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Two young writers meet at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and fall in love. He is from Haverford, and she is from Stanford, and they are both very talented. They graduate and move to New York City and take jobs in publishing-he at Harper's Magazine, she at Viking. But they are writers, and they continue to write. By the time they are in their early forties, he has published five novels, all while working full-time as a salaried employee, and is now a Vice President and Senior Editor at Scribner; she has written six novels, two books of essays, a biography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and a travel book. This improbable narrative does not sound at all like a novel by either Kathryn or Colin Harrison, but it is a loose summary of their life story thus far.
Kathryn Harrison's novels are: Thicker Than Water, Exposure, Poison, The Binding Chair, The Seal Wife, and Envy. She has also written a bestselling memoir, The Kiss. Her personal essays have appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere, and they are collected in seeking Rapture and The Mother Knot. Colin Harrison is the author of five novels: Break and Enter, Bodies Electric, Manhattan Nocturne, Afterburn, and The Havana Room.
I met the Harrisons for a late brunch-fruit, bagels, and hot coffee-on a Sunday in their four-story brownstone in Brooklyn, where they live with their three children.
Joe David Bellamy: I ran across this statement over the weekend. You probably can't guess who said it: "A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling. We storytellers are all ancient mariners and none of us is justified in stopping wedding guests unless he has something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experiences of every average man and woman." I think that admonition applies to your novel, Afterburn, Colin, and to all your work, and I believe you've taken that advice seriously.
Colin Harrison: Well, we're busy people, all of us, and as writers, the promise is that if you, the reader, take some time out to read my book that it'll be worthwhile and the time will be well spent, and I like to think that a writer makes a big bet to his readers early on in...