"I had to start dating upper-class girls to learn about shoes"

November 9, 2024 7:22 AM

“Every time I sit down to write, I have a great fear that anything I write will reveal me as the monster I was always told I would be. But that fear is personal, something I must face in everything I do, every act I contemplate. Writing is an act that claims courage and meaning, and turns back denial, breaks open fear.” Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina (and the equally amazing Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, among others), has died. NYT obituary (archived).
posted by mittens (14 comments total)

Yesterday I was reading Brandon Taylor's most recent newsletter, and his description of how hard it was to breathe, with smoking parents--smoking everyone--and pollen everywhere ("The yellow-green pollen spread out over the benches by the side of the house, stuck to the window screens, plastering the backs of the fan blades in the box fans set in the windows."), was like a proustian madeleine for me, opening up memories of growing up here in the South, everything either humid or smoky or dusty, paint and floors peeling up, and that made me think about Dorothy Allison, whose Bastard was one of the first times I really felt like I'd read about the world I grew up in. I didn't grow up as poor as either of those writers--I was a generation past that--but growing up an avid reader of horror and science fiction, and then learning all the 'real' books in college, I somehow missed reading any books that talked about the south, a particular kind of south, poor and crazy and dangerous.

Anyway, you know, my mind was kind of wandering around this topic, and now come to find out, Allison has died. I hadn't realized she was in her 70s; the places and people she wrote about are, not exactly timeless, but things moved more slowly then, a past sort of smeared around so that the sharp delineation of decades is harder to see, and so I'd somehow thought she was my own age.

If you're having trouble this week, and want a reminder that it's possible to live through the dark, and if you've never read her before, and if you don't mind stepping into some muddy water and getting your shoes messed up, you should really go read her books.
posted by mittens at 7:33 AM on November 9 [24 favorites]

Greenville, SC is my hometown and frankly she was the best thing to ever come out of such a blighted place.

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posted by Kitteh at 7:52 AM on November 9 [6 favorites]

💔💔💔💔💔💔💔
I (M 57) must have read “Bastard…” in 1993 or 94. It and especially “Trash” and “Skin…” shortly thereafter, along with everything I could get by Cookie Mueller and Pat California really set my internal tone at that time during my junior and senior year of college. I won’t credit her with completely igniting my class awakening but it was a pretty firm nudge. Coming to terms with being gay wasn’t enough and it took a real, relatable, down to earth account of working class damage for me to figure out what was “ wrong” with me. Why I didn’t ultimately relate to the middle and upper middle class kids around me.

I had honestly forgotten her name recently and had been trying to remember. Such a sad way t find out.
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 8:02 AM on November 9 [9 favorites]

Oh. Oh no. 💔
posted by eviemath at 8:15 AM on November 9

“…Pat Califia”

(Macs have the worst most obtrusive autocorrect)
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 8:39 AM on November 9 [4 favorites]

Oh my goodness. How sad. I read all her books when they came out. I read Trash and my mother found it (from the library, must have been the 1990 edition). I would have been sixteen or seventeen, and she took it away because she flipped through it and said it was too sexually explicit. I pretended I hadn't read it yet, but I had.

It was because I read her essays that I read Samuel Delany, because she talks up "Time Considered As A Helix of Semi-Precious Stones", which I wanted to read and sought out and was totally totally confused and put off by. It was not what I had hoped. I can't for the life of me remember how I went from feeling like a bad reader and sort of dumb to reading all the Delany I could find, but it very well might not have happened if it were not for her. (In retrospect, I think I brute-forced my way through the Neveryona books because they were gay and eventually something clicked.)

Younger people don't know a thing about her work. It's the damnedest thing - I was talking to some queer folks in their twenties/early thirties and no one had heard of her. But I feel that her essays in particular are really essential queer reading.

Boy, how sad. So we sail on into our horrible future, bereft of people one by one.

I was thinking this morning that at least, even if we lose forever, they can't out-create us, they will never be heroic or create great work. They'll always be mean little men with gold toilets and pinched faces. Dorothy Allison was an art hero; nothing can make that untrue.
posted by Frowner at 8:44 AM on November 9 [20 favorites]

I own not one but two copies of Bastard Out of Carolina. One is signed by the author, one is signed by the friend who gave it to me not knowing about the other copy or that I had already read it more than once. I treasure them both. Just an amazing unflinching brilliant book and one that encapsulates a whole world. I wish she had written more but she said, I guess, what she had to say.

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posted by mygothlaundry at 9:15 AM on November 9 [4 favorites]

75 is too young for such a talent. One again, fuck cancer.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:10 AM on November 9 [2 favorites]

Pulled into my reading list. There are so many wonderful Southern authors, how did I miss this one?

Yes, Frowner. We lose gold. Dross lingers.
posted by BlueHorse at 11:27 AM on November 9

I've been remembering how bad things used to be lately.

Nothing we're going through now is anywhere close to what they had in the Civil Rights struggles. Though a lot of those people can't be very happy about what "Victory" has done to their young. It was somewhere around when I was born they stopped having the semi-public lynchings in the South. Not that many, certainly from what they used to be, but (I believe) it happened.

And South Africa...

And...

Besides the constant struggle to do what you can, the path out has always been community development. *And* nowadays, personal development where you are not tied to the dopamine fixes so everywhere now. They're used as comforts at best and like all comforts can smother you if you so choose. Like resisting the easy street drugs we have new struggles to master.

I wonder if the young men I've heard of "raw dogging" on flights is an attempt at this? If what I've heard isn't incorrect.
posted by aleph at 11:44 AM on November 9

Bastard had a profound impact on me when it came out. I spent hours talking about it with my friend at the time, it led us to start a book group. She was so gifted. She made things that will last in a good way.
posted by kitten kaboodle at 4:26 PM on November 9 [2 favorites]

My copy of Bastard Out of Carolina was stolen from my undergrad library (forgive me) along with a copy of Zami by Audre Lorde. In the 90s, almost all the queer books I had found in the public library or furtively flipped through in the bookstore were about/by gay men. Idioms of hers still show up in my internal monologue regularly…
posted by BundleOfHers at 4:47 PM on November 9

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posted by gusandrews at 6:03 PM on November 10

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posted by vitabellosi at 7:30 AM on November 11