Salon | The Salon Interview: Dorothy Allison

T A B L E+T A L K
What recent books will be future classics? Make your picks in the Books area of Table Talk

A L S O+T O D A Y

The Salon Interview:
Ian McEwan
By Dwight Garner
(03/31/98)

R E C E N T L Y
Nadine Gordimer
By Dwight Garner
(03/09/98)
P.D. James
By Jennifer Reese
(02/26/98)
Stanley Crouch
By Jonathan Broder
(02/25/98)
Martin Amis
By Laura Miller
(02/10/98)
Toni Morrison
By Zia Jaffrey
(02/02/98)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
INTERVIEW ARCHIVE

R E V I E W S

The Short History of a Prince
By Jane Hamilton
A meditative novel, set in Wisconsin, about a former ballet dancer trying to come to terms with his new life
(03/31/98)

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_[ T H E _S A L O N_ I N T E R V I E W ]
_____Dorothy Allison DOROTHY ALLISON TALKS ABOUT WORKING-CLASS GUILT,
THE FILM VERSION OF "BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA" AND
COMING OUT -- AS A SCIENCE-FICTION FAN.
_____- - - - - - - - - - - -
BY LAURA MILLER | It's a toss-up which quality Dorothy Allison has in greater measure -- strength or charm. She's needed plenty of both to fight her way out of the desperate circumstances into which she was born. Her riveting, semi-autobiographical first novel, "Bastard Out of Carolina," portrays a dirt-poor Southern childhood in a family notorious for its violent, hard-drinking men and trouble-prone women. For Allison, these crushing circumstances were intensified by a physically and sexually abusive stepfather and, eventually, the discovery that she was a lesbian. She left home and devoted years of her life to feminist activism and collectives, although her refusal to toe the line sexually (or to keep quiet about her penchant for what she calls "rough trade") often made her an outcast there as well. She also began to write stories and essays whose fierce eloquence instantly gripped anyone lucky enough to discover them in alternative newspapers and books published by the small press Firebrand.
Then, in 1992, "Bastard" was published to ecstatic acclaim, particularly a full page in the New York Times Book Review in which George Garrett proclaimed the novel "as close to flawless as any reader could ask for" and "simply stunning," and praised Allison's "perfect ear for speech and its natural rhythms." "Bastard" became a bestseller, a perennial favorite of reading groups, and was made into a 1996 film directed by Angelica Houston for TNT (although TNT owner Ted Turner, in a brief, capricious "decency" campaign, refused to televise it -- it premiered on Showtime). The success of "Bastard" lifted the lifelong outsider from relative obscurity and penury to literary fame and middle-class comfort, much to her amusement.
Allison's long-awaited second novel, "Cavedweller," concerns Delia Byrd, a rock 'n' roll singer who abandons her career and returns with her third daughter to the small Georgia town where years earlier she had left two older children with the husband who nearly beat her to death. Allison spoke to Salon in the dining room of the bustling Victorian house in San Francisco where she lives with her lover, Alix, their young son, Wolf, and several extravagantly affectionate dogs and cats.
Tell me about "Cavedweller," the glimmer that was the beginning of this book.
I had Cissy in the cave. The notion was of somebody in such trouble that the only place she was going to feel safe was in this hole in the ground. And I had the notion of a woman who, in order to redeem herself, basically buries herself alive. And, of course, rock 'n' roll. I've been wanting to write a novel based on the story of Janis Joplin. Not a biography, but about that whole complex of working-class self-hatred and female masochism and self-destruction and great talent. Delia grew out of that.
Cissy is someone most at home in total darkness, and it's not a coincidence that the two women who she goes down there with are lesbians, even though Cissy doesn't get that.
She's in the dark in more ways than one. In this decade there is a lot of information about lesbians. But there wasn't before this, especially not in small towns. And so what happened is that you couldn't quite get it. It didn't quite register. You knew you were weird. And the first time Cissy gets a spark is with these girls, but she hasn't got any language or any concept to understand why she is mad for them.
"Bastard" was a book about getting out, while this is in many ways a book about going back home.
