Conversations with Dorothy Allison

By Mae Miller Claxton

Since the publication of her groundbreaking novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison (b. 1949) has been known—along with Larry Brown and Lee Smith—as a purveyor of the working-class, contemporary South. Allison has frequently used her position, through passionate lectures and enthusiastic interviews, to give voice to issues dear to her: poverty, working-class life, domestic violence, feminism and women’s relationships, the contemporary South, and gay/lesbian life. Often called a “writer-rock star” and a “cult icon,” Allison is a true performer of the written word.

At the same time, Allison also takes the craft of writing very seriously. In this collection, spanning almost two decades, Allison the performer and Allison the careful craftsperson both emerge, creating a portrait of a complex woman.

In the absence of a biography of Allison’s life, Conversations with Dorothy Allison presents Allison’s perspectives on her life, literature, and her conflicted role as a public figure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: May 9, 2012
• ISBN: 9781628468038

Book preview

Moving toward Truth: An Interview with Dorothy Allison

Carolyn Megan/1993

From Kenyon Review 16.4 (1994): 71–83. Reprinted by permission of Carolyn Megan.

In March 1993 Dorothy Allison’s novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, nominated for the 1992 National Book Award, had just been published in paperback, and she was at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a reading tour. She answered the door to her posh suite dressed in T-shirt and jeans saying, Look at this place! Grace Paley stayed in this room! Readers were lining up in city after city to hear her read, but she was still becoming accustomed to her fame.

Her work includes collections of poems, The Women Who Hate Me; stories, Trash; and essays, Skin. A novel, Cavedweller, will be published in 1995. She lives in northern California with her companion, Alix, and their son, Wolf Michael.

CM: You’ve said you began Bastard Out of Carolina as a poem. It seems there are a lot of roots of Bastard in your collection of poems, The Women Who Hate Me. Does all your work begin as poetry?

DA: It’s what I always do. Almost everything I write begins in some lyric form. It’s how I began; it’s how I learned; it’s what I do. Almost never does it continue as a poem anymore because I have become much more interested in narrative storytelling. There are places in Bastard that are tone poems that somehow survived the editing process. My editing process is extensive. I go through a lot of rewriting.

CM: It sounds as if you use your sense of sound and language in coming into a narrative. Does that change how you think of the narrative?

DA: No, it doesn’t. I think of it all as the same process. What was different was moving from short stories to a novel in terms of structure and language. It became such a larger canvas. Well, I don’t know how in the world I thought I knew what I was doing. I knew I didn’t know what I was doing. Maybe you just throw yourself in with total immersion. My trick was to get a book contract. With a book contract, you either give them their money back or finish it. On sheer nerve I started it and taught myself to do it. It changed everything, because a lot of the forms that I had learned in terms of working with poetry and short stories just did not apply.

CM: So when you come into a novel, are you using the same sensibilities you came into your poetry with? I would imagine working in poetic form you begin with hearing the language.

DA: I work a lot more with dialogue, which is the thing I moved into more and more from the poetry. But you can look at some of the earlier poems, and there are places where that happens. In The Women Who Hate Me you can see where people talk. But moving into short stories, what I would do is to get first the dialogue, and with the novel that became central. In a large sense, the book [Bastard] is structured so that at different points people are primarily talking. And they all tell stories, and they have a way of storytelling that in some way parallels gospel music. Like choruses that repeat … and essentially they repeat each other’s stories to a certain extent. Just different versions. There are a whole lot of stories about the Cherokee great-granddaddy, and they all had their own view about it and they each had to have a different voice. So it became like a series of tone poems, slowly pushed further and further, getting into those characters. And everything was constructed around what these people, who were essentially the aunts and uncles, were giving to this Bone: a sense of who she was in the world—what her possibilities were.

CM: And Bone seems to save herself by telling stories. There’s a scene in Bastard where Daddy Glen has broken Bone’s clavicle, and Bone imagines an elaborate scenario in which she forgives Daddy Glen and then dies.

DA: Oh, high drama.

CM: So storytelling speaks to Bone’s survival.

DA: That’s what I intended. It becomes a technique whereby she retains a sense of power in a situation where she has none. And comfort, just sheer physical comfort of retelling herself the story in which she is not the victim. She learns that from her family.

CM: Bone is retelling stories even when she masturbates. She becomes the perpetrator and the victim all at once.

DA: She becomes the heroine. Even when she’s the martyred heroine, she’s still the heroine and they love her fiercely.

CM: Is the writing what saves you?

DA: Oh, absolutely. It became the way out of an enormous amount of guilt. It became the way I figured things out. When I couldn’t find my story, I wrote it. I trusted books; I grew up that way. And so I made my own story, writing it down so that it would be real, and I could see it and step outside of it. It was some kind of comfort, and yes … sometimes the whole purpose is to make yourself a heroine.

CM: The prologue to your collection of stories, Trash, also reflects writing as a means of survival. The narrator says that one day she decided to live, and that living meant telling her stories.

