[In the following excerpt, Halpern compares specific passages from Thicker Than Water and The Kiss, noting the similarities in the subject material.]

The response to Kathryn Harrison's memoir, The Kiss … illustrates how one's expectation defines one's reception—how what a book is called determines how the reader reads it. The Kiss, as everyone knows by now, is about Harrison's four-year affair with her father, a pastor, which began when the author was twenty. The book is written in a cool, hypnotic monotone, as if the writer were unattached to the events she records (and therefore not culpable). “We spend our nights in motels not so much sordid as depressing. Sordid has a style and swagger these places lack, rooms with curtains cut from the same orange fabric as the bedspread, ceilings of plaster textured like cottage cheese,” she writes. And, in the book's most sexually explicit passage:

… He lifts the hem of my nightgown. He doesn't speak, and neither do I. Nor do I make any attempt to stay his hands. Beneath the nightgown I am wearing no underpants, and he opens my legs and puts his tongue between them. … What he does feels neither good nor bad.

The writing is so painstakingly flat and uninflected, so reported, that it seems to detach the writer from her own willfulness. It is, deliberately, amoral.

When The Kiss came out this spring, critics complained that it was both meretricious and poorly written, and in a rare moment of collective outrage castigated both author and publisher for the opportunism in bringing the book to market. Other critics, citing a number of recent books by male authors revealing their defiance of sexual taboos that did not meet such opprobrium, accused these critics of sexism, among other sins. Meanwhile, the author's husband—perhaps opportunistically, perhaps not—took to the pages of Vogue to defend his wife. His main argument: The Kiss was a book Kathryn Harrison said she had to write, and who was he to deny her? What is interesting about this justification is that it suggests a compulsion: not only could Colin Harrison not stop his wife, she could not stop herself.

And the manifestation of a compulsion may be exactly what The Kiss is, for it is not the first book she's written that chronicles the affair and other family pathologies. Harrison's first novel, Thicker Than Water, tread that fertile ground six years ago. But writing about it once, apparently, was not enough. Harrison came back to the affair, though not to portray it differently. Indeed, the two books share a lot: images, conversations, paragraphs. (One critic, in fact, accused Ms. Harrison of “self-plagiarism.”) What is different, though, is that one book is a novel, the other a memoir. One is supposed to be fiction, the other fact.

From the novel, Thicker Than Water:

When I was fifteen, my mother made me get my first diaphragm. … My mother was in the examining room when the doctor broke my hymen so he could fit me properly for the device. He used a series of graduated green plastic phalli. First a tiny little boy sized one, then a larger and larger one, until he withdrew one whose shaft had been discolored by a smear of blood. My mother leaned against the wall, watching.

From the memoir, The Kiss:

He uses a series of graduated green plastic penises. … One after another he inserts them, starting with the smallest—no bigger than his little finger—until the second to last one comes out smeared with blood. This doctor deflowers me in front of my mother.

From the novel, Thicker Than Water:

In line at the salad bar he pulled my plate out of my hand and let it fall to the floor and shatter, cherry tomatoes rolling between my feet. When he thus had the attention of all the diners he said loudly, “You're a slut, just like your mother.” One entire family turned around in their seats and looked to see who I was.

From the memoir, The Kiss:

My father leans across the table. His face is the same shape but much larger than mine, seemingly larger than other men's. At close range, it seems planetary. “You,” he says, too loudly for a restaurant, “are a slut just like your mother.” Everyone who hears turns to see who the big man is talking to with such righteous conviction.

When it was published, Thicker Than Water received many favorable reviews. The writer, who was thirty years old, was praised for her use of language, which was at once direct and distilled, and for her command of the material. But one review in particular, by Scott Spencer, writing in The New York Times Book Review, is especially prescient: “The first two words of Thicker Than Water are ‘In truth,’ and as the novel plunges into a woman's painfully frank and unsparing revelations about her miserable childhood, and her struggle to awaken from its dank, hypnotic spell, this reader felt, at times, that he was reading a harrowing, fully imagined work of nonfiction.” And so, it turned out, he was.

What is interesting about this comment in retrospect is that neither Mr. Spencer nor any of the other reviewers who suspected that Thicker Than Water detailed real events chastised Ms. Harrison for writing about the affair. No one argued that it was exploitative or potentially damaging to her children or that her rendering was meretricious. No one suggested that she should not have written it or, at least, if she had to write it, that she should not have published it. No one said anything of the sort because the story was told behind the veil of fiction. As long as there was the slightest possibility that the story was not true, veracity could be the object of speculation, not the subject of criticism. As long as the story was just a story, no one needed to consider its impact on the family or the author's motive in publishing the book. As fiction, both the writer, and the reader, were protected.

Call it something else, though—nonfiction, true crime, autobiography, or the murkier “memoir”—and the reader cracks the binding with certain (and different) assumptions. Knowing that the events are really “real” raises questions of culpability, intent, and motivation. Not only is the writing—the telling of the story—under scrutiny, the writer's life is, too. The outrage people have expressed about Ms. Harrison “outing” herself has as much, and maybe more, to do with her real-life behavior vis-à-vis her father (and mother) as they do with the content or style of her book. Calling the book a memoir afforded them this liberty: the life as well as the work are fair game. One suspects that Ms. Harrison knew this and that this, in fact, was one of the reasons she chose to tell the story again, in this form. In the vitriolic controversy that occurred after The Kiss came out, greed, notoriety, and revenge were each suggested to be the author's motivation for writing and then publishing the book. If so, it would not be the first time a book was drawn from any of these wells. But more likely, The Kiss first came from a deeper place—the need to lay bare—that only a book that has no pretense can get at.

Still, in a curious way, the impulse works to Ms. Harrison's disadvantage. The Kiss is a stronger book than its predecessor precisely because it gets at its subject more directly. Forget subplot, forget ancillary action—this book has one subject, one narrative line, and it clings to it almost desperately. There is no relief from the story, no diversions, no humor, nothing to keep the reader from getting sucked into Ms. Harrison's reality. And that is the problem. It is another seduction—this one of the reader. In the beginning this feels all right—it is, in fact, what good books do—but some time later the author's confession begins to seem manipulative. The somnolent, distant voice through which she makes that confession, and which at first contributes to its authenticity by suggesting how truly damaged Ms. Harrison has been by the affair, is so self-consciously “written” as to be suspect. In another context its mesmerizing quality would be an achievement. In this one though it cannot help but raise questions of trust. And trust is essential to the enterprise of nonfiction, even to memoir.