Back in 1992, when Dorothy Allison burst into the literary limelight with her bestselling novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, she dubbed herself the "Roseanne of Literature." That shocking, autobiographical story of a young girl in the South who is raped and beaten by her stepfather helped open the floodgates to the rush of memoirs that has since poured into American bookstores. Allison's audience flocked to her in droves, bearing their own stories of prejudice and abuse and poverty. Their heroine, it turned out, was a fast-talking, brash motorcycle mama whose previous books included everything from lesbian porn to feminist theory and had titles like Trash and Skin. Photographs from the early 1990s show a woman whose fists are usually clenched, squinting straight into the camera and looking a little the worse for wear, a woman whose very expression might be translated as: "No Confession Necessary." One expects, meeting Allison for the first time, to be cussed out.
People change. Or do they? These days, Allison lives in what looks like a freshly painted blue house in a quiet neighborhood high above San Francisco's once gay and rowdy, now somewhat bourgeois, Castro district. She is solicitous and gracious and puts a guest at ease. She is plainly dressed and maternal, curling her hands around a warm cup of tea. Her home is neat and pleasant, with family photographs on tabletops and homemade tablecloths. As a matter of fact, if a person were fleeing any number of evils -- from literary pretension to an abusive stepfather or a bad marriage -- she could do worse than end up sipping tea in Dorothy Allison's dining room.
Allison has responsibilities that she seems proud of: two pugs, Attila and Chl ; a goldfish; a five-year-old son, Wolf; and a 10-year relationship with Alix Layman, a musician finishing her Ph.D. in music theory. The writer recently built a new leaf for the dining room table so that her dinner guests can sit down. In the summer, she will take on an au pair.
This domestic placidity might surprise readers of Bastard Out of Carolina, which took readers by the throat with its depiction of the smoldering rage of a child named Bone. And that fury has fueled each of Allison's books thus far: Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature; Bastard Out of Carolina, which was a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award; Trash; The Women Who Hate Me; and Two Or Three Things I Know for Sure. But Allison's new novel, Cavedweller (Dutton) is something different. It is about a Janis JoplinÐstyle rock singer, Delia Byrd, who takes her daughter, Cissy, and runs away from a dead-end life of drugs and ex-musicians in Venice, Calif. She drives a car loaded with all her possessions back to her home town, Cayro, Ga., to reclaim her two other daughters, Amanda and Dede, from Clint, her abusive ex-husband. By sheer force of will, Delia creates a sane life for her children. When Allison finished Cavedweller, her partner said, "Oh my God, you've written a book with a semi-happy ending."
Where did all that rage go? "I wanted to write about people who could change," Allison explains. This does not mean that she has reached a sublime state of forgiveness. Clint, who recalls Bone's stepfather and Allison's own, can't quite seem to change, but Delia and her daughters are given the possibility of happiness. "It's about redemption and going home and doing things my mother couldn't do. I saw my sisters grow up and take care of their children in ways I didn't believe any of us could do. I saw them work small miracles again and again at enormous cost," Allison says. "You can create redemption for yourself."
But redemption takes many forms. Allison's house may be freshly painted, but it sits on one of the most perilous hills in San Francisco. Layman has been sober for 14 years, but, says Allison, "if she ever drank, I'd leave her and she knows it." Wolf, as Allison tells it, is the result of "three plates of chicken and a plate of beans," referring to the ritual of dinner followed by impregnation that made it possible for Layman to give birth (Allison can't have children). Wolf's father, who now lives with Allison, was the lover of one of her best friends. "We picked him," says Allison. "He's intelligent, he's gentle, he's HIV-negative and he'll do whatever you tell him." Every third sentence or so, Allison lets loose either a gap-toothed guffaw or a judgment on welfare reform, evangelicals or corporate publishing that can singe the eyebrows of an admirer who sits too close.
In other words, it's only hard work and ingenuity that has pulled Allison out of the hole her life might have buried her in, and dirt is constantly threatening to bury her as she climbs out. She was born in 1949. Her mother, Ruth, was a 15-year-old waitress in Greenville, S.C. Her father was a deadbeat who sold faulty insurance policies to poor blacks, and who disappeared even before Allison was born. When Allison was four, her mother married the stepfather who began his pattern of sexual abuse and violence almost immediately. When she was 11, Allison told a cousin about her stepfather's repeated atrocities. Her mother picked up her three daughters and left briefly but returned to her husband.
Amazingly, Allison maintained the confidence and drive to pull herself out of such miserable circumstances. In 1968, she won a National Merit scholarship and attended Florida Presbyterian College in St. Petersburg. In flight from her family, she studied anthropology, became a feminist and, after college, went to live in a lesbian collective in Washington, D.C., which broke up when somebody fired a gunshot through their front door. "That made an impression on me," says Allison, in her sly, storyteller's voice. "I guess he took offense."
