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Dorothy Allison
- University of Georgia Press
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73 Dorothy Allison Dorothy Allison is the author of two novels, a collection of stories, a collection of essays, and a memoir. Born in Greenville, South Carolina, she received a BA from Florida Presbyterian College (now Eckerd College) and an MA from New School for Social Research. The poverty, incest, and abuse that Allison experienced as a child figure heavily in her first novel, Bastard out of Carolina, which was nominated for the National Book Award. Other honors include Lambda Literary Awards for Best Small Press Book and Best Lesbian Book. Allison is a popular workshop teacher and lecturer. She lives in California with her partner and their son. Trash, 1988 (stories); Bastard Out of Carolina, 1992; Cavedweller, 1998 How do you approach and sustain work on your novels? I’ve watched my whole life recircle, alter significantly. I think that part of it’s having a kid. Some of writing is so deliciously self-indulgent: you just live in your bathrobe or your pajamas for days. I work long binge sessions —in a state of misery and sweat, rocking back and forth and wringing my hands, or in exultation. Most of my life, even though I lived with other people, I had my own private space and nobody would go in there. Then I went and had a child. We were living up in Sonoma County and my compromise was to go out to a little building on our property to write. But that didn’t really work. When you’re finishing a novel, you’ve got all these balls up in the air, and to get them up in the air, keep everything in your head is an intense emotional job. If it is interrupted, you can lose a book. I learned that the hard way: by losing a couple. After some terrific bouts with my own psyche, I developed the practice of going to stay with other people when I was finishing, or I would check into a motel. But I keep feeling I’m doing it wrong. I continually try to be reasonable, to work at reasonable hours 74 the INtervIewS while Wolf’s in school, but it doesn’t work that way. I work in the middle of the night the best and I work binges. There’s nothing reasonable about the process. It’s a completely unreasonable process. It makes me feel like I’m guilty, like I’m sinning against being a good mama—and it’s a big issue for me to be a good mama. When we were about to make Wolf, I went and read everything I could find about what it was like to be a writer and have a kid, because I could set the gay and lesbian movement back a thousand years by raising a fucked-up child. Or not being able to write when I have a kid, because I’m a feminist and I’m arguing that you can do that. Then for years I tried to pretend, “Oh, no problem.” But it’s a terrible problem! I’ve lost whole books, and acknowledging that is difficult. When you say you lost whole books, what do you mean? Describe that. Well, there’s the sneaky way and there’s the God-help-me-it’s-gone way. The sneaky way is that you don’t know it’s gone until it’s gone. You have to get enough of it done when the tide is up inside to be able to do the long work of living in the novel. If you don’t get enough of it down, you will lose it, or it will become something else. Then you lose what you were originally going to do and you have to make peace with what you wind up with. Isn’t there always that gap between what you hope and envision a novel will be and what the novel actually is? Yes. That’s a given. But having it shift! I started working on Cavedweller when I was still working on Bastard. I started it with Cissy, the young girl. I started with this incredibly angry, resentful, God-help-me-I-don’t-wantto -be-in-the-South kind of little girl. I was pretty clear that I wanted to write about sisters who really have every reason to hate each other and who make a kind of accommodation. I started it before I had Wolf, and I wrote it mean, really mean...