GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

JULY 24, 1998

Evenings Out

A mother's atonement

Bastard Out of Carolina author tells a tale of painful homecoming

by Danica Kirka

Novelist Dorothy Allison once burned every word she wrote.

She had her reasons.

Allison, the daughter of a 15-year-old poor, unwed mother in Greenville, S.C., was a survivor of sexual abuse as a child. She needed to write about it, but she thought that if the truth came out, neighbors would no longer consider her family respectable “good poor," but "trashy poor."

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So one day, she torched the pages she had written, tossed the flaming words into holes she had dug in the ground and covered them up.

"It was the sheer reality of it," she said. "It would have definitely gotten me into trouble."

But Allison also felt guilty, that she had done something to prompt the abuse. "I believed I was a monster. It wasn't my fault that I couldn't fight. The women's movement told me I wasn't a monster."

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Allison drew on her past to write Bastard Out of Carolina. The 1992 novel earned her comparisons to the great Southern-writers and a National Book Award nomination. It was made into a movie directed by Anjelica Huston and televised on Showtime, after

TNT, which had commissioned a TV movie, pulled it off the air because of scenes involving the sexual abuse of a child.

Set in Greenville, the book is narrated by young Ruth Anne "Bone" Boatwright, daughter of Anney Boatwright and a man Bone never knew. Her life is marked by the money her family doesn't have and the blank space on her birth certificate where her father's name is supposed to appear.

Bone is raised by a violent, moody.stepfather.

With her second major novel, Cavedweller, Allison takes on another broken-family saga, this one characterized more by atonement than anger.

The story revolves around Delia Byrd, who flees an abusive husband by hitching a ride with an up-and-coming rock musician. She leaves two babies behind in Cayro, Ga., a wide spot in the road where there "was a sign that read WELCOME on one side and COME BACK SOON on the other."

Scrambling back to Georgia when the singer's death jars her into facing her past, Delia suffers the recrimination of a small town that hasn't forgotten her sin, and tries to

Dorothy Allison

AUTHOR OF BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA

Cavedweller

repent and make amends to children she left behind.

Allison doesn't hide that Delia is an alter ego, a free-spirited singer still wandering the wild side of the 1970s and getting mistaken for Janis Joplin. With self-deprecating humor, Allison identifies herself closely with her working-class roots.

Allison's own story is an American tale of survival and rejuvenation.

Her father took off before she was born; her mother was a waitress who believed in her, and encouraged even her earliest efforts at writing.

The first person in her family to graduate from high school, she won a National Merit Scholarship, graduating from Florida Presbyterian College in St. Petersburg.

She later embraced feminism and moved to New York, where she found contacts that eventually put her work in print.

The wisdom learned by rising from rough circumstances is woven into Cavedweller. Like Bastard Out of Carolina, the book makes no effort to hide disturbing issues. Yet Allison doesn't jump into difficult areas--she slides in, cloaking the predicaments of her somewhat less-than-upstanding characters with sympathy. Her relaxed style reminds literature professor Chris Mott of Southern writers Flannery O'Connor and Harper Lee.

"It's like your next-door neighbor Dorothy sits you down and hands you a cup of coffee or a beer--you know, a nice cold one and... then says, all of a sudden, ‘Last night I was in a razor fight," said Mott, who teaches at the University of California at Los Angeles.

"You have a mixed response. You want to be sympathetic, but at the same time [say], 'You're scaring me'."

An outspoken lesbian activist (Allison delivered memorable keynote address at last year's National Gay and Lesbian Task Force "Creating Change" conference in San Diego), her early short stories were released by small gay and feminist publishers she trusted to understand her work. A collection of short stories called Trash was published in 1988 by Firebrand Books, a feminist

press in Ithaca, N.Y. Firebrand also published Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature.

She did readings at colleges and independent bookstores, watching what worked, staying close to her audience. She still visits every independent bookstore she can find.

Allison lectures and teaches writing. She wants to pass on the benefits of anxiety. "I tell my students that if they're afraid, they're doing something right. Fortunately, I have a bottomless well of anxiety to draw on. Fear is always the replenishable resource."

Telling the truth may not have gotten her into the trouble, but it did cause a stir. Bastard Out of Carolina sold 400,000 copies in paperback and transformed the life Allison had carved in San Francisco, where she lives with her partner, Alix Layman, a trombone player in a swing band, their five-year-old son, Wolf Michael, and Wolf's dad, Dan.

In an interview with Atlanta's gay and lesbian weekly Southern Voice, Allison said she has received a lot of flak from all sideslesbians, gay men and straight people--who don't understand their version of the classic extended Southern family.

Allison said, "People ask me, 'What if lesbians and gay men start getting together to raise children?' and I say 'Yeah, what if?""

She needed six years to finish Cavedweller, distracted by the success of her first mainstream book and the attention that followed.

First came manuscripts, piles of paper in fat brown envelopes sent by struggling writers trying to cash in on her new celebrity. There were so many that she gave up reading them, and eventually began using the pages to stoke her wood stove. Then there was the publicity—the interviews, the photographers who wanted to shoot her in trailer parks surrounded by poor people.

But always there were the letters from incest survivors who understood.

Allison reads every one, though she gets so many she can't answer them all.

She misses the South, where people can cook and know the fine art of flirting, but Allison doesn't plan to return for now, fearing that her son would face repercussions because of his lesbian parents.

Not that she's complaining. The distance gives her the space to advocate the things that matter to her. To those pushed to society's margins, she wants to offer the same hope she received 24 years ago, when a roommate persuaded her to wait before starting one more fire.

"You don't have to kill yourself because you were raped as a child," she said. "Change is truly possible."

Danica Kirka covers arts and entertainment for the Associated Press.

Dorothy Allison