Kathryn Harrison
Kathryn Harrison
Kathryn Harrisonis an American author...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAutobiographer
Date of Birth20 March 1961
CountryUnited States of America
allow book break essays good personal reviews work
Shorter work - personal essays and book reviews - allow me to take a break from working on a book, which is good for the book and for its author.
feels people reveal whether
Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, I've never had the sense I was 'making up' a character. It feels more like watching people reveal themselves, ever more deeply, more intimately.
angels arc counsel deliver france god herself joan proclaimed receiving sent three time
By the time Joan of Arc was 16 and had proclaimed herself the virgin warrior sent by God to deliver France from her enemies, the English, she had been receiving the counsel of angels for three years.
family royal spectator
Rasputin's daughter understands the revolution. She would have been an outsider, a spectator in the royal family and to the revolution.
I'm not an investigative journalist; I don't track crime or police blotters.
characters evolve love people sorry struggled understand
I'm always sorry to finish a book, to let go of characters I love, people I've struggled to understand for years, people who evolve before me.
compelling embrace figure hard joan last whose
I'll never have so compelling a figure within my embrace as Joan of Arc; there will never be a book whose last chapter is so very hard to get right.
along brooklyn floor shelves square study taken top work
I work in a small study on the top floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn - it's about 75 square feet, 11 taken up by book shelves along one wall.
discovered enjoy nose true
I used to enjoy reading true crime, but I've discovered that I don't have the journalism nose for blood.
work
I can't work out much about myself or what I see in the world around me unless I do it through writing.
How much of a book review is about the reviewer? Sometimes it's mostly about the reviewer!
For years, the place I really lived - the world I watched, the one I thought and wrote about - was 15th-century France.
life nonfiction offers
Because the kind of nonfiction I write has a plot, the events and transactions that make up a life, nonfiction offers me a break from plotting.
bad drew eccentric family quite sort terms
I think in terms of the parents that I had, I sort of drew a bad hand, or bad karma; who knows? And I did have a family that was complicated, with some quite eccentric members. So there was a lot of grist there.