I think a lot in terms of what I am missing in books that I want. And I am missing a story of redemption that I find believable. Lyrical, but believable. I find Delia's redemption believable. I'm in awe of some of the women in my family. We're like these girls [points to a newspaper article about women on death row]. In my family, it is pretty traditional that we all commit some unforgivable sin and then spend the rest of our lives trying to redeem it in some fashion. And the romance of self-destruction: I truly do not know why some of us can resist it and some of us can't, why some of us kill our children and some of us try to send them whole into the world.
I don't believe that God does it. I don't know that I even believe in God. Some days, when I feel really tired, I kind of believe in God because it would be easier. I don't believe in fate, except some days. And I don't believe that fighting really hard and sacrificing necessarily makes a difference, but sometimes it does. I sometimes wonder how our family has survived at all. I feel that about working-class women and families, that some do everything and lose everything. And some don't. I just don't see enough of it in literature. I don't see enough honor paid.
How are Delia and her family different from the Boatwrights, the family in "Bastard"?
In terms of the working class they are one step up, because Grandaddy Bird had that piece of land. But I basically write about the working class in the way that, I think, Flannery O'Connor wrote about the middle class. There's a whole lot of range in there that is not usually recognized. I just don't think I could give you suburban middle-class families. I just don't think I can write them believably. I admire them. I envy them on occasion. I am trying desperately to raise a middle-class child, you know.
Have your own experiences as a parent affected --
Yes, God help us all! I can write about kids now without feeling like I am completely making it up whole, because now I see more children. And I begin to realize how unique my perspective on kids is, because I grew up with kids who were either so damaged you couldn't tell what they were thinking, or really smart kids. I was really smart, and the other kids around me, in order to survive, were all pretty sharp. Now, when I meet these kids who are so young and so fragile, I don't understand them. My boy is very intelligent, but he has got a tenderness. He has been protected. He has never been thrown on himself so severely that he had to get sharp. There is some kind of soft place in them that I don't quite get.
Do you think it is a middle-class kid thing?
No. It's about safety. I think if my mother hadn't married my stepfather, we might have had it. But we didn't. Fate went the other way, and we got sharp and damaged.
Of course, you don't want children to have to go through things like that, but on the other hand, you have so much respect for that sharpness and resilience.
I'm watching it. I'm watching this thing because it's a dangerous idea. I remember reading a short story years and years ago, a science-fiction story about parents in the future who wanted to raise genius children, and the way you did that was so heartbreaking. It was all about yelling at the kid, locking all the doors, refusing to let the kid have books and all of these calculated abuse strategies which were designed to produce a genius. I don't think it works. I think kids are a whole lot more complicated than that.
Cissy is a big science-fiction fan, like yourself. In an essay in "Skin," you write that you're about to confess something really, really embarrassing -- and it turns out to be your passion for science fiction! What did it mean to you as a girl?
Every kid I meet who's a reader has got something like that, their fantasy world. And science fiction is the best, especially for girls because it's the one place where you can do the forbidden. You pick it up because it's not about living in this place, where there is nothing that you can be or do, no adventure, no stepping out. The world is sitting on you like a horsehair blanket covering your head. Science fiction is where you can be anything. You can transgress in terms of gender, in terms of the body, in terms of imagination. You could be anything. I adored it, it was my safe place in my 20s. It was my whole imagination. I have not just a novel, but three linked science-fiction novels, and I have to finish them very soon.
You are very out about being a lesbian and other renegade aspects of your sexuality, and yet, in a funny way, your lifelong love of science fiction may be your last dark secret.
That's because it's an area in which there is a huge amount of contempt, partly because of the fantasy element. I subscribe to a discussion group on the Internet for feminist science-fiction writers. I barely qualify. I've published a couple of science-fiction stories. But I am a writer, and I am a science-fiction fan, and I get to have amazing conversations with Vonda McIntyre and Nicole Griffith, writers whose work I absolutely adore, who have been writing science fiction for 20 years or more and who get no respect. They are doing serious work. Their work is an assault on conventions so enormous that it is very much more dangerous, sometimes, than writing about lesbianism, which is essentially about love and romance.
I first met you before "Bastard" came out, and now things are so different. You're a mom and you actually have a comfortable, secure life. Back then, things felt like they were a little bit on the edge.
