Kathryn Harrison
Kathryn Harrison
Kathryn Harrisonis an American author...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAutobiographer
Date of Birth20 March 1961
CountryUnited States of America
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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.
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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.
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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.
work
I can't work out much about myself or what I see in the world around me unless I do it through writing.
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.
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I like vampires, tuberculosis, anything to do with blood. Then I read a biography of Rasputin and found out he'd had this daughter who had become a famous lion tamer and been billed as the daughter of the mad monk who was able to hypnotize animals with her eyes. It gave me a vision.
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Joan of Arc was born 600 years ago. Six centuries is a long time to continue to mark the birth of a girl who, according to her family and friends, knew little more than spinning and watching over her father's flocks.
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I admire writers who succeed at what I consider the first demand of art: that the artist vivisect himself without pity, without hesitation, determined to reveal whatever he might find.
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I remember seeing my father only twice as a child for brief visits. As I grew up, I invented a father who was larger than life - stronger, smarter, more handsome, and even holier than other men.
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In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction - in which I'll include memoir, biography, and true crime - is that one relieves the other.
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.
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The least likely of military leaders, Joan of Arc changed the course of the Hundred Years' War and of history.
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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.