Seeking Rapture: Scenes from a Woman's Life

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.

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.