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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Sept. 15, 1995)
15 . 1905 ju st out T T ruth T eller Dorothy Allison on being a Southern lesbian writer and the price o f mainstream success ▼ by Daniel Vaillancourt astard out o f Carolina drastically al tered the path of Dorothy Allison’s life. Heralded by The New York Times Book Review and other influential pub lications immediately upon its 1992 release, the sem i-autobiographical novel— Allison’s first— became an instant bestseller. But that’s just the beginning. The book was a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award; may become a film starring Winona Ryder; is being adapted for B the stage by Cherrie Moraga; and bought the author the house she currently shares with her partner, Alix Layman, and their 3-year-old son, Wolf Michael. The acclaim Bastard continues to gamer has transformed Allison— the beloved Southern lesbian/feminist author of The Women Who Hate Me (a book of poetry), Trash (a Lambda Literary Award-winning collection of short sto ries) and Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature (a Lambda Literary Award-winning compilation of essays, speeches and performance pieces)— into a beloved mainstream author whose forthcoming works are eagerly awaited by a read ership of astounding diversity. Allison’s latest offering is Two or Three Things I Know fo r Sure, a short memoir which began as a performance piece written in the months follow ing Bastard's completion. “I decided, ‘What if I only told true stories?’ ” says Allison of the book, which weaves childhood tales with old family photos. The author recently spoke to me by telephone from her Northern California home outside of Guemeville. Despite the discomfort of a recently sprained Achilles’ tendon— and the approaching deadline for her nearly completed second novel, Cavedweller—Allison was genuine, generous and more than willing to share a few laughs. Tell me about Two or Three Things / Know fo r Sure. the richness of her life that I can manage to acquire.... I wanted people to see what a working class Southern family really looks like. [Laugh ter.] Years ago I worked with Barbara Smith and people at [the lesbian literary journal] Conditions, and we used to talk about how nobody knows what our families really look like.... So I wanted those women in print dresses and those men in cloth caps and my sisters and I.... I also think they’re extraordinary pictures; I think they’re extraordinary people. But it’s hard for me to be sure, because 1 can’t look at them without remem bering who they were and how they died. It was a way of clearing up my own confusion about finishing [Bastard]. If you’ve read the novel, I used people in my family, most of whom were Why must we tell our stories? dead. When I finished the book, I was very, very Because I don’t believe this culture knows our depressed, which is usual. You finish a book, you true stories. It’s like the photos. They have cul miss the people you’ve made up. But also, I was tural images that have been handed to them from having some trouble clearing up in my own mind confusion between which were true stories and which were fic tion. And this is a big problem within my family. [Laughter.] Nobody’s ever been really clear about what’s real. So I started with a poem that I made up: “I’ll tell you the truth/I’ll tell you a lie/ You will not know which is one, which is the other/You will not know, and it will not matter.” That was the idea, but then I de cided, ‘‘What if I only told true stories?” And that’s pretty much what the book is, except for a couple of places where I needed to protect people.... The book is closure for me because I’ve pretty much made a decision to stop writing about my family for a decade. [Laughter.] I’m deep in this new novel that I’m finishing, and I need to do somethi ng di ffer- ent.... It’s also my little lesbian book. It’s very lesbian, and I had a lot of fun with that.... People don’t really know how queers grow up in this society. They don’t have an everyday feel for us. I wanted to publish a book in which Dorothy Allison being a lesbian is everyday, it’s movies and television and jokes. We’re the great part of the family matrix, it’s not something secret of this society. The simple fact is that our outside. lives are just as real as straight people’s lives, but are not seen as such. W e’re either exotics or we’re The family photographs peppered through unimaginable. I think that the great secret of this out add so much. Tell me about their selection. culture is how pervasive lesbian and gay people Well, the story in the book is what happened: are. One of the things I do as a teacher is get people I got the photos. When my sisters and I divided up to tell their stories, in either a seductive or horri- my mother’s things, that’s what I wanted. That’s E a S m I I V a d I ■ ■ nWW V Organic Farmers Market * ° r9anlc 1=00(1 Tastings w Free Draw ing fo r organic Ts , caps, and totes * " v e Reggae Music How has your life changed since the enor mous success of Bastard! I got a house. [Laughter ] We call it the house that Bastard built. It’s pretty nice. I can make a living. It’s pretty extraordinary. I’ve been poor all my life. I know how to be poor. But I’ve had a little difficulty figuring out how to be this person who can actually make a living. It’s occasionally star tling. Is mainstream success all you hoped it would be? I never thought about it; I had no hopes about it. I have found it somewhat difficult. It gets in the way of getting your work done. Queers love books. We understand writers to a certain ex tent— we have a niche in our culture for writers. We pretty much let writers do their stuff. I don’t think that straight people really get it. They think you’re a public thing. They don’t understand that writing is actually this enormous, private, has- nothing-to-do-with-the-public-performance thing. But queers get it. So you can be a writer in the queer community and do your stuff for two de cades and be perfectly fine. But man, when the straight people get you, they want you to do all kinds of odd things that have nothing to do with the work. So I have found that a little difficult.... It really interrupts being able to write. Your dedication states that Two or Three Things I Know fo r Sure is “ For my sisters.” Has there been a rapprochement since you became a mother? Yes. My sisters finally understand something I did. And I finally did something that they knew more about than I did. So they’ve been extremely happy with me as a new mother without sleep or sex or normal life. They understand all that. Tell me about your family life with Alix and W olf Michael. It’s a good thing. Occasionally, Alix and I are like, “We don’t really believe in this,” you know? Neither of us believes in monogamy, neither of us believes in the so-called traditional family life. But here we are. We’re living out in the country; we’ve got two dogs, two cats, a goldfish and a three-year-old; and it kinda looks like Dyke Knows Best. It’s very funny. [Laughter.] You truly are “ out” in the country. Continued on page 31 Gargoyles • Cards • Soaps • Icons 5 ^ ^ 3707 SE Hawthorne Portland, Oregon 97214 5 0 3 -2 3 5 - 1 2 5 7 W S I I m ti r fk r M U n r tc Portland, o r 97202-2572 l<503) 222-5658 10:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m . 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