When Kathryn Harrison published The Kiss in 1997, many reviewers criticized the book for attracting readers more for its shocking subject matter—it detailed a four-year-long incestuous relationship Harrison had with her biological father—than for its literary merits. (One wonders if this could ever have not been the case.) “This is obviously an awful story in life,” Mim Udovitch wrote in New York Magazine, “but in art, even gothic and dreadful pain is only as interesting as what the artist brings to it. Harrison brings a mannered, accomplished technique… What she fails to bring is any sense of rigorous engagement with her material.”

Whether or not this was true of The Kiss is debatable. The book inspired so much preemptive pearl-clutching that it quickly became all but impossible for readers and reviewers alike to take stock of its merits. The criticism some reviewers leveled at it is also familiar to anyone who reads similar denunciations of today’s confessional writers. “Our once-hidden shames have become publicity hounds,” James Wolcott lamented in his review. “Some memoir-writers are legitimately trying to clarify for themselves and the reader the experience of a cruel upbringing or an unfortunate twist of fate; others are simply peddling their stories for fame.” According to Wolcott, Harrison fell into the latter camp. The Kiss, in his estimation, was “trash with a capital ‘T.’”

More recently, personal essayist Leslie Jamison exploded knee-jerk reactions like Wolcott’s in her “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” writing that “people say cutters are just doing it for the attention, but what’s that ‘just’ about? A cry for attention is positioned as a crime, as if attention were inherently a selfish thing to want.” This was the response that greeted The Kiss and continues to greet works by similar writers: not just memoirists Rachel Cusk, Daphne Merkin, and Katie Roiphe, but writers like Melissa Broder, Emily Gould, and Audrey Wollen, who began their careers online and found enormous audiences there. The medium has changed, but the critical response hasn’t. If a female writer asks for attention, her detractors will often find a way to claim she writes for no other reason.

It’s easy to see how the title of Harrison’s new book, True Crimes, may reflect the “crime” of asking for attention that Jamison describes. A collection of essays written over the course of the last decade, the book deals with cancer, dementia, debt, incest, motherhood, and murder—which is to say that it is also about family life. The book’s subtitle is “A Family Album,” and reading it is very much like flipping through the photo album of a family you have never met. The faces of strangers grow familiar, until you are sensitive to a touch, a glance, a weary smile, and all that it may mean. The essays in True Crimes appear out of chronological order, and the experience of reading the book forces us to realize that some stories are too complicated to tell simply—that claiming to know where and when to start would, in itself, be a lie. That this approach holds true for a family narrative is hardly surprising. What is surprising is how much Harrison can show us through the random, revelatory moments her essays cull.

TRUE CRIMES: A FAMILY ALBUM by Kathryn Harrison Random House, 240 pp., $28.00

True Crimes opens with “A Tale of Two Dogs,” an essay that takes place nowhere near the beginning of the family narrative we will come to know, but instead during a vacation Harrison takes with her husband and children. Their trip to Italy was, Harrison writes, “a perfect holiday, until I ruined it abruptly one night in the middle of dinner.” Harrison “ruins” the vacation with a mysterious illness that turns out to be a life-threatening bout of hyperthyroidism, and the rest of the essay is nauseous with guilt. Harrison, first irradiated with the pills she takes to poison her overactive thyroid, and then weakened by the treatment’s aftermath, finds herself driven mad by the family’s new Lab puppy. He barks and howls and scratches the children and, Harrison writes, “disprove[s] a conceit I’ve long cherished about animals and myself: that I can love any animal indiscriminately, without reservation.” But she can’t love Max, and we know that by the end of the essay that this lack of love, treated as a twin infirmity, will prove devastating to someone.