Kathryn Harrison calls it being "totally naked in front of strangers." Most people know it as "memoir," and Harrison has become one of its leading practitioners.

Born March 20, 1961 in Los Angeles, Harrison earned fine art degrees from Stanford University and the University of Iowa, where she found herself being pulled into writing. She met her husband, novelist and editor Colin Harrison, at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1985.

Harrison began her writing career (and gaind a following) with a trio of rather dark novels: Thicker Than Water, Exposure, and Poison. It turned out that she was actually just following the time-honored novelist's credo "Write about what you know," because these were followed by two memoirs that made clear where the plots of the novels had come from.

First, there was The Kiss: A Memoir, which Harrison published in 1997 and which described the incestuous relationship she had with her father during her early 20s. That was followed by The Mother Knot, in which she turned her attention to her other parent (Harrison was actually raised by her maternal grandparents).

Harrison continued to dip from the well of family in two later novels, The Binding Chair (set in Shanghai) and The Seal Wife (set in Alaska around World War I.

"A book itself," she wrote on her Website, " when you think about it, is a strange thing. It’s a silent interaction– I mean, there’s a lot of words in it but they’re not spoken aloud – a silent interaction between me and somebody I don’t know, and on the page I can say anything, it gives me the opportunity to be completely stripped bare. In fiction and in non-fiction, I’m somebody who really wants to vivisect myself, to really just cut it open and to show. There is something n me that I suppose is exhibitionistic, but there’s also that insistence on being known, and being understood for who I am, and that’s sometimes more important than people’s approval, or affection."

In another interview, with Slice magazine, she said: "(It's) like taking your clothes off and standing in harsh lighting in front of a really accurate mirror. You’re not going to see what you want to see. Memoir is to report on this, to maintain a clinical distance from yourself. We’re taught to be modest, so underselling yourself is also a problem."

Most recently, Harrison tried her hand a true crime, producing "While They Slept," about the murder of an Oregon family by their son. She is also a frequent contributor to magazines like Vogue, the New Yorker and Salon, and teaches memoir writing at Hunter College in New York.

She and her husband have three children. It is not yet known if they plan to write memoirs of their own.