Talking Trash
The Interview: Dorothy Allison(Originally published in San Francisco Focus, KQED, Northern California Broadcasting)
From "white trash" waitress to National Book Award finalist for Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison has never forgotten her roots. But she has turned a legacy of shame into a wellspring of pride.
By Marilee Strong
"We don’t think of the white poor in this country anymore," says forty-five-year-old Russian River writer Dorothy Allison. "But when I was growing up, there was this myth of the `good’ poor. You know, `They’re ragged, but they’re clean.’ It’s an amazing mix of contempt and romanticization. We hate the poor in this country, and we created this myth as a way to hide that hatred and contempt. We really want poor people just to go away or be fertilizer for those of us who are going to do well.
"It’s like crabs in a bucket. When I was a kid we would collect crabs, and the two things you notice immediately are that they hate being in that bucket and that they’ll kill each other to get out. We tell each other that the good poor are noble and long-suffering and saintly. The bad poor is that crab stepping on the other crab to get the fuck out of the bucket. I climbed out of the bucket. But if you’ve taken in that myth, you have no choice but self-hatred. It’s why we drink, it’s why we do drugs. It’s why I used to pick up really evil, drunken girls who’d beat the snot out of me and convince me that I was just as worthless as I thought I was.
"To survive sometimes you collude with the lie, but real survival is to refuse to collude anymore. It’s to force people to see that when you pretend that there is a good poor and a bad poor, you’re killing people. They kill themselves, or they let themselves be killed. I saw it happen in my family over and over again."
Dorothy Allison speaks, as she writes, with unflinching honesty about a world where pain and love intersect, a world Americans like to believe does not exist. Its people are trapped behind the invisible barrier of social class, living the inverse of the American dream: "trash" they are called, or, in more polite company, the "working poor." Their existence is all but invisible--or savagely caricatured--in art and literature. But the former "white trash waitress" is determined to change all that.
In her powerful first novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, Allison drew on her own harrowing childhood in 1950s Greenville, South Carolina: the stigma of growing up a bastard, the shame and pride she felt toward the family she says both nurtured and nearly destroyed her, and her complicated yet undying love for a mother who chose her husband over the stepdaughter he beat and molested. (When contacted by San Francisco Focus, Allison’s stepfather denied he ever physically or sexually abused her. "Everything she says against me is untrue. I never touched her at all. I did everything I possibly could for that girl all my life.")
Bastard tells the story of the extended Boatwright family through the eyes of Bone, the illegitimate daughter of waitress Anney Boatwright--born, like Allison, a month past her mother’s fifteenth birthday. At twenty-two, Anney marries Glen Waddell, the son of one of Greenville’s more successful clans, hoping to legitimize her own family and raise it from the grinding poverty she has always known. But those dreams implode as "Daddy Glen" takes out his frustrations on Bone, leading Anney, a product of her environment as much as Glen, to her own painful betrayal of her daughter.
The book, which was a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award, was heralded by The Nation as "a singular and important act of art and courage." The New York Times called Bastard "simply stunning, about as close to flawless as any reader could ask for, and any writer, at any age or stage, could hope for and aspire to." The book has sold more than 200,000 copies and has been optioned by Viacom with Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging) as director.
The road to success has been a long, strange trip for the self-described "cross-eyed, working-class lesbian addicted to violence, language, and hope."
Allison managed to escape the fate that destroyed so many generations of her family through her own stubborn determination and the occasional kindness of strangers: eyeglasses donated by the Lions Club, a job from Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and a National Merit Scholarship that allowed her to go to college. The first to graduate from high school in her family, she went on to get a bachelor’s degree from Florida Presbyterian College and a master’s degree from New York’s New School of Social Research, migrating north and eventually west to San Francisco’s Mission District, to Monte Rio, and this year to a small town outside Guerneville.
She became a feminist activist in the 1960s and spent the next twenty years writing and editing in the gay and women’s press and teaching at Florida State, Rutgers, Wesleyan, and the San Francisco Art Institute. Trash, her 1988 collection of short stories published by Firebrand, a small feminist publishing house, won two Lambda Awards in 1989 and sold well enough to garner the attention of the big mainstream publishers. Dutton gave Allison a $37,500 advance for her then half-finished first novel, making her one of the highest-paid lesbian writers in the country.
