Harrison is not afraid to plumb the darkness of family life, to look at the rage, panic, and resentments entangled with love: Her reminiscences are vivid and unforgettable.â€â€”Katie Roiphe

From the Hardcover edition.
Country USA
Manufacturer Random House
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2016-04-05
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Random House
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2016-04-05
Format	Kindle eBook

True Crimes: A Family Album

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