The former advises Harrison to keep a bank account separate from her husband’s in case she wants to “clear out in a hurry” the latter fritters away money intended for health insurance premiums - and much of Harrison’s own trust fund - on designer shoes and clothing. (She brought the pug home and, when her husband objected to a lap dog, exchanged her for the Labrador.) In “The Couch Account” she describes with uncommon specificity the careful finances of the eccentric, trust-funded, iron-fisted grandmother who raised her, and the profligacy of the coddled young mother who all but abandoned her. She writes about picking up a tiny pug puppy (“about the size of a big baked potato”) at a pet store after leaving a doctor’s office where she’d just swallowed radioactive iodine to kill her ailing thyroid and received an extensive list of protocols advising her to launder her linens daily and avoid preparing food for others. In the opening essay, “A Tale of Two Dogs,” she confesses to accidentally-on-purpose “losing” Max, her children’s black Labrador - an overbred, neurotic dog who “howls long, shatteringly loud, Baskerville-caliber howls” and barks “psychotically,” arousing the neighbors’ ire. For Harrison, whose interior life is like a rich vein she can tap at will, there seems to be no moment, no feeling, too private, peculiar or uncomfortable to render in words. With startling candor and almost clinical attention to detail, she writes about the sort of behaviors, thoughts and experiences most of us don’t care to recall, let alone lay bare and examine for an audience. In spite of her proper upbringing, Harrison has no qualms about poking around in the back alleys of the mind, places that polite society prefers to avoid. “I’d been taught never to talk about money, because, like talking about sex and politics, it was vulgar like religion, it was private,” Harrison declares in “True Crimes: A Family Album,” her latest collection of essays written for various magazines and anthologies over the course of a decade.
You might assume that an author who has written about having a consensual sexual affair with her father, as Kathryn Harrison did in her controversial 1997 memoir “The Kiss” one who has also detailed her struggles with anorexia and self-mortification (along with her daughter’s all-consuming bout with head lice), as Harrison did in her 2003 essay collection “Seeking Rapture: Scenes From a Woman’s Life” and one who has told of exhuming her mother’s remains to have them cremated 17 years after her death, as Harrison did in her 2004 memoir “The Mother Knot,” would be emptied of surprising personal revelations. TRUE CRIMES A Family Album By Kathryn Harrison 222 pp.