Dorothy Allison
Dorothy Allison
Dorothy Allisonis an American writer from South Carolina whose writing expresses themes of class struggle, sexual abuse, child abuse, feminism and lesbianism. She is a self-identified lesbian femme. She has won a number of awards for her writing, including several Lambda Literary Awards. She was elected in xxxx as a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth11 April 1949
CountryUnited States of America
lying fiction telling-the-truth
fiction is the great lie that tells the truth
laughing mama wells
Mama learned to laugh with them, before they could laugh at her, and to do it so well no one could be sure what she really thought or felt.
meaningful pain opening-up
I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.
drama years proud
Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.
appreciation children mean
And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained. And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.
heart two stories
Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world
class backgrounds contempt
One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.
running past thinking
I wanted to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over. I wanted to run away from who we had been seen to be, who we had been... It's the first thing I think of when trouble comes - the geographic solution. Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over. What hides behind that impulse is the conviction that the life you have lived, the person you are, is valueless, better off abandoned, that running away is easier than trying to change things, that change itself is not possible.
girlfriend quality leisure
Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.
trying world imagine
I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself.
girl dry littles
It ain't that you get religion. Religion gets you and then milks you dry. Won't let you drink a little whiskey. Won't let you make no fat-assed girls grin and giggle. Won't let you do a damn thing except work for what you'll get in the hearafter. I live in the here and now.
sister growing-up book
When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.
wish stories behinds
Behind the story I tell is the one I don't...Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.
children writing years
If I could have found what I needed at thirteen, I would not have lost so much of my life chasing vindication or death. Give some child, some thirteen-year old, the hope of the remade life. Tell the truth. Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you there is magic in it.