Fearful that her work might get lost in a big house, Allison convinced the publisher to let her market Bastard her own way. Rather than blowing the publicity budget on a few ads in tony publications, she bought a train ticket and spent two months visiting gay, women’s, and alternative bookstores, bringing her characters to life with dramatic readings in her expressive Southern drawl. She ended up with pneumonia but managed to sell out the first printing. Nine hardcover and nine paperback printings later, the book is still selling briskly--up to a thousand copies a week.
In July, Firebrand will publish Allison’s first completely nonfiction book, Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature. The narrative essays reveal even more facets of Allison’s eclectic personality: her fascination with guns, surviving a public scandal in the women’s movement, and the pain of her mother’s death.
When I first heard Dorothy Allison speak, shortly after the publication of Bastard, I felt a strange jolt of recognition, as if someone were at long last speaking my language. As a daughter of the working class, I, too, had somehow managed to cross the culture line, but with battle scars that continue to confound me. The experience has colored my world and everything in it, including, most destructively, my view of myself. Like Allison, I’ve spent a lifetime trying to learn to feel like a we, not a they.
So it was with great pleasure that I sat down to talk trash with Dorothy Allison in "the house that Bastard bought," the modest home she shares with her partner of six years, Alix Layman--a printer by trade, musician by love--and their twenty-one-month-old son, Wolf Michael. Allison is as eloquent and unaffected in person as she is on the page, her speech punctuated by passion, irony, and much good humor.
SF FOCUS: Is it daunting to follow up a book as successful as Bastard Out of Carolina, which seems to have taken on a life of its own?
ALLISON: Yes. I thought I could go back to being this hide-up-in-the-woods-and-write person. But Bastard just keeps selling. I find it truly remarkable. I mean, it’s not Danielle Steele. It’s not a mystery, nobody gets killed.
SF FOCUS: I find it remarkable because the subject matter is so emotionally intense; it’s not the kind of book most people think they want to read. Yet every time I go to a bookstore--even now, two years after its publication--I see someone buying it. Some bookstores have even included it on their recommended reading lists.
ALLISON: I’m at Costco, for God’s sake! [Laughs] I think it’s wonderful that people in pickup trucks are buying two flats of dog food and a copy of Bastard. Literary arrogance is bullshit. I want my view of the world to be right up there next to the gallon boxes of Tide. Check me out at the checkout stand. I want to reach as many people as possible, and as deeply as possible.
SF FOCUS: Were you surprised by the mainstream success of Bastard, considering you had published only in the gay and feminist press?
ALLISON: I think it’s astonishing that Bastard got picked up by a major house, not because of the book but because of who I am. I still don’t quite get it except that I think people are hungry for real characters, for emotional honesty, for books that the writers really care about. Do you ever look at what’s on the best-seller lists?
SF FOCUS: Yeah, Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern.
ALLISON: And Robert James Waller’s Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend. I actually tried to read that. Oh boy. They’re selling millions of copies. "Trade" used to be a code word for literary fiction. Now it’s just a size. So there’s this little category of literary fiction, but we’re not selling anywhere near the numbers of Thin Thighs in 30 Days or Rush Limbaugh or the dysfunctional pop psychology books.
SF FOCUS: Your writing has always been a means of self-exploration, but your new book, Skin, is the first to be completely nonfiction. Does that feel more emotionally naked to you?
ALLISON: Yes, and it’s scaring me to death.
SF FOCUS: Because you had to live so much of your life in denial of what was happening to you?
ALLISON: Oh Lord, child, "live in denial" is not a creative enough expression for what really happens in life! [Laughs] I lived in my head completely. I had to make a movie out of my life for it to make sense, to survive it. And when you romanticize your own life, you lose some of the important details.
SF FOCUS: In my experience, the hardest thing about growing up working class is believing you can be more than what is expected of you, that you can be part of a world not defined by failure and hopelessness. I was particularly interested in the distinction you draw in Skin between the "good" poor and the "bad" poor, a myth that had deadly repercussions in your family. Can you give us an example?
ALLISON: You ever see anybody get a scholarship and not use it? Or be given an opportunity and fuck it up? You know, get a good job, get drunk, get fired. Win something and destroy it. In my family, they’re always saving up every penny they can to get a good truck. Get a good truck and you’re going to get a good job, they think. Well, they wreck the truck. They shoot each other. With enormous love and carelessness, they hurt each other. All that slow death is about feeling that you don’t have any value. It’s about believing the myth of the poor, and knowing that you don’t fit it.
SF FOCUS: Did you believe the myth?
