Six years ago, Kathryn Harrison wrote a startling confessional memoir revealing her incestuous relationship with her father while she was a college student. She entered into this disturbing taboo after having been abandoned by both parents and raised by her grandparents. The confused situation led to bouts of anguish, anorexia and bulimia, and ultimately an affair that would revolt most readers.

Enter The Mother Knot, another memoir. Here, Harrison grapples with personal issues involving her absentee mother. Her mom, who was an unsettled teenager when Kathryn was born, died of metastatic breast cancer some 17 years ago. Nevertheless, this deceased woman, who didn't want to be there for her child, continues the squeeze on this author's heart and soul.

"I was the girl who loved and hated her mother in equal measure," she explains, "whose longing was obvious and whose rage had always been concealed, even - especially - from herself."

At 41, Harrison is a "loving and responsible mother" of three. She saves one bottle of breast milk in her freezer, though her three-year-old daughter hasn't nursed for nearly a year. "I saved (it) for myself - a benign little keepsake, or so I thought at the time, unable to imagine that the apparently sentimental souvenir would be revealed as a dark, even perverse, fetish."

She thinks all is well until a traumatic emergency involving her son revives haunting thoughts of her mother and threatens to break the thin thread holding her sanity in place. Harrison unexpectedly becomes distraught and her anorexia creeps back into the picture. She returns to her therapist in search of a way to keep from losing her sanity and the stability of her family.

Light reading? No.

Yet the reader is compelled to continue turning pages of this brutally honest first-person narrative as Harrison seeks avenues to purge all destructive thoughts of her emotionally bankrupt mother. Ultimately, she devises a ritualistic way to say goodbye that would be the stuff of a great novel if it weren't the absolute truth.

Sparely written, The Mother Knot is just 82 pages long. It probably would be half that length if not for the large print and double spacing on each page. The book is as personal as a diary, and readers sometimes may feel as if they're intruding.

While the ending bodes well for the author, the book has an unsatisfying finish. Perhaps that's because one isn't really sure what other demons lurk in this complicated woman's head that may yet arise in a memoir down the road.

Verna Noel Jones is a freelance writer living in Aurora.