DA: Kind of a truth telling. Whereas I would not guarantee that all the stories the aunts and uncles tell are true, Bone is moving toward a kind of truth, and that’s real important. She’s caught in a network of lies and misrepresentation. All the things she’s being told about herself by Daddy Glen are horrible. And she takes those things, and we watch it have an impact on her. The only thing that saves her are the stories, the ones that she needs to make for herself.

CM: Anger seems to save Bone. Is that true for you: Is anger where your writing originates? Has taking on anger saved you?

DA: Not only to take on anger, but to realize the justification of it. The thing that happens with you if you’re poor, or you’re powerless, or you’re in the situation that Bone is in, suffering any kind of physical or emotional abuse, is that you begin to feel kind of numbed. You get so wounded that you freeze up; you don’t get angry. Which is really hard for people to understand. And if you do get angry, all the anger is inner-directed. What I tried to do in the book was to show Bone taking all that in and believing it, believing herself a monster … thinking that it was her fault, trying desperately to protect her mother, to hide what was going on, just to find some way to stoically endure it. I knew that in my life, and that nearly killed me. But I didn’t get angry until I was in my twenties. When I constructed this novel, I constructed it in such a way that Bone gets angry at thirteen, and I think it’ll save her. I think it is the best ending I could put on the book. She begins to hold people responsible.

CM: How were you able to deal with your anger and to hold people responsible on your own?

DA: I didn’t do it on my own. I had a great deal of help. It was in 1973, so I was twenty-four, and I went into the women’s center in Tallahassee, Florida, and walked in on a consciousness-raising group. I had never been to one before. The center was forming a magazine, and I had misread the schedule and got there a little early. I was too embarrassed to leave, so I stayed. And everything changed … everything changed. I wasn’t the kind of person that would seek out help. I had been raised to be really fiercely independent. Never ask for help, never go for it … but this wasn’t that anyway. It was people sitting around basically telling stories, and I knew how to do that. But there were people telling stories that I had never heard before. And there was a woman there who started to talk about her own experience of incest. And it didn’t matter that she was using a lot of early feminist rhetorical language. What mattered was that it was my story, and she was so different from me—middle class—she was wearing pearls, for God’s sake. She had one of those amazing, elaborate flip-up hairdos, and she was at the university. And she was telling a story that I knew in my bones absolutely.

CM: It was the first time you had heard the story?

DA: First time from anyone else. I had read a lot of books, all those case studies, all the stuff that was available then. But I had never sat across from another human being that I could look at and see that this is not a crazy person. This is not an evil, monstrous human being … this is your average everyday normal girl, and she’s survived the same thing I have. It made it all different. It made me different. So I kept coming and talking and became a rabid feminist. I just spent a few years of my life just figuring out what the hell happened to me … how I had gotten into this enormously tight, walled, closed place.

CM: Did writing help you figure that out?

DA: Writing helped me break out of it. Writing became the way that I could say things that otherwise I had no other way to talk about. Mostly, to begin with, I wrote really bad poetry, something I had done for years actually. I did it as a child, but it became a way to talk about emotions that were terrifying, dangerous. And then, as is the way of such things, I became an editor. I helped start a magazine called Amazing Grace in which I published my first poem. (The first since my mother had submitted a poem to the JFK Library when I was eleven.) Then I started working at it, but it was something I did on my own time. I started working for the Social Security Administration; that’s how I got to Tallahassee. I did the same thing Kafka did: Social Security during the day—writing stories at night. But writing was, it seemed to me, kind of private and in someway indulgent. I think because it really was a way of my maintaining my own sanity, I kept it really private. So I did my serious writing, articles about day-care centers … that kind of thing. I waited a long time to start publishing my fiction.

CM: You said that in writing Bone’s story you gave her more hope at the end of the novel. What did you learn through the process of writing the novel and through creating Bone?

DA: Well, Bone is a trick for me. I made her up very deliberately because I wanted to learn how to love young girls … how to love children. It’s hard to explain to people. My family was really loving and enormous, but there was a conviction about children in my family that’s very destructive and dangerous. I don’t think any of us believed in children. It’s a normal thing to backhand a child, to hit a child. That everyday brutality that was visited on the men and women in my family came out in the children. And I recognized really early on, especially when I left home, that I did not think about kids the way normal people thought about kids. They thought children were really powerful, strong adults masquerading in these little bodies. Which is a vicious thing to believe … especially when it’s what you think about yourself. I made Bone so that I could see a child and believe her and inhabit her, live inside her. And the first thing I had to learn was how fragile children are. That’s not something I had believed in nor anything I had understood. So for me it was really a long process of changing something that was so intrinsic I didn’t recognize how it had even been put into me.

CM: Did the writing help you to do this?

DA: I think so.

CM: And how is it now for you as a parent?