We were barely surviving. We were kiting one credit card to pay for the other. But you keep that quiet -- don't tell nobody. No, you learn to live with uncertainty and poverty if you are going to be a writer. I'm still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been able to make a living at it is astonishing. I know so many great writers who can't and, oh, it is not about justice. I am trying to carry it off with grace and a sense of humor.
You must have found a whole new readership, too.
I did a reading in Marin, the month after [the New York Times Book Review's rave for "Bastard"] came out. And, you know, I have been reading in public and doing my stuff for years, but I went to that reading, looked around the bookstore and realized that it was almost entirely people that I didn't know a thing about. Straight white people from Marin. They drove up in their BMWs and came in to have a look at me. And I was just shitting myself with terror. It was like, oookay. We are all loving books. We are going to do this.
We are not in Kansas anymore, in a funny reverse sort of way.
It's very interesting to me. They will give you a little room, you know. They get a little nervous every now and again, but I am very good for them. I am like a diuretic. Got to clean out all that stuff. I figure if they give me room, I'll give them room. I am not going to try to be nobody different -- and they wouldn't believe it if I tried.
Your life must have changed pretty quickly.
Well, yes and no. I was still poor. All that stuff happens and everybody thinks, whoa, she's rich. That was a bad couple of years just keeping balance, materially, emotionally and psychically. But I live with good people. My lover is -- we are not talking salt of the earth, we are talking the entire state of Utah. Good, solid people. And I have been doing this a long time. I think I would have been in real trouble if I had been young, because some of this stuff will really mess you up. I have seen it happen. Let me tell you, adulation is a remarkable drug. A whole lot better than any I ever tried as a young person. God. I mean look at me! Come on!
What do you mean by that?
When I go out and do these gigs, people show up and they all look at me like, she's the writer? She's the famous one? I just wrote a piece about it for one of the women's magazines. It is an article called, "Who I Am and Who I Think I Am." And it's about being sent somewhere, going to a really nice hotel and arriving late and they don't want to give me the room.
They look at you and they think, she's not the kind of person ...
This bitch is going to steal the sheets! Until they know you are The Writer, they treat you like dirt. It is a very, very effective way to remind you what kind of margin you are getting and what kind of margin you wouldn't have.
N E X T+P A G E +| Working hard enough to kill yourself
- - - - - - - - - - - -
ILLUSTRATION BY JOE MORSE


	T A B L E+T A L K What recent books will be future classics? Make your picks in the Books area of Table Talk A L S O+T O D A Y The Salon Interview: Ian McEwan By Dwight Garner (03/31/98) R E C E N T L Y Nadine Gordimer By Dwight Garner (03/09/98) P.D. James By Jennifer Reese (02/26/98) Stanley Crouch By Jonathan Broder (02/25/98) Martin Amis By Laura Miller (02/10/98) Toni Morrison By Zia Jaffrey (02/02/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - INTERVIEW ARCHIVE R E V I E W S The Short History of a Prince By Jane Hamilton A meditative novel, set in Wisconsin, about a former ballet dancer trying to come to terms with his new life (03/31/98)		_[ T H E _S A L O N_ I N T E R V I E W ] _____Dorothy Allison DOROTHY ALLISON TALKS ABOUT WORKING-CLASS GUILT, THE FILM VERSION OF "BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA" AND COMING OUT -- AS A SCIENCE-FICTION FAN. _____- - - - - - - - - - - - BY LAURA MILLER \| It's a toss-up which quality Dorothy Allison has in greater measure -- strength or charm. She's needed plenty of both to fight her way out of the desperate circumstances into which she was born. Her riveting, semi-autobiographical first novel, "Bastard Out of Carolina," portrays a dirt-poor Southern childhood in a family notorious for its violent, hard-drinking men and trouble-prone women. For Allison, these crushing circumstances were intensified by a physically and sexually abusive stepfather and, eventually, the discovery that she was a lesbian. She left home and devoted years of her life to feminist activism and collectives, although her refusal to toe the line sexually (or to keep quiet about her penchant for what she calls "rough trade") often made her an outcast there as well. She also began to write stories and essays whose fierce eloquence instantly gripped anyone lucky enough to discover them in alternative newspapers and books published by the small press Firebrand. Then, in 1992, "Bastard" was published to ecstatic acclaim, particularly a full page in the New York Times Book Review in which George Garrett proclaimed the novel "as close to flawless as any reader could ask for" and "simply stunning," and praised Allison's "perfect ear for speech and its natural rhythms." "Bastard" became a bestseller, a perennial favorite of reading groups, and was made into a 1996 film directed by Angelica