ALLISON: Oh yeah. I can remember being a kid and being told that I was a bastard and that’s why the other little kids in the neighborhood wouldn’t buy my lemonade. And then being in junior high and going over to somebody’s house and having her mother follow me around because she thought I was going to steal something. That expectation is like acid on your soul, and you begin to think there must be something deeply wrong with you. And if so, why not die? Why not be what they expect you to be?
SF FOCUS: In the introduction to your 1988 collection of short stories, Trash, you say that starting to write for you was a decision to live. Were you actually considering suicide?
ALLISON: Often, and in as many different ways as possible. I once climbed into a bathtub with a shotgun, but all I could think of was that somebody would have to clean my brains off the wall. Mostly I’d get really drunk and pick up dangerous people. That’s a damn good way to kill yourself. It worked for a lot of my relatives. Deciding to live is something I’ve had to do over and over again. I don’t think it’s a process that ever stops. Writing Skin, I had to start thinking about it again because when I’m finishing a book I can’t sleep. I’d get up and pace and have long conversations with people in my head to justify my life.
SF FOCUS: I think I know where that feeling comes from, but since our readers may not, why don’t you put it in your words?
ALLISON: [Laughs mordantly] Darlin’, I was raised to die. My mother loved me and my sisters enormously, and she fought desperately to get us through our childhoods intact, but she failed utterly. She kept us alive, and she minimized the damage, but the one thing she couldn’t prevent was the fact that we breathed in hatred constantly. Not just from my stepfather but from everyone, because we were trash. I mean, we were supposed to grow up to be whores. We were supposed to die. And every day we live is a startling affront to a whole bunch of people. Sometimes I think that’s what keeps us alive. It doesn’t keep us sane, and it does not make it easy.
SF FOCUS: Were books a refuge for you as a child?
ALLISON: Not after I started looking for myself in them. When I was ten or eleven, I started reading every book I could get about the poor. And for the most part they’re whitewashed. You know that you’re ragged and you’re not as clean as you should be, that your daddy gets drunk and your mother sometimes brings home meat from the diner that she didn’t pay for. You know that you’re not noble like the poor kids in these glossy Disney books. So you go looking for something else and you find books like Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road. In mainstream fiction in the fifties the poor are venal. There’s always this desperate boy doing anything to succeed. They made them into movies, so it’s American culture writ large. But the son of a bitch always is destroyed in the end, because he’s not really noble. It’s incredibly destructive. You wind up leading a joyless life because they don’t show you any way out.
SF FOCUS: Were you able to find any books that portrayed the working class the way you would come to do in your work, without derision or sentimentality?
ALLISON: There were a few books that gave me hope, most of them written in the thirties. Josephine Herbst, Meridel LeSeuer--those Commies understood that there’s no such thing as the noble poor, just the poor trying hard not to be poor. That saved my life, finding some of those books. And the weird thing, since I was a white kid growing up in a really racist culture, was reading black novelists. They wrote about the poor without that lie that white people were giving me. Just Above My Head, James Baldwin’s novel--that was my family! He showed you poor people who were not saints, and not devils, just people trying to make their way. And Flannery O’Connor could make you laugh and make you ashamed of yourself at the same time. When I found out that people could make you ashamed of yourself in a book, it gave me hope for revenge. I wanted to make my stepfather ashamed of himself, and I wanted to make those little girls in the clean, white dresses who had treated me badly ashamed of themselves. I wanted to make this society ashamed of itself for what it tried to do to me and my sisters. That’s a motivation to write.
SF FOCUS: It’s hard to write anything and have other people read it. You write about the most painful, intimate, important things in your life. Where do you get the courage?
ALLISON: It’s that desperate courage, the one that says, "I don’t dare admit how scared I am." I think that, especially for working-class girls, we’re encouraged to go through the world in hiding. But if there is any purpose to life, it is to figure out your own stuff, to claim some kind of vindication. The way I’ve learned to do that is to write. But where it gets complicated is when it touches other people.
SF FOCUS: It’s no secret that Bastard Out of Carolina is based largely on your experiences growing up in the rural South. Did you ever find out who your real father is?
ALLISON: He was an insurance salesman. He moved off to Blackburn, South Carolina, and had six other kids. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. My mother didn’t want to pick cotton; that’s all she ever told me. She ran off with him when she was fourteen, married him, got pregnant, didn’t yet know she was pregnant, and came home. My grandmother Mattie threw a hissy fit. She had her sons beat the shit out of that boy and had the marriage annulled.
SF FOCUS: Did you ever meet him?
