Dorothy Allison.

• Author: Pratt, Minnie Bruce
• Position: Lesbian author - Interview

On a cold rainy Boston afternoon in March, I was curled up on Dorothy Allison's bed, eating chocolate, gossiping, and talking books with this charismatic author, who wrote the award-winning novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, and the short-story collection, Trash. Her most recent book is Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature (Firebrand Books).

We were in town for the annual Out/Write conference of lesbian and gay writers, and were snatching a few hours to renew a connection that had begun more than ten years ago, when Dorothy was one of the editors of the lesbian-feminist literary journal Conditions.

I first met Dorothy in New York City, on the weekend of a massive anti-nuclear demonstration, but we had recognized each other, even there, from another terrain, that of our native South. Dorothy was born and raised in South Carolina, and I in Alabama.

Q: When I was growing up - and I think this was true for you, too - there was just this tremendous fear of the intellect, the imagination, people who wrote. Not the spoken word or the story, but books, words written down, the cultural realm. Lillian Smith talks about the voice of the demagogue versus the voice of the poet, and how people in the South have to struggle with the voice of the demagogue that dominates the public space. How did you get from that place to here?

Dorothy Allison: My mother believed in books, as peculiar as that was. She was a secret reader. I can remember both my mother and me trying to sneak away to read when I was a girl, and being really messed with because my stepfather didn't want anybody doing anything except doing what he wanted them to be doing at any one moment - whether that was bringing him a glass of tea, or going outside and playing when you got your head buried in a book. He really was that voice, the demagogue that distrusted the book, distrusted the intellect, distrusted education. The thing I heard over and over again from him - so that I heard it in my dreams - was, "You can't believe that." He'd listen to the news, and when I was a kid and the civil-rights movement was all over the news, my stepfather would sit there and...

Q: That's what my father would do, too. We would sit and turn on the TV set, and he would just scream about what was happening.

Allison: "Liars," you know. "You can't trust them - those politicians, those radicals, those agitators."

Q: What would you and your mother sneak off and read? Allison: Well, my mother read mysteries. It was her lifeline. Mysteries, adventure books, some kind of escape. And she read really terrible books like the Executioner Series. Trash fiction. And I would read anything. Anything. I was just hungry, desperately hungry.

Q: You would read together?

Allison: No. If we were reading together, we would have been in real trouble. We didn't do anything together. My stepfather would not have tolerated that. So I would sneak off and hide. And because it was a thing that I had to fight to do, and I had to keep kind of secret, it assumed enormous power. It was resistance. God, it was hope!

Q: But how did you get from somebody who read to somebody who wrote it down?

Allison: Oh, honey, that's fractured. It comes from different places. One, when you're a really bright kid, you are kind of encouraged in a peculiar way to think of yourself as going to school and becoming something. So I wanted to write.

Q: You thought of yourself as someone who could be a writer.

Allison: No, I didn't think of myself as somebody who could be a writer. I was in awe of it. But as I got to be a teenager, it was like masturbation. It was the secret dream. You'd never admit in public that you were going to do this. Because I didn't see any way to get there. There was no connection. When I started reading, I went after biographies and autobiographies because I was looking for how people survived. And I went looking particularly for working-class novels. And Christ, you know what you find - Erskine Caldwell! His basic message was that poor people were dirt and hopeless. But there were a few - one that I remember was Not as a Stranger, which is not a great book. But it was about a poor kid.

Then I discovered black writers. Besides James Baldwin, nothing ever hit me as hard as Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. It didn't matter that they were black - though it should have. But it was about incest, about that terror, and it was about suicide. Which at that point in my life seemed to be where I was going.

Q: You were in your early twenties then?

Allison: Yes. And that's when I started writing. I went to college with the secret dream. On the surface what I told the world was that I was to teach history. That was high enough for my family - becoming a teacher was as much as anyone in my family could imagine. It's the reason they gave me support for going to college. To be a teacher.

But in the secret dream, I wanted to write. But when I went to college, and found the people who were writing, that stopped the dream cold. I burned everything I had ever written.

Q: The writing teachers stopped you?

Allison: No, no, no. The people who were writing and being published. The model for that was this kid, this middle-class white boy who was into poetry. And was getting published. And being called a genius. And I looked at him and thought, "Anything I would say would be dismissed out of hand." The few things that I did try to write were so far from where I wanted them to be that I was deeply humiliated. I had really dark, horrible stories in my head. And I didn't know how to own those stories in the world.

If you come from the South, if you're working-class, and especially if you look like me - let's get real, I am not pretty - you get a sense of humor or you die. So you become a clown. But I wasn't writing clown stories. So I burned them. But I came out of that, became a feminist, and found what was essentially a feminist writing voice. Mostly, that was black women - Toni Morrison, Alice Walker. When I found Zora Neale Hurston, it was like getting kicked in the butt. It was a voice - the weird thing was that it was a voice that I heard in my head. That I was familiar with. The speech, the rhythms of my family, the kind of language that I grew up with resounded for me in the books written by those women. It didn't read to me black. It read to me working class.

Q: I've been thinking about the language in Bastard Out of Carolina. Where I grew up, I was taught that the language you put in that book - the speech of poor white folks - was worthless. Just like I grew up being taught that African-American language was worthless. And when I read Bastard, it was the first time in my life that I read a book that accepted the language of poor and working-class white people, that said that speech was beautiful, lyrical, eloquent. That said, "This is the voice of humanity speaking." The language of Bastard was so important to me. In other ways in my life, my eye had been distorted in its looking. When I read your novel, I realized how my ear had had its hearing distorted. But I was finally hearing this...