Seeking Rapture: Scenes from a Woman's Life - Hardcover

Harrison, Kathryn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 037550558X ISBN 13: 9780375505584

Publisher: Random House, 2003

Synopsis

In this exquisite book of personal reflections on a woman’s life as child, wife, and mother, Kathryn Harrison, “a writer of extraordinary gifts” (Tobias Wolff), re-creates episodes in her life, exploring how experiences of childhood recur in memory, to be transformed and sometimes healed in the lives we lead as adults. At the heart of Seeking Rapture is the notion that a woman’s life is a continuous process of transformation, an ongoing overcoming and re-creating of self.

Standing in her children’s bedroom, Harrison asks, “How did it happen that I got from there to here?” The bestselling author of The Kiss and The Seal Wife writes with honesty and grace of how her early longing for the mother who abandoned her led to a pattern of self-destructive behavior, from shoplifting to bulimia, and to yearning for ways to transcend and even erase her physical self, to become the perfect child her mother could love. As a woman, she writes of time, the relentless passage experienced by adults, in contrast to the languors of childhood, and she recalls with vividness and humor her grandmother’s attempts in her eighties to cheat on a driving test. And as a daughter, she writes of caring for her ailing mother, hoping for closure that does not come, but which she creates on her own terms.

“This is a writer at the top of her form, entirely the master of her material,” said Mary Gordon about The Kiss, and the same can be said about Seeking Rapture, a book that is by turns startling, moving, insightful, and always resonant and true.

About this title

About the Author

Kathryn Harrison is the author of the novels The Seal Wife, The Binding Chair, Poison, Exposure, and Thicker Than Water. She has also written a memoir, The Kiss. Her personal essays, including some from the collection Seeking Rapture, have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s magazine, and other publications. She lives in New York with her husband, the novelist Colin Harrison, and their children. She can be reached at thebindingchair@yahoo.com.

From the Back Cover

Advance praise for Seeking Rapture

“The prose sings....Harrison [is] at her thoughtful, provocative best, mindful of the flaws and desires within everyone.” —Publishers Weekly

“Poignant glimpses into the life of a survivor.” —Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Kathryn Harrison

“Mesmerizing...harrowing in its emotional intensity, haunting in its evocation of a distant time and place.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, about The Seal Wife

“Lyrical passages...reads like profound poetry...the most enterprising and successful portrait of a man in heat by a female writer since Joyce Carol Oates’ tumultuously orgasmic What I Lived For.” —Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune, about The Seal Wife

“Impossible to put down...Kathryn Harrison is an extremely gifted writer, poetic, passionate, and elegant.” —San Francisco Chronicle, about Exposure

“Intelligent and impassioned...superbly written.” —The New York Times Book Review, about Poison

“A boldly distinctive voice...both lyrical and depth-plumbing, a voice charged with intensity and informed by psychological truths...remarkable.” —Newsday, about Thicker Than Water

“Like all good literature, The Kiss illuminates something that we knew already, while also teaching us things we had not even suspected.”—Los Angeles Times, about The Kiss

From the Inside Flap

isite book of personal reflections on a woman s life as child, wife, and mother, Kathryn Harrison, a writer of extraordinary gifts (Tobias Wolff), re-creates episodes in her life, exploring how experiences of childhood recur in memory, to be transformed and sometimes healed in the lives we lead as adults. At the heart of Seeking Rapture is the notion that a woman s life is a continuous process of transformation, an ongoing overcoming and re-creating of self.

Standing in her children s bedroom, Harrison asks, How did it happen that I got from there to here? The bestselling author of The Kiss and The Seal Wife writes with honesty and grace of how her early longing for the mother who abandoned her led to a pattern of self-destructive behavior, from shoplifting to bulimia, and to yearning for ways to transcend and even erase her physical self, to become the

Reviews

Harrison's affinity for vivisecting the soft underbelly of social mores-displayed in The Kiss, The Binding Chair, etc.-is vividly apparent in this series of autobiographical essays. Detailing aspects of a privileged girlhood lived with eccentric maternal grandparents while yearning to be with her beautiful but promiscuous mother (Harrison's parents married at 18 because Harrison's mother was pregnant; her father, the subject of The Kiss, vanished soon after), Harrison reveals bouts with eating disorders as well as an attraction to religious fervor (the rapture of the title). Raised concurrently with Christian Science and Catholicism, Harrison is fascinated by the complications wrought on the spirit by the body. She records bodily functions-e.g., vomiting, lice picking, childbirth-as avidly as she recounts the grisly mortifications of the flesh inflicted upon the saints. (In describing her mother's early death from breast cancer and her reaction to it, she illuminates the tale of St. Catherine of Siena's drinking of the cancerous pus of an enemy.) At times the prose sings, at others it merely plunks. Many of these essays are more self-revelatory than self-exploratory. The most evocative piece, the title essay, shows Harrison at her thoughtful, provocative best, mindful of the flaws and desires within everyone, while the essay on nitpicking for lice depicts an almost callous disregard for racial and class differences.
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Diabolically compelling, Harrison holds readers' attention even when they find her fascination with obsession and pain more morbid than illuminating. In her fiction, which includes The Seal Wife [BKL Ap 1 02], her taste for dark emotional extremes is alluringly venturesome, but in The Kiss (1997), her notorious memoir about her affair with her father, and now in her first essay collection, it can be transgressive. Harrison is daringly confessional and ravishingly poetic in her re-creation of her stressful California childhood, during which she did not know her father and slavishly worshiped her young, glamorous, ice-queen mother while her maternal grandparents raised her with a bewildering mix of quaint strictness and unintentional laissez-faire. No reader could ask for a more intriguing figure than Harrison's grandmother, who was born Jewish and raised in Shanghai, and the evolution of their complex love plays in plangent counterpoint to Harrison's tragic failure to win her mother's affection. Harrison's family portraits are vivid, involving, and resonant, as is her frank chronicling of her unhealthy beguilement with the martyrdom of women saints and her corresponding anorexia. Unfortunately, Harrison veers from the courageously cathartic to the dismayingly aberrant in excessive and creepy broodings over ticks, head lice, and cat births, oddities that detract from her otherwise lancing inquiry into longing and loss, fetishistic mourning and brute survival, and, finally, the miracle of munificent love. Donna Seaman
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Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 037550558X
• ISBN 13: 9780375505584
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208