Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Skin: Talking About Sex, Class And Literature, has died. She was 75. According to Sinister Wisdom, Allison died Wednesday after a short illness with cancer. A staunchly pro-woman, pro-queer, pro-love voice in our society, Allison wrote poetry, novels, essays and what she called “smut.” She repped poor, rural queerness when at least two of those three things seemed mutually exclusive to outsiders. As Literary Hub put it, “Allison wrote about a queer, poor South with dynamism and ferocious love.”
Dorothy Allison was born on April 11, 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina. Her mother, Ruth Gibson Allison, was 15 at the time. In her writing Allison described a childhood of poverty and abuse, both sexual and physical. Allison went to college and eventually got her masters at the New School. While in New York, she dove headfirst into the emerging feminist and gay rights movements. She wrote about the joy and excitement she found in those spaces for Sinister Wisdom, saying “I loved each and every one of us. I loved what we were trying to do even as we quibbled over line breaks in a poem or structure in an essay.”
Her first publication was a chapbook of poems, 1983’s The Women Who Hate Me. 1988’s Trash, a book of essays, brought her critical acclaim. She is perhaps best known for Bastard Out of Carolina, a semi-autobiographical novel. It was adapted into a film starring Jena Malone and Jennifer Jason Leigh in 1996.
Allison wrote extensively about the divides in society, and how they are set up to make people fight amongst each other. “The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal,” she wrote in 1994. “To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us—extraordinary.”
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