Houston for TNT (although TNT owner Ted Turner, in a brief, capricious "decency" campaign, refused to televise it -- it premiered on Showtime). The success of "Bastard" lifted the lifelong outsider from relative obscurity and penury to literary fame and middle-class comfort, much to her amusement. Allison's long-awaited second novel, "Cavedweller," concerns Delia Byrd, a rock 'n' roll singer who abandons her career and returns with her third daughter to the small Georgia town where years earlier she had left two older children with the husband who nearly beat her to death. Allison spoke to Salon in the dining room of the bustling Victorian house in San Francisco where she lives with her lover, Alix, their young son, Wolf, and several extravagantly affectionate dogs and cats. Tell me about "Cavedweller," the glimmer that was the beginning of this book. I had Cissy in the cave. The notion was of somebody in such trouble that the only place she was going to feel safe was in this hole in the ground. And I had the notion of a woman who, in order to redeem herself, basically buries herself alive. And, of course, rock 'n' roll. I've been wanting to write a novel based on the story of Janis Joplin. Not a biography, but about that whole complex of working-class self-hatred and female masochism and self-destruction and great talent. Delia grew out of that. Cissy is someone most at home in total darkness, and it's not a coincidence that the two women who she goes down there with are lesbians, even though Cissy doesn't get that. She's in the dark in more ways than one. In this decade there is a lot of information about lesbians. But there wasn't before this, especially not in small towns. And so what happened is that you couldn't quite get it. It didn't quite register. You knew you were weird. And the first time Cissy gets a spark is with these girls, but she hasn't got any language or any concept to understand why she is mad for them. "Bastard" was a book about getting out, while this is in many ways a book about going back home. I think a lot in terms of what I am missing in books that I want. And I am missing a story of redemption that I find believable. Lyrical, but believable. I find Delia's redemption believable. I'm in awe of some of the women in my family. We're like these girls [points to a newspaper article about women on death row]. In my family, it is pretty traditional that we all commit some unforgivable sin and then spend the rest of our lives trying to redeem it in some fashion. And the romance of self-destruction: I truly do not know why some of us can resist it and some of us can't, why some of us kill our children and some of us try to send them whole into the world. I don't believe that God does it. I don't know that I even believe in God. Some days, when I feel really tired, I kind of believe in God because it would be easier. I don't believe in fate, except some days. And I don't believe that fighting really hard and sacrificing necessarily makes a difference, but sometimes it does. I sometimes wonder how our family has survived at all. I feel that about working-class women and families, that some do everything and lose everything. And some don't. I just don't see enough of it in literature. I don't see enough honor paid. How are Delia and her family different from the Boatwrights, the family in "Bastard"? In terms of the working class they are one step up, because Grandaddy Bird had that piece of land. But I basically write about the working class in the way that, I think, Flannery O'Connor wrote about the middle class. There's a whole lot of range in there that is not usually recognized. I just don't think I could give you suburban middle-class families. I just don't think I can write them believably. I admire them. I envy them on occasion. I am trying desperately to raise a middle-class child, you know. Have your own experiences as a parent affected -- Yes, God help us all! I can write about kids now without feeling like I am completely making it up whole, because now I see more children. And I begin to realize how unique my perspective on kids is, because I grew up with kids who were either so damaged you couldn't tell what they were thinking, or really smart kids. I was really smart, and the other kids around me, in order to survive, were all pretty sharp. Now, when I meet these kids who are so young and so fragile, I don't understand them. My boy is very intelligent, but he has got a tenderness. He has been protected. He has never been thrown on himself so severely that he had to get sharp. There is some kind of soft place in them that I don't quite get. Do you think it is a middle-class kid thing? No. It's about safety. I think if my mother hadn't married my stepfather, we might have had it. But we didn't. Fate went the other way, and we got sharp and damaged. Of course, you don't want children to have to go through things like that, but on the other hand, you have so much respect for that sharpness and resilience. I'm watching it. I'm watching this thing because it's a dangerous idea. I remember reading a short story years and years ago, a science-fiction story about parents in the future who wanted to raise genius children, and the way you did that was so heartbreaking. It was