DA: I’m glad I waited until forty-three. It’s taken me this long to learn to be gentle. I have two sisters, and we talked a lot about it, especially when I was younger, when they were first raising their kids. They’re so happy that I’m finally doing something they’ve done. They can tell me how. I wrote about that fear of what I would do with children, and they were living it. It’s amazing to me … that there’s this conviction that survivors are dangerous to kids because we learn brutality; therefore, we will visit brutality on our children. While that can be so, it isn’t necessarily so. It is something you can unlearn, but you do have to know you’re doing it; you have to become conscious. Writing, for me, is a way of making me conscious—especially the early stories in Trash—I really centered in on that, trying to piece that out. That’s why it took me so long to write Bastard. The first chapter, a large part of the first chapter, is a short story that I wrote in 1981. It was in the first issue of the Village Voice literary section. And once I had that, I had an idea of what I wanted to do but had no idea how to go about it. It took me a long time to write out all the stuff. I won’t say the stories in Trash were practice, but they were a way of writing out the rage. I couldn’t write this story from rage; it had to be from a place of compassion. I had to get to a place of understanding these people.

CM: And you succeeded.

DA: But you see, the hard thing to explain to nonwriters is how much we write that no one ever sees. I’ve got cabinets, God, yes … feeling things out in my own mind, telling myself stories in order to understand things. I think all writers do it; some of us are wise enough not to publish the stories. A lot of it is bad writing, which descends to melodrama quite often. But it’s a process of self-discovery, and the process of discovery is about writing. I had to learn about a kind of spareness that is not natural to me.

CM: There is a kind of evolution in the epigraphs and prologue of your works. In The Women Who Hate Me, you write in the epigraph, For the women who hate me who made me angry enough to write these poems. In the prologue of Trash, you write, I got up and wrote a story all the way through…. I wasn’t truly me or my mama or my girlfriends, or really any of the people who’d been there, but it had the feel, the shit-kicking anger and grief of my life. And finally in Bastard, you quote James Baldwin, People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead. Could you explain the evolution behind these beginnings, how they represent your place in the world and in your writing at that time? And particularly could you address the Baldwin quote?

DA: Well, it’s about a different kind of justice. It is actually what I’ve come to believe. I don’t believe in rage anymore, and I used to be in love with the idea of revenge. I used to collect revenge stories, read books, watch movies.

CM: Rage and revenge are powerful.

DA: Yes, but there’s one thing more powerful, and it’s justice. That’s what it is about…. I don’t have to buy myself a shotgun and go hunt down my stepfather. He’s living the nightmare he made. It’s harder with Anney, the mother in Bastard, for she is also going to pay for what she does by the place she puts herself into at the end of the book. It’s just, but it’s hard.

CM: Anney tries hard not to have her children live the life she has. And she fights it many times in the book. For example, she tells Daddy Glen that she doesn’t want her kids to be hungry, that she doesn’t want it for her children.

DA: Absolutely. The hardest thing for me to understand was why my mother stayed in this bad, bad marriage with a brutal man. And it took me my whole life to begin to understand. And I didn’t really understand it fully until I started going to meet the few of her sisters who were still alive. Looking at the choices they made and seeing how powerfully caught they were in the things they were supposed to do … keep kids safe, find a good man, save him, and hang on for dear life. The concept of giving up and leaving was so alien to them. They believed that they could tame and heal the men in their lives with love. In some cases that works, which is kind of extraordinary.

CM: The women in Bastard don’t seem to recognize that it is their love for the other women that carries them through.

DA: But it’s a generation that didn’t even know how to see that. They didn’t know, didn’t think it was important. They knew it was important but didn’t think it was nearly as important as what a man and woman made together. And there are other things … from the beginning Glen desperately tries to isolate Anney from her sisters. The further away from her sisters, the less powerful she becomes. It’s a tragedy. The book is essentially a tragedy. I tried to make it big enough and deep enough so it wasn’t as easy, wasn’t as simple, wasn’t predictable. I don’t believe that anyone is born evil. I believe things happen because you choose things. And I had to show every place where they could have done something else but didn’t. Glen chooses to become the man he becomes. In the beginning he is not that man. Anney … the choices she makes bend her life in a direction she never wanted to go. The hard thing is what happens to Bone. What choices is she going to make?

CM: It seems to have to do with hunger as well. What kind of hunger they have on a basic level, and the deeper hunger they have for a different life. Is hunger a theme you come back to in your work?

DA: I’ve become aware of it; at first I didn’t think about it. It’s a metaphor that lived in me; I know it so well from the inside. But being poor in this country is about being constantly hungry, because the thing that you get, the emotional sustenance you get is never enough, so that hunger becomes a way of life, that longing for something never had. I consciously work with that because it’s an emotional state I understand so well. Appetite is a good thing, and hunger and lust for life a marvelous thing. Put it together with a kind of hunger that at its worst can really damage you. Once you’re a bit hungry, you’re desperately trying never to be hungry. You fear that you’ll never get what you need. But you know, real fear, the kind of real endemic fear in the novel that these people feel all the time, is rarely directed where the actual danger is. It is complicated; it’s hard to sort out. What you’re afraid of … that’s of minor importance, and what you’re ignoring is what’s important. Look at Anney … what she’s most afraid of is losing this family she’s held together. That’s not what she should be afraid of; she loses her family when she loses her daughter. She doesn’t know enough to be really afraid of