In Washington, Allison worked on a feminist magazine called Quest and co-taught, with the writer Charlotte Bunch, a class on feminist political theory. "I was teaching upper-class people who would one day run women's studies programs and never invite me to come teach. It dawned on me that if there was going to be a revolution, I was in the wrong place. When trash don't know what to do," she says stepping into character, "it g s back to college." In 1979, Allison packed up and moved to New York City to get a Master's degree in anthropology at the New School. She loved New York, "the fantasy world of every poor child in the South." There she wrote urban ethnographies about the lower east side, worked as an arts organizer at Poets and Writers and wrote book and music reviews for the Village Voice.
She also relished her proximity to famous authors. When Stanley Diamond, the director of her program at the New School, had a manuscript to send up to Toni Morrison, who was then working as a special projects editor at Random House, Allison volunteered herself as a messenger. "Hauled my butt up on the subway," she recalls, "and refused to give it to the secretary. I got to see her. She was so powerful." Provoked by a review of a friend's book in the Women's Review of Books in which the reviewer used the words "white trash," Allison signed on with Nancy Bereano, editor and publisher of Firebrand Books, a feminist press in Ithaca, N.Y., to write the collection of short stories that would become Trash.
In the meantime, she slept little and drank "a bit too much," an understatement Allison reveals with a raw grin. Sure enough, she fell apart, body and soul. "You can kill yourself," she says, in the voice of a woman who knows all the available weapons. In 1987, Allison fell down a flight of stairs in a Greenwich Village restaurant, and her broken bones refused to mend. "Each time I scratched my finger it would take weeks to heal," she says. "My immune system had broken down." Allison was late delivering the manuscript for Trash. She quit her job, left her girlfriend and collapsed at a friend's house in Santa Cruz, Calif.
Out of the Margins
Trash was finally published by Firebrand in 1989, winning two Lambda Literary Awards for gay and lesbian fiction. Following her convalescence, Allison began working on Bastard and shopping for editors with the help of Jeffrey Escoffier, a friend in New York who founded the magazine Outlook.
"When you start in the small presses," Allison says, "you become very clear about what you will and will not stand for. I took the most sexually explicit parts of the book to editors, figuring that if they wanted me to change anything -- to make them more or less explicit -- then I was going to have trouble with them." Although, according to Allison, "none of the male editors we saw were interested in it," Carole DeSanti at Dutton and Joyce Johnson at Grove bid against each other for the book. Allison emerged from the auction clutching a check for $37,000 from Dutton. On Halloween in 1989, not long after acquiring Bastard, DeSanti was laid off by Dutton, along with several other editors, leaving the novel in the care of Rachel Klayman. DeSanti returned to Dutton as editor at large in 1991 and has since edited Two or Three Things and Cavedweller.
Commercial acceptance incurred the resentment of Bereano and her colleagues, who were angry that Allison had defected to a mainstream house. But she has healed that rift by going back to publish Skin at Firebrand in 1994, and by working hard to raise money for independent bookstores and presses. She recently established the Independent Spirit award for independent publishing with the Astrea Foundation, a lesbian nonprofit public service foundation.
Nor has Allison traded a career on the fringes for lavish riches. Cavedweller earned her a modest $100,000 advance. She received $25,000 for the film rights to Bastard, which was made into a movie directed by Anjelica Huston in 1996. She is working now on several projects but seems most excited about a novel based on Janis Joplin's life.
The writer who speaks openly about being raped as a child learned early in life what she will and will not do for her publishers. Maintaining that "the tour is the only thing I can control in this process," Allison insists on going on extensive reading tours to meet her audience, even if means going against the stern advice of her agent, Frances Golden, who wants her to stay home and write. "Frances is a gift from God," says Allison. "My momma died in 1993 and I got Frances."
Allison says she writes for the 15-year-old girl, like her own mother, like herself, who's got every reason in the world to hate herself. "I'm just trying to provide her with ammunition," Allison says. And she has thousands of readers who write to her with their life stories. Some of them seek her out; a few have called on the brink of suicide. "Alix and I spent a night after Bastard was published trying to keep a 16-year-old from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. But it's not the ones who come up and talk to you that you really worry about. ItÕs the ones at readings who stand in the corners with their white faces and their large eyes.
"Take Monica Lewinsky, for example," continues Allison. "She sounds frightened, like a lot of young girls I've known who were not the pretty girls. All the women in my family grew up not valuing themselves, not loving themselves and giving themselves away to the first person who smiled at them. They're callin' this girl a bimbo and all she is hungry for is love and tryin' to win at something.
"What do I know," says the author. "I'm just America." A classic American story in her own right, Allison has been able to pull herself up by her bootstraps, to reinvent herself. The effort shows in the determined line of her mouth and in her edgy vernacular. Perched in her house high above the Castro, she still sees her life as precarious, and each positive step has the power to amaze. "I've just barely learned how to be dirt normal; how to fall in love with reasonable human beings," she says. "Do you know," she asks, "what a miracle it is to make a living as a writer?"