ALLISON: Once. The family legend is that he came to my Aunt Dot’s house when I was two weeks old. Back then they had this idea about newborns that they had to keep the house really hot, so they had my mother in the room with the coal stove. I have this image of a steamy room with all these women standing around hating this poor boy. Christ God, I think he was seventeen and scared to death. Technically, what he was supposed to have done when she was revealed to be pregnant was to come back and insist that he was going to be the father. But he didn’t, he ran. So he picked me up, and I peed on him. [Laughs] For years, that’s the only thing they ever told me about him. "You peed on him! We were so proud of you!" Never saw him again.
SF FOCUS: Did your mother try to have your birth certificate amended to make you legitimate, like the mother character, Anney Boatwright, does in Bastard?
ALLISON: She burned it. The biggest fight we ever had was when I was nineteen and wanted to get a passport. I had to order a copy of my birth certificate, and we had to go in together to get the passport. As soon as we were done, she tore the certificate up and said, "We’ll not have it in the house, and don’t you ever talk to me about this again." I think the shame she felt was one of the reasons she stayed with my stepfather. She wanted to be respectable.
SF FOCUS: When you were growing up, did you go hungry? You have these very powerful scenes in the book of your child heroine, Bone, living off soda crackers and ketchup when things got tough.
ALLISON: My mother was extremely effective. She had sugar daddies, older men who helped out. It got very bad a few times when I was really little. My stepfather came home one day and sat down on the couch and didn’t get up for several weeks. But a bigger problem was that we didn’t go to doctors. I never saw a dentist until I was in college. Didn’t have enough clothes. My mother was pretty good about food because she worked in the food industry, and she was not above sneaking food home.
SF FOCUS: Your stepfather put up with her having these sugar daddies?
ALLISON: It’s more complicated than "put up with." I think he hated it, but he benefited from it. I remember distinctly that at one point they were able to buy a car because the sugar daddy owned a car lot. I don’t think she was having real sex with them, but they got to feel good about having this pretty woman that they took care of. She was infinitely gentle, infinitely loving. People fell in love with her and helped her. That’s how she thought about it. But there were terrible fights. Sometimes my stepfather broke doors because somebody else paid for something he couldn’t.
SF FOCUS: Is that what you meant about being raised to be whores? That even in a relationship like that women are, in a sense, bought and paid for?
ALLISON: Partly, but there was something even more pervasive. I’ll give you an example. My little sister was incredibly beautiful, so beautiful people would stop on the street to look at her. Yet girls wouldn’t let her date their brothers; she couldn’t get an after-school job. I cannot understand it except to believe that they thought she was too poor to be that beautiful. They left her nothing else to do but whore, and then when she didn’t, they treated her as if she did. Little girls like my sister get broken so many times they’re held together with spit. So if anybody shows them any kindness, they think they’re deeply in debt. It’s an interesting way to raise a generation that’ll do anything for a little love.
SF FOCUS: When Bastard came out you told one reviewer that you made Bone a stronger child than you were, and you gave her a way out of her predicament. If it had been truly autobiographical, you said, it would have been a lot meaner. How so?
ALLISON: I gave Bone a good substitute mother in Aunt Raylene. My mother wanted to be a good mother. She tried desperately, and on half a dozen occasions she literally saved me from being murdered. But I would not have been in that danger if she hadn’t married the man she had, and I wouldn’t have remained in that danger if she had known how to get away from it. Bone gets mad at her mother, claims a sense of herself, and goes to live with somebody who will teach her not to give her life away to a man who won’t value it. My mother died still living with my stepfather.
SF FOCUS: Did your mother know what was going on?
ALLISON: She knew and she didn’t know. She knew I was being beaten. Her whole life was designed around preventing me from being hurt any worse than I was being hurt. He never hit my mother, but he would punch at her, and his fist would stop just inches from her face. He would scream at her, kick in doors, break things she loved. He would go literally four or five days at a time without speaking, just sitting in the middle of the living room, staring at us like he was going to get up and cut our heads off. It was incredible, just the most appalling jungle hothouse of emotion you can imagine. A lot of the sexual abuse she wasn’t really clear about, and I colluded in that.
SF FOCUS: Why?
ALLISON: Because I was in love with my mother, and because I was convinced that he had a right to beat me. The sexual abuse is actually the least destructive part of it. When they are raping you, you can hate them. When they get up every morning and tell you you’re a dog for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, when they knock you down with that contempt until you believe you’re contemptible--that’s the greatest damage. That’s what has lain on my life like a layer of dirt I cannot wash off. I can get out from under almost everything else, but I breathed in that hatred so deeply I can still breathe it out now.
SF FOCUS: Did anyone in your family try to intervene?
