Thicker Than Water - Hardcover

Harrison, Kathryn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394588894 ISBN 13: 9780394588896

Publisher: Random House, 1991

Synopsis

Now available from Random House Trade Paperbacks—the extraordinary first novel by the bestselling author of The Kiss

This first novel from Kathryn Harrison is a story of obsession, lust, and despair, detailing the life of the narrator, Isabel, and her troubled family. Readers witness a daughter’s passionate struggle to free herself from her mother’s tyranny.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this title

About the Author:

KATHRYN HARRISON has written the novels Exposure, Poison, The Binding Chair, The Seal Wife, and Envy. Her autobiographical works include The Kiss, Seeking Rapture, and The Mother Knot. She lives in New York with her husband, the novelist Colin Harrison, and their three children.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly:

A story of obsession, selfishness, lust and despair, Harrison's accomplished first novel deals with a dysfunctional family and the enduring psychic damage inflicted on a child. The narrator, Isabel, tells of growing up in L.A., the product of a brief teenage union between a vain, paranoid, destructive girl from an eccentric, wealthy, Jewish family, and a warped, brutal youth with a "heritage of Catholic poverty." Emotionally abandoned by both parents (she is brought up by grandparents; her mother lives nearby but withholds intimacy; she doesn't see her father until her adolescence), Isabel accepts perverse ways of earning their favor. As a child, she is sexually abused by her mother; later, her father will repeatedly rape her. Equating pain with endearment, and sexual submissiveness and degradation with sanctification, Isabel pleads for a declaration of love from her mother as the latter dies of cancer, but is denied even that succor. Harrison relates this story in hypnotically intense prose, somewhat broadening the claustrophobic viewpoint of her protagonist by evoking what in outward respects is a typical California childhood in the 1960s. Impressively in control of her material, she will be heralded as a promising new writer. BOMC and QPB alternates.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0394588894
• ISBN 13: 9780394588896
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 271