Dorothy Allison: Tender to the Bone
Dorothy Allison, 2002. “I don’t believe in being safe or right,” Dorothy Allison says to a group of men and women gathered around a writing workshop table. She pushes up her sleeves and rakes her fingers through her long hair, which is streaked with gray. Her voice thickens with gravitas as the dozen or so of us, who range in age from eighteen to almost eighty, look to her for guidance. If there were a tablecloth, she would whip it out from under all our dishes. She is as subversive in her sixties as she was in her thirties, when she co-founded the Lesbian Sex Mafia. If anything, age and motherhood made her more indomitable. “Write something inappropriate, however you define the term,” she prompts. “I give you absolute license,” she says, after a pause.
As we put pens to page, I wonder how the boundaries of appropriate and inappropriate subjects have changed since Allison published Bastard Out of Carolina in 1992, a book that is still banned from many classrooms and libraries for its depiction of sexual abuse. Such “absolute license” as she offers us was not extended to her, who grew up poor and female in the 1950s, and it is not often offered to those around this table who have left behind working-class families to pursue their educations. It is why, in part, I invited this radical to our Tennessee campus.
Born in 1949, in Greenville, South Carolina, Allison was the illegitimate child of a waitress and first member of her family to graduate from high school. Not expected to go to college, much less to win the Robert Penn Warren Award for her fiction, she has a lot to say about risking contempt, humbling yourself before scholarship committees, and understanding characters whose fury is as justifiable as it is unchecked.
Allison has been recognized with the Ferro Grumley prize, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the American Library Association Prize for Lesbian and Gay Writing. Her first novel was an award-winning bestseller made into an award-winning film. Her second novel, Cavedweller, became a New York Times Notable book of the year, and was adapted for the stage. These achievements overcame incredible odds, but what baffles her most is that she did not die before receiving any of them.
A social activist deeply invested in the early feminist movement, Allison met head-on the dangers of free expression. If her courage to keep raising her voice empowers others, she is not so naïve as to imagine our right to speak will ever be equal. Nor, I realize after spending several weeks with her, would she deprive anyone of the fight, her sentences often undercutting someone else’s surety, or her own. Having written genius works of resilience, she recognizes the favor you do a person to unsettle her.
The conversation that follows took place in my sunroom. At one point, a doe crossed the backyard and Dorothy stopped talking to watch her watch us, ears pricked to any threat of danger.
—Amy Wright for Guernica
Guernica: What defines class?
It’s always an argument, because class is defined in opposition, and to some extent in denial. Especially in American society,
