Kathryn Harrison

For every J.D. Salinger hiding out at the end of a very long driveway and revealing nothing to no one, there is a Kathryn Harrison, sharing everything—perhaps too much of everything—in a memoir. Notwithstanding her growing collection of graceful, compelling novels, Harrison will always be the woman who wrote a memoir (The Kiss) about having sex with her father. In other books, she’s generously shared her experiences with shoplifting, eating disorders, and exhuming her mother’s body to cremate her and scatter the ashes, thereby dispelling bad mother/daughter juju. Envy, however, is fiction. After losing his son in a boating accident, grief consumes a New York psychoanalyst, leading him to become obsessed with patients and with a woman from his past. Emotionally searing and darkly erotic, Envy allows Harrison to work out a few taboo ideas, while withholding a bit of herself—for her next memoir, perhaps.