“As you see, it’s decorated early Addams Family,” Kathryn Harrison says as she leads us through three floors of her Brooklyn brownstone. Standing beneath an ornate chandelier, she points out the Madonna statue that she carried home from Mexico. Over in the corner, a stuffed Bobcat stands atop a cabinet, his face frozen in a silent snarl. The bobcat recently lost his ears, which Kathryn says is “the final weird touch in this household.”
The stairs creak as we climb. Throughout the house, cats in various stages of repose lift their heads and stare. Kathryn ends the tour in her study. The room is bright and cozy. Her floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are decorated with prized curios.
“All that’s important is in this room,” she says. She picks up a paperweight from her mother’s desk, a plaster impression of her best friend’s teeth.
In her Stacked Up episode, Kathryn discusses her ideas about truth vs. the facts when writing non-fiction. In the past, she hasn’t shied away from weighty subjects such as murder (While They Slept) and incest (The Kiss). But in talking about truth as a direction rather than a destination, she suggests that telling a story doesn’t mean simply reciting facts. She’s more interested in the subjective truth of her characters. She says, “I think that everybody’s truth is different, and also that one’s own truth changes over time.”
Her point is best illustrated by the portrait that hangs above her desk. The drawing was sketched by her daughter and has a haunting, Dorian Gray quality. “I just thought she saw through the surface of me, into the me-me,” Kathryn says. “You know how you look at pictures and you don’t recognize yourself? I looked at that and I thought, ‘Yes, that’s me.’”
In which the author explains how books about real life are better than fiction.
First editions from her grandmother feature prominently in Jennifer Gilmore’s library.
