Dorothy Allison burst onto the literary scene in the early '90s with Bastard Out of Carolina, a searing work that looked at poverty, violence and abuse. The book—her first—captivated everyone who read it, and it became a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award. The work even got Hollywood's attention, becoming a movie that starred Jennifer Jason Leigh and had Anjelica Huston as its director.
Allison has written several works since, including Cavedweller and Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature. She is currently working on She Who, due out later this year.
The unpretentious Southerner ( born in Greenville, S.C. ) , who is the visiting artist at Columbia College's fiction writing department this semester, will be taking part at the institution's 10th Annual Story Week Festival of Writers, occurring March 12-17. ( Other writers who are participating in the event, subtitled 'Fighting Words: Stories of Risk & Rebellion,' include Studs Terkel and Edward P. Jones. )
Recently, the out and proud lesbian ( who describes herself as a 'fascinating dyke' but quickly adds 'then again, we all are' ) talked with Windy City Times about good writing, bad experiences and ... the name Wolf.
Windy City Times: OK. I read that your son is named Wolf. [ Note: Wolf and Allison's partner Alix Layman live in California. ] How did he get that name?
Dorothy Allison: [ Laughs. ] Dykes will name a child anything! Actually, Alix had wanted to name him Michael but then we realized his name would be Michael Allison Layman, which sounds like a fuckin' law firm. And I wasn't about to have a hyphen in his name; he's not going to be half nothing—he's going to be fully something. So we argued and one of us said, 'What do you want to name him? Wolf?' ( We have a friend named Wolf. ) Now he has the largest collection of wolf paraphernalia of anyone on the planet.
WCT: Your family's in California and you're here. How does that work?
DA: I'll be here until mid-May and I leave once a month to go there. Plus, they may be coming here soon.
WCT: First of all, I saw Bastard Out of Carolina. It depressed the hell out of me.
DA: Yeah. I don't watch it.
WCT: I don't blame you. [ Both laugh. ] How cathartic was it to write the book?
DA: Oh, writing the book was cathartic and satisfying on many, many levels. The movie, however, was a problem. It is accurate in its depiction of sexual violence but it's a misrepresentation of the family.
Anjelica Huston and her company were wonderful people but they had no sense of humor and no concept of how working-class families survived dire times, which was not to weep all the fucking time but to find the absurd and the hubris in the monstrous lives we lived.
WCT: Maybe she couldn't identify with it.
DA: I think that's it. She's raised rich and she was fascinated by the tragedy. A lot of people are fascinated by the tragedy; what they don't understand is the construction of the novel that is designed to lead you through the tragedy in the same way that my aunts and uncles taught me to survive dire times. In the midst of terrible moments, there are moments of enormous grace and levity. The book was designed that way but the movie was not.
WCT: Is Bastard semi-autobiographical?
DA: It's not autobiographical; it's a novel. It's autobiographical to the extent that I'm an incest survivor. The first chapter is a trick in that it's a retelling of all the stories I was told about how my mother met my stepfather and how I was certified a bastard. And the burning of the courthouse really happened. But I never robbed a Woolworth's.
WCT: You founded the Independent Spirit Awards [ in 1998 to honor those who work with small presses and independent bookstores ] . What's going on with that?
DA: I ran out of money. As soon as I get some more, I'll start it up again. Awards without cash are all well and good, but ... [ Laughs. ]
The thing about being a writer is that you find all the great bookstores in the country. Actually, I was finding them just being a dyke.
WCT: Which ones do you like in Chicago?
DA: I like Women and Children First because it's a great damn bookstore. However, a lot of little ones seem to be gone.
WCT: Let's talk about James Frey. What do you think is the impact of his situation [ regarding his work, A Million Little Pieces ] on the literary world?
DA: That son of a bitch. [ Smiles. ] I think the literary world has taken an enormous delight in this. Most of us had to substantiate our memoir material anyway. When I did two or three things, I submitted them to my sisters and had them mark what they were uncomfortable with and talked them through.
I never finished James Frey's book. It had this grandiose, butch bullshit that I don't recognize. All the people who've gone through the process of becoming sober became involved in the constant questioning of the self—and James Frey never did that.
It's a process. The process of having such a successful author be proven to have lied—I think that it will make publishers pay more attention. Memoirs will now be held to a high standard, which they should be.
A good literary memoir works on many different levels. He crafted a memoir like a novel; you knew it had to be false.
WCT: Do you think Oprah was right in calling him out like that?
DA: Oh, it was great television. I thought she made a mistake in being so grandiose in her praise of him in the beginning, because she usually has great taste. But I think she fell into the persona.
A good memoir is Samuel Delany's The Motion of Light in Water. He collected a lot of essays but in the introduction he talks about looking into his own files and discovering that everything he had been telling people for eight or nine years had been completely wrong. His memory didn't match the record.
WCT: How often do you go to Greenville?
DA: When I'm invited. I'm actually going to Western Carolina University because there's a writer there who I love. His name's Ron Rash and he's written something called The World Made Straight.
I love going to small colleges in the South and talking about queer literature. I look for those kids who hate themselves. Most of the kids try to pretend they're something they're not. I try to invite the queer kids to talk to me.
WCT: Is going to those colleges ever risky?
DA: Every now and again.
I've done work with the Children's Defense Fund and the hardest place I've been has been Clinton, Tenn., where there's a program for young community organizers. It's about 90 percent Black and here I am, the quintessential Southern white girl—and I'm a dyke who's slack on religion. It gets tricky. People will be polite at first but there's always a minister who tells me I'm going to burn in hell—and he does it in front of hundreds of people.
I've had things thrown at me and I've been cussed out to my face. Sometimes it's scary. It's the crazies you have to worry about. They won't ask questions; they'll just shoot. I once had my front door shot in [ while living in Tallahassee, Fla. ] . We moved.
WCT: What can you tell me about your upcoming work, She Who?
DA: It's a novel about violence and the response to it. It's about a 'golden child'—pretty, rich, and with a sense of entitlement—and I break her. Casey is about to graduate from Stanford and she has a gorgeous girlfriend. They go to San Francisco and Casey is attacked in a parking garage and thrown off onto the street; she winds up in a coma for 10 months and has to re-learn how to walk and talk. When she wakes up, she thinks she's 13 years old.
In the beginning, I wanted to write about a mother-daughter conflict. Then, things stopped. After 9/11 and for other reasons, everything I wrote for a couple of years was just garbage. Then, I had a third character: a ex-nun from El Salvador who has a 23-year-old daughter.
WCT: What is the essence of good writing?
DA: It's the uninterrupted dream—and the trick is the 'uninterrupted.' Good writing seduces you into a story that you might not want to know but takes you there so smoothly and completely that you get pulled in against your will and are shown something you otherwise would not know. That's what I love about great books; I love books that take me places I have not been and into the hearts of people I have not imagined.
For more info about Story Week, call ( 312 ) 344-7611 or see the Web site storyweek.colum.edu .
