Kathryn Harrison

From the bestselling author of The Kiss comes a riveting account of true crime --the murder of a family in a small Midwestern town-- and the gripping exploration of its haunting aftermath. The Gilley family murders ended a lifetime of physical and mental abuse suffered by Billy and Jody at the hands of their parents. And it required each of the two survivors-- one a convicted murderer, the other suddenly an orphan--to create a new identity, a new...

In essays written over the course of more than a decade, Harrison has created a beautifully detailed and rigorously honest family album. She writes for the first time in almost two decades about her affair with her father, and how she has reckoned with the girl she once was. Harrison writes about the birth of her youngest daughter, and how she finally came to understand her own mother's attitudes toward parenting. And she reflects on the loss of her...