ALLISON: Oh yes, repeatedly. When I was about eight one of my aunts discovered how badly I had been beaten and got my uncles to beat my stepfather up. But my stepfather just kept moving us further and further away from anybody who would intervene. And when outsiders tried to intervene we wouldn’t cooperate. I had a really good teacher in the sixth grade who took me aside and tried to talk to me. That terrified me. I thought she was going to take me away from my mother.
SF FOCUS: You’ve been very critical of writers you say eroticize incest and family violence into a pornography of victimization.
ALLISON: I call it pseudo-porn. You know, that movie-of-the-week shit where the child is raped just as an excuse for daddy to go kill the rapist. It’s the standard American plot. If it’s only a plot factor, if it’s only motivation for the man to feel good about himself or to jerk off, it gets me ticked. It feels like my life has been used.
SF FOCUS: How did you take measures in Bastard to avoid doing the same?
ALLISON: I cut a lot of stuff out. There’s no description of genitals; there’s no description of the actual act of intercourse except from the perspective of this child who is being hurt terribly. For most of the book, you don’t even know what the man is doing, and that’s very deliberate. Because a lot of what has messed with my head when I read other books has been the enormous gratuitous detail. What always seemed to me to be missing was the enormous emotional impact. All there is in Bastard is the emotional impact.
SF FOCUS: What struck me most about Bastard, and it comes up again in Skin, is how painful and complicated the love must be that you feel toward your mother. Ultimately, she chose your abuser over you.
ALLISON: Yeah, but people don’t ever think that way. No woman ever chooses for her abuser over her child. Real life is infinitely complicated. Fiction makes that clear. My mother never forgave herself for staying with my stepfather. She held herself responsible, not just for that but for everything.
SF FOCUS: Why do you think she stayed with him?
ALLISON: She was raised to believe that because she was female, she was responsible. One of the bad things about growing up in the South, and one of the really bad things in the working-class family, is that men are raised to be children. At its worst, it infantilizes them and produces violent boys who see women and kids as something that belongs to them, something that they can do anything to. And the women accept it and play into it. I watched my aunts turn some half-decent men into pitiful sons of bitches just by being resigned to men’s inability to control their temper and their sex drive.
SF FOCUS: So you think your mother felt as responsible for her husband as she did for her children?
ALLISON: Absolutely. My mother always talked about the abuse roundabout and in code. In one of the worst conversations we ever had, she said she was ashamed that she could never really--she didn’t use the word satisfy, but that’s what she meant--my stepfather. She had this notion in her head that if she’d just been a good enough wife he wouldn’t have had to beat me. She couldn’t even talk about the fact that he raped me. That was not possible for her to think about. The few times when it got really up in her face she left. She went back, but every time she came back believing it was never going to happen again.
SF FOCUS: How does he respond to what you’ve written and said about him?
ALLISON: He has never admitted that he did anything wrong. His side of the story is that we were dangerous. The final irony was that just before I went away to school he got in a fight at work with another man. He was arrested for assault, the court sent him to a psychiatrist, and they put him on drugs. He’s been on some kind of medication ever since, as far as I know.
SF FOCUS: So when he hurt someone outside of the family, it was no longer acceptable behavior?
ALLISON: Exactly. He could have killed us, but he punched one man--a respectable, middle-class store owner--and he was in deep shit. It made me incredibly cynical about how the world works.
SF FOCUS: Do you ever see him now or talk to him?
ALLISON: The last time I saw him was the day after my mother’s funeral in 1990. I don’t ever have to see him again, and I don’t intend to.
SF FOCUS: How were you able to forgive your mother for not protecting you?
ALLISON: It wasn’t simple, but I loved her. For a few years of my life, in my late twenties, I hated her almost as much. I didn’t go home. If I did not answer the phone when she called, my sisters would call me, and if I was rude to my stepfather he would make my mother miserable. I had to call up and pretend that we were family and that nothing had ever happened.
SF FOCUS: Were you ever able to talk to your mother about these things before she died?
ALLISON: Several times. There was a point in the mid seventies when I sent her a plane ticket to come visit me, and we had a couple of long talks. That was when I was trying to get past being so angry at her. I finally had to look at the fact that I was holding her responsible for things she still did not know. Like she didn’t know until I was in my thirties that I couldn’t have kids. I wrote a story about it, and I sent it to her.
SF FOCUS: You can’t physically have a child?