all about yelling at the kid, locking all the doors, refusing to let the kid have books and all of these calculated abuse strategies which were designed to produce a genius. I don't think it works. I think kids are a whole lot more complicated than that. Cissy is a big science-fiction fan, like yourself. In an essay in "Skin," you write that you're about to confess something really, really embarrassing -- and it turns out to be your passion for science fiction! What did it mean to you as a girl? Every kid I meet who's a reader has got something like that, their fantasy world. And science fiction is the best, especially for girls because it's the one place where you can do the forbidden. You pick it up because it's not about living in this place, where there is nothing that you can be or do, no adventure, no stepping out. The world is sitting on you like a horsehair blanket covering your head. Science fiction is where you can be anything. You can transgress in terms of gender, in terms of the body, in terms of imagination. You could be anything. I adored it, it was my safe place in my 20s. It was my whole imagination. I have not just a novel, but three linked science-fiction novels, and I have to finish them very soon. You are very out about being a lesbian and other renegade aspects of your sexuality, and yet, in a funny way, your lifelong love of science fiction may be your last dark secret. That's because it's an area in which there is a huge amount of contempt, partly because of the fantasy element. I subscribe to a discussion group on the Internet for feminist science-fiction writers. I barely qualify. I've published a couple of science-fiction stories. But I am a writer, and I am a science-fiction fan, and I get to have amazing conversations with Vonda McIntyre and Nicole Griffith, writers whose work I absolutely adore, who have been writing science fiction for 20 years or more and who get no respect. They are doing serious work. Their work is an assault on conventions so enormous that it is very much more dangerous, sometimes, than writing about lesbianism, which is essentially about love and romance. I first met you before "Bastard" came out, and now things are so different. You're a mom and you actually have a comfortable, secure life. Back then, things felt like they were a little bit on the edge. We were barely surviving. We were kiting one credit card to pay for the other. But you keep that quiet -- don't tell nobody. No, you learn to live with uncertainty and poverty if you are going to be a writer. I'm still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been able to make a living at it is astonishing. I know so many great writers who can't and, oh, it is not about justice. I am trying to carry it off with grace and a sense of humor. You must have found a whole new readership, too. I did a reading in Marin, the month after [the New York Times Book Review's rave for "Bastard"] came out. And, you know, I have been reading in public and doing my stuff for years, but I went to that reading, looked around the bookstore and realized that it was almost entirely people that I didn't know a thing about. Straight white people from Marin. They drove up in their BMWs and came in to have a look at me. And I was just shitting myself with terror. It was like, oookay. We are all loving books. We are going to do this. We are not in Kansas anymore, in a funny reverse sort of way. It's very interesting to me. They will give you a little room, you know. They get a little nervous every now and again, but I am very good for them. I am like a diuretic. Got to clean out all that stuff. I figure if they give me room, I'll give them room. I am not going to try to be nobody different -- and they wouldn't believe it if I tried. Your life must have changed pretty quickly. Well, yes and no. I was still poor. All that stuff happens and everybody thinks, whoa, she's rich. That was a bad couple of years just keeping balance, materially, emotionally and psychically. But I live with good people. My lover is -- we are not talking salt of the earth, we are talking the entire state of Utah. Good, solid people. And I have been doing this a long time. I think I would have been in real trouble if I had been young, because some of this stuff will really mess you up. I have seen it happen. Let me tell you, adulation is a remarkable drug. A whole lot better than any I ever tried as a young person. God. I mean look at me! Come on! What do you mean by that? When I go out and do these gigs, people show up and they all look at me like, she's the writer? She's the famous one? I just wrote a piece about it for one of the women's magazines. It is an article called, "Who I Am and Who I Think I Am." And it's about being sent somewhere, going to a really nice hotel and arriving late and they don't want to give me the room. They look at you and they think, she's not the kind of person ... This bitch is going to steal the sheets! Until they know you are The Writer, they treat you like dirt. It is a very, very effective way to remind you what kind of margin you are getting and what kind of margin you wouldn't have. N E X T+P A G E +\| Working hard enough to kill yourself - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY JOE MORSE