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courtvallee's review against another edition
3.0
This was assigned reading for my visual anthropology class freshman year of college. It was better than I expected, because I wasn't sold on the class. The idea of looking and seeing through observing photographs and being photographed made this a somewhat worthwhile read, although it's hardly a book I'd want to read again.
caitlinxmartin's review against another edition
3.0
There was a kind of woman who was very fashionable throughout the nineties - intellectual, talented, beautiful, damaged in some vague and unspoken way. These women made a performance of their damage and of their self-destruction and took us all along for the ride. Kathryn Harrison, with her memoir of incest with her father The Kiss was certainly one of them. I think also of Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation) and to a certain extent Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness), although I honestly think Jamison is ultimately more scholarly and less transgressive than the other two (and ultimately more successful). Ann Rogers, the main character in [b:Exposure: A Novel|208204|Exposure A Novel|Kathryn Harrison|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172692707s/208204.jpg|1068573] is definitely one of them.
Harrison's prose is razor-sharp and her characterizations are clear and unmuddied, but there's something dishonest at the heart of this novel and I can't quite put my finger on what it is. Perhaps it is the way that sickness and misery are romanticized through this character. Perhaps it is the cold and enabling nature of the people around her. Maybe it's the refusal to truly examine the relationship between father and daughter that is at the center of all of this misery.
Does Harrison capture what it feels like to begin spinning out of control in this way? Yes and no. Yes, in that Ann is certainly spinning out of control and no, in that her wealth privilege ultimately cushion her in a way that takes the reader and all of the characters in the novel out of the story. Depression and suicidal self-destruction are neither glamorous nor pretty - Harrison spends too much time on and just past the edge of pretty to make this book truly work.
Harrison's prose is razor-sharp and her characterizations are clear and unmuddied, but there's something dishonest at the heart of this novel and I can't quite put my finger on what it is. Perhaps it is the way that sickness and misery are romanticized through this character. Perhaps it is the cold and enabling nature of the people around her. Maybe it's the refusal to truly examine the relationship between father and daughter that is at the center of all of this misery.
Does Harrison capture what it feels like to begin spinning out of control in this way? Yes and no. Yes, in that Ann is certainly spinning out of control and no, in that her wealth privilege ultimately cushion her in a way that takes the reader and all of the characters in the novel out of the story. Depression and suicidal self-destruction are neither glamorous nor pretty - Harrison spends too much time on and just past the edge of pretty to make this book truly work.
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