ALLISON: No. My stepfather gave me gonorrhea when I was twelve. I knew something was wrong, but it was nothing I was going to tell anybody about. And since we didn’t go to doctors, I didn’t actually get medical treatment until I was in my early twenties. By that time I had too much scar tissue.
SF FOCUS: That must have been a devastating story for you to write and for your mother to read.
ALLISON: I was ashamed of myself for having told her in that way. My mother always wanted me to have children. She had almost an obsession about it. I think my anger at her was why I didn’t tell her. It was like I was keeping from her the one thing she really wanted.
SF FOCUS: I know she was reading Bastard as you were writing it, but she died before the ending was written. How did she feel about the book?
ALLISON: She thought I told the wrong stories. She would tell me stories I should be telling: all these marvelous tales about her sisters and brothers. My grandmother had eleven children: five boys, six girls. Only one lived long enough to collect Social Security. There was this enormous history that had disappeared. I didn’t use the stories she told me, but I used the feel of those brothers and sisters who loved each other so much but could not help each other. Some of her stories I am going to write someday. They’re too good to let disappear.
SF FOCUS: It still must be a complicated and ambivalent love you have for her. I heard that after she died, you wrote a different ending for Bastard where Bone and her mother kill Daddy Glen.
ALLISON: Yes, it was marvelous. [Laughs]
SF FOCUS: The ultimate fantasy?
ALLISON: It was good for my soul. I made Anney a heroine, which is really weird because I was clear when I was writing the book that Anney was not my mother. Aunt Ruth in the book is much more based on my mother. But it was a terrible thing. I turned it into one of those "good" poor stories. God, Disney could have filmed it! Except the ending was so violent. I killed him in a highly grandiose fashion.
SF FOCUS: How did you do it?
ALLISON: Ran him over with a truck; smashed him into the porch and cut him in half. My mother’s death filled me with enormous grief and a whole lot more rage. I felt she had been robbed. When somebody dies it’s as if the novel of their life ends and you’re supposed to say what it all means. I looked at my mama’s life and I wanted to kill somebody. So I killed Glen, and I had Anney and Bone do it together. But it was terrible. It was too easy and trite.
SF FOCUS: Did you cut it out to save the book?
ALLISON: No, I cut it out to save my soul. The book got saved along the way. I don’t believe in murder as a solution. I’ll have to live with my stepfather the rest of my life if I kill him. I want to live past him.
SF FOCUS: I’ve heard that you say the first rule of writing is to love your characters.
ALLISON: Even the ones you hate. You have to get inside them.
SF FOCUS: So did you even love the Daddy Glen character?
ALLISON: Of course. I had to make somebody I could almost understand. I didn’t quite manage it, actually, and I think it’s a flaw in the book.
SF FOCUS: The novel you’re working on now, Cavedweller, is going to be about three sisters in a working-class family. What are you trying to explore in that book?
ALLISON: The belief that you’re supposed to grow up joyless, like crabs in a bucket, climbing over each other. What I’m trying to write out is how you can get the notion that you can do something different.
SF FOCUS: Let’s talk about breaking out. You certainly aren’t living out the legacy that was passed down to you. How did you transcend it?
ALLISON: I almost didn’t. I wanted to go to college, but I didn’t know what happened there. When I started planning for after college, I didn’t know what a job was that wasn’t in a factory or a diner. I got a degree in anthropology and went and became a salad girl, for God’s sake! Living up to every class stereotype.
SF FOCUS: So how did you eventually get the idea that you could do something different?
ALLISON: I think I would have died if there hadn’t been the women’s movement. It gave me a vision that I could do something different, and it gave me an understanding that I wasn’t a monster, or sport, or a betrayer of my family. And it gave me a source of joy. It told me that being a lesbian was not a crime or a sin, that I could be happy, and that I could do something of use.
SF FOCUS: There must have been a kernel of hope even before you encountered the women’s movement. What made you think you could go to college and develop a life of the mind?
ALLISON: My mother. She thought I was a miracle. When I was five years old, she discovered I could read, and she never got over it. She decided that I was a genius, that I could do anything. It was her vindication. She had a bastard child, but the bastard’s a genius! When I was in first grade, she started putting her tips in the jar and saying, "This is for you to go to school." Something would always happen, and she’d have to empty the jar. When I went away to college, she didn’t have a penny. I went totally on scholarship. But it was the idea that counted. And I’ve seen what it did to my sisters not to have that, because she didn’t believe in them the way she believed in me.
SF FOCUS: Do you feel, in some ways, guilty about escaping?
