Dorothy Allison: “In the Stories We Share and Those We Have Not Yet Crafted—We Live Forever”

It is a wonderful thing to be told that the work to which you have devoted your time, energy and passion has found an audience that understands the difficulties and accomplishments of transforming a lifetime’s experience and struggles and making all that over into story. Story is how I understand life. My family’s struggles, the fear and shame inherent in living on the margins of what everyone sees as everyday life, has always seemed to me to be the great secret of our society. Understand me, I was born into the working poor, watching my mama pull off her waitress garb and make dinner out of pork scraps and pinto beans. She would chop peppers and onions to add to a pan of cornbread that was not only filling, but colorful. She could make a cream pudding to rival the best soufflé, then toss in a streak of crushed berries to puddle and entice even the most resentful angry child. I was that terrified resentful child dodging my stepfather’s angry hands and grinding my teeth at wearing my cousins’ hand-me-downs, watching mama give home permanents to neighbor ladies for a few dollars to buy shoes or blue jeans or the paperback novels she and I devoured like printed candy. I listened to my stepfather shatter coke bottles the way I knew he hoped to break my stubborn head. I watched my cousins dragged off to the county farm where they would be taught to hate themselves and breathe in shame so deep, they could never again be free of it. What if life really was a story? What if you could alter the plot? Assign meaning to the most brutal contempt? Claim passion and glory while walking away from the spit and rage everyone seemed to aim at the poor, the disdain of the well-off and their bland disregard for the not-pretty, the exhausted uncertain girl children struggling to be seen as full human beings, the tender soft-eyed boys who wanted only what we all wanted—vindication, hope, love and meaning. What if life really was a story? What if […]

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