ALLISON: Yes! Survivor guilt is so deep. I’m convinced that to be worthy of having survived, when all these people I loved didn’t survive, there’s got to be something huge that I’m supposed to do. It’s like I’m in emotional hock, permanently. When I was about thirty-four, before I left New York and moved to California, I got really depressed. I went to see a therapist, and she said, "Let’s make a list of everything you’ve done." It was really hard for me to think of anything I had done. So she finally sat down and interviewed me about my life. "Okay, you graduated from college. You won this award. You established this, you did that." After a while we had all these pages. Then she turned them over and said, "Tell me something on the list"--and I couldn’t remember anything of worth about me.
SF FOCUS: Is it hard to celebrate your own success?
ALLISON: The world would like us to believe that if you do well, if you do anything successful, you are proof that everybody else in your family is worthless. I’m no different from my sisters, my cousins. I’ve got the attitude and the same kinds of fear, where I wake up at night and I can’t go back to sleep. I just did this one weird thing. I stayed in school.
SF FOCUS: Identity must have been such a struggle for you already--being poor, being a bastard, being an abused child. It must have been really overwhelming when sexual orientation entered the mix.
ALLISON: I actually deeply believe that being a lesbian is part of why I survived. It’s easier to crawl through the eye of a needle than to be a heterosexual thirteen-year-old in my family. For one thing, other girls cannot make you pregnant.
SF FOCUS: When did you first realize you were a lesbian?
ALLISON: When I was an adolescent. There was no way around it, because your body will tell you things that your mind can’t tolerate. It scared me to death. But desire, even though it’s scary and embattled, is such a source of joy. I would fall in love with these other little girls, and it would be hopeless and tragic and scary, yet it would be exalting. It would be a reason to get up in the morning. The first stories I ever wrote were stories I wrote for other little girls. It was the place in my life where, even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to, I felt good about myself.
SF FOCUS: How did you come out to your family?
ALLISON: My mother and my sisters knew before I did, and they were appalled. My mother believed that being a lesbian was a death sentence, and it terrified her. She didn’t have any trouble with the lesbian part. She was just afraid someone was going to kill me, or that I was going to kill myself out of despair. You’ve got to remember, I was born in 1949, so the point at which it began dawning on me that I was a lesbian was even before the women’s movement. My sisters wanted me to move away. One of them went through a period where she got into fundamentalism. She spent like twenty-four hours trying to save my soul. Eventually, my mother put it to them this way: "You’ve got to decide whether you’re going to be your sister’s sister or not." For her, there wasn’t any choice.
SF FOCUS: Now you’re a mother yourself. How did you make the decision to become a parent?
ALLISON: With enormous difficulty. Once we moved in together and became semi-serious, Alix told me that she wanted to have children, and because I can’t have kids I told her I had a lot of trouble with the idea. I had tremendous anger about not being able to choose, and I was really jealous of her ability to make that decision. It took me a long time to work my way around to deciding that I could deal with it. Then it took even longer to decide that I wanted to do it.
SF FOCUS: How did you come up with the name Wolf Michael?
ALLISON: Well, Michael is Alix’s uncle who helped her get sober and saved her life when she was a wild teenager. Without him, she believes she would have ended up dead or in prison. So we were trying to think of a name to go with Michael, and everything we came up with sounded like a yuppie stockbroker. So one night in a raucous mood, we said, "Let’s name him Wolf. Then he can grow up to be a biker or a stockbroker!" [Laughs] The nurses were a bit appalled. But he’s a big, healthy, wolflike child, very aggressive and strong. Of course, I think we’re raising him to be that way.
SF FOCUS: Does it make you angry that your child can’t be legitimate in the eyes of the law?
ALLISON: Darlin’, I have so much contempt for the law already I can’t worry about it. But Alix is angry about it. I’m adopting him, which is legally possible in California. Technically, he’s a bastard since we’re not legally married. Emotionally, he is an extremely wanted, planned-for, cared-for, and very satisfying child.
SF FOCUS: I notice you have your domestic partnership license framed here on the wall.
ALLISON: All it means is, I’m responsible for her debts. [Laughs] When we decided to get married, we went down to San Francisco City Hall. They give you all this paperwork, and you turn it over and there’s this very clear statement on the back of the form. It says that this contract has no effect in law except that you become legally responsible for each other’s debts. You’d best love each other a whole bunch!
SF FOCUS: Did you have a wedding?
ALLISON: No, we didn’t do a wedding. You have to understand, we’re old famous messarounds. But we love each other deeply. We’re married. I could die with this woman. But I intend to live with her as long as possible. And she’s a damn good mother. If I didn’t trust her, I don’t think I would trust myself to be a mother, because it’s real scary.
SF FOCUS: A baby in the house must wreak havoc on your writing schedule.
ALLISON: A baby costs at least a book, maybe two. It just takes that much time and emotional and physical energy. I didn’t sleep a whole night through for a year, and I’m just a co-mother. I also haven’t been able to teach this year, which is something I really love. Before Wolf, the luxury of being a writer was that I could close all the curtains and write for weeks. I’d sleep for about three hours in every twenty-four. That’s how I finished Bastard. That’s no longer possible. I need to check in with Wolf and be with him part of every day. So I’m no longer this free spirit who can just go off and lead the literary life. But he’s worth it. I’m madly in love with him.
SF FOCUS: Has having a child changed the content of your work as well?
ALLISON: I think if Junior had been born when I was writing Bastard it would have screwed it up completely, because for the first six months of his life I couldn’t even think about a child being in danger. I did not birth this baby, Alix did. But something hormonal happened. Now I’m beginning to return to normal, because there’s some stuff in Cavedweller that’s pretty hard. I couldn’t have written it during the first year of Wolf’s life. I couldn’t even think about it.
SF FOCUS: Would you like Wolf to be gay?
ALLISON: It would be convenient. [Laughs] I’ve never had any interest at all in whether people are born queer or grow up to be queer, but it is clear to me that this child is already his own person. He is who he is going to be--and the world is in a lot of trouble!
SF FOCUS: We’ve talked a lot about inheriting the legacy of the past. Do you ever worry that you could be violent toward your own child?
ALLISON: Always. I was very afraid before he was born that I would suddenly discover this other person inside me. When you grow up conditioned to violence you have to deconstruct it in your head. I do not think that Wolf needs to be slapped around to learn what’s right and wrong. But I must say, it’s easier to handle the stresses of parenthood with two women. I don’t get as exhausted as I saw my sisters get. I made enough money on Bastard that I’ve been able to be home and not be terrified all the time about paying the bills. But another big factor is Alix herself. I think I lucked into finding the one woman in the world who could show me how not to be afraid of yourself when you’re holding your child.
SF FOCUS: The South is so vividly rendered in your work, it so much defines you and your characters, that I was shocked to find you living in Northern California. What brought you here?
ALLISON: California was the place Southerners ran away to. I wanted to run north, to go meet those Yankee girls. But when I got sick and exhausted in New York City, it was a real clear choice for me to go to California. I came here to get mellow, learn to meditate, join a gym. I did all those things, but it didn’t really work. I didn’t get too mellow.
SF FOCUS: Do you feel like a fish out of water?
ALLISON: Not with all these Southerners here. When we were living in Monte Rio I swear to God I felt like I was living in Greenville. It looks a little like Greenville. You just pretend that redwoods are fir trees. And everybody drives pickup trucks, carries shotguns, and has dogs. I couldn’t make a living in South Carolina. And I like the climate here much better. I’m cooking a book--it’s going to be a while before I get to it--about California. It has a lot of runaway Southerners in it.
SF FOCUS: What writers inspire you?
ALLISON: Brave, courageous, demented, suffering, exalted souls. [Laughs] I go back and reread James Baldwin pretty regularly and Flannery O’Connor. But I use Muriel Rukeyser to keep me alive. You know those nights when you wake up and you just can’t figure out why you’re still here? I go read my absolutely worn-to-a-fray edition of Muriel Rukeyser. I love to read her aloud. I make my students read Ai, a poet from Arizona who won the Lamont Prize. When you’ve got a narrative poet who tells a whole short story in three pages, in monologue, that’s like coming off the high board for writers. Of fiction writers I love Lee Smith, Ellen Gilchrist, Blanche Boyd, and my favorite boys, Tobias Wolff and Madison Smartt Bell.
SF FOCUS: What do you think of Pat Conroy? He’s covered some of the same territory you have as a writer.
ALLISON: Ahhh! He’s the real thing. Sometimes he loses control, and his sentences just run all over him. But his characters are magnificent. That mother in The Prince of Tides. Wow! When I was reading that book, people kept saying, "Let me tell you what’s wrong with it," and I would just say, "Leave me alone and let me cry." Oh, and that line he has about "What’s a Southern writer?" In March, I was invited to South Carolina to give a reading before the lieutenant governor, and I quoted Mr. Conroy. "My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me all Southern literature can be summed up in these words: `On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’" [Roars with laughter] Perfect! He got it!