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Dorothy Allison died at the age of 75 from cancer earlier this week. The lesbian, feminist writer, and activist from the South helped shape the very core of who I am and taught me the value of living and fighting for a better world despite the temptation to resign myself to sorrow, heartbreak, and hopelessness even though I never knew her personally. Some of my favorite teachers in the world are people I’ve never shared a classroom with, and Allison is undoubtedly one of them.

Allison’s life began in Greenville, South Carolina, where she was “born a bastard” into a poor white family to a teenage mother and an absent father. Early in her childhood, Allison’s mother married Allison’s stepfather, a man who came from a better class position than Allison’s family but who soon found himself poor, out of work, and full of rage for himself, her mother, and, eventually, Allison and her siblings. Her stepfather’s physical and sexual abuse of her and the other members of her family informed much of her early life and some of her most famous works of fiction, so it’s often the focus of most conversations on her and her life. However, even in her embattled and dysfunctional family, Allison experienced a great deal of love, affection, and care from her mother’s extended family, and she often pointed out how abuse was only one part of the larger narrative of life growing up in the impoverished South.

Before Allison became a teenager, she and her family moved to Central Florida where Allison graduated high school and went to Florida Presbyterian College (now Eckerd College) on a National Merit scholarship. In college, Allison was involved in anti-Vietnam War organizing and eventually dipped her toes in the burgeoning women’s movement happening in conjunction with anti-war organizing. Although she did do some early work with women’s movement organizers in college, Allison’s lesbianism, her class status, and her status as an incest survivor complicated her position among the other women involved, and she moved away from organizing for a while.

After graduation, Allison spent a few months trying to look for a part time job, but she was also still contending with the weight of her past and poor romantic decisions. She coped by retreating to destructive behaviors. She finally found a clerk job at the Social Security Administration in Tallahassee, and during the initial weeks of her job training, she would return to her motel room at night to write. In her short preface to her 1988 short story collection Trash, Allison writes, “Writing it all down was purging. Putting those stories down on paper took them out of the nightmare realm and made me almost love myself for being able to finally face them. More subtly, it gave me a way to love the people I wrote about—even the ones I had fought with or hated.”

She didn’t return to organizing until she was finally settled in her new job and home in Tallahassee. There, Allison attended what she thought was a magazine organizing meeting for a lesbian publication at the Women’s Center at Florida State University but was actually a “consciousness raising” group for the women’s movement. During the meeting, she felt she finally found a place within the movement and never left. She stayed in Tallahassee until the mid-1970s doing graduate work in anthropology at FSU, volunteer editing the feminist magazine Amazing Grace, and becoming the founding manager at the Herstore Feminist Bookstore.

In the late 1970s, Allison moved to New York City to attend The New School for Social Research to finish her graduate studies, eventually graduating in 1981 with an MA in Urban Anthropology. Throughout this time, Allison kept writing, editing, and publishing in early gay and lesbian journals like Quest, Out/Look, and Connections, and she also co-founded the Lesbian Sex Mafia, a women’s BDSM support and education group, in NYC. Prior to publishing Trash with lesbian press Firebrand Books, Allison published a chapbook of poetry with Long Haul Press called The Women Who Hate Me: Poems by Dorothy Allison in 1983. The subsequent publication of Trash in 1988 earned Allison two Lambda Literary Awards and the American Library Association Prize for Lesbian and Gay Writing, fully cementing her place in the queer literary landscape at the time.

More mainstream attention would come to Allison after the publication of her most famous work, Bastard Out of Carolina, in 1991. The book was a fictionalized account of the poverty and abuse Allison suffered as a child in the South that follows the main character Bone as she tries to survive the abuse in her household and eventually finds a semblance of salvation through her lesbian aunt, Raylene. The novel went on to become a bestseller, was a finalist for the National Book Award the following year, and was turned into a feature film starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jena Malone in 1996.

In the years immediately following the success of Bastard Out of Carolina, Allison published two works of non-fiction. The first, Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, & Literature — a collection of personal and critical essays examining race- and class-based conflicts Allison experienced within the feminist movement and the lesbian community, her participation in BDSM and her thoughts on pornography, and the enduring impact of Literature on our lives — was published in 1994 and won both a Stonewall Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. The second, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure — a short, lyric memoir that tells the story that inspired Bastard Out of Carolina — was published in 1995 and was a finalist for both a Stonewall Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Allison’s final book, a novel called Cavedweller that tells the story of a mother who abandoned her daughters making her way back to them to reclaim the life she once knew, was published in 1998 and earned Allison her last Lambda Literary Award and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year the following year.

Since the early 2000s, Allison taught writing and Literature courses at various universities, writers residencies, and writing programs. Until her death, she remained in vocal opposition to the lies and injustices queer people, poor people, people of color, and survivors of abuse are often subjected to in our society and used her work to expose difficult truths about the way power and subjugation impact every aspect of our lives, our minds, and our spirits.

Allison’s work came barreling into my life during my second semester in college when my professor assigned Allison’s “Compassion” from her 1988 collection Trash. In the story, three not-quite-estranged but not-quite-amiable sisters take care of their mother as she is suffering from cancer that has spread to her brain and lungs. Each of them are grappling with the immense loss they’re about to experience, the pain and trauma of their collective past, the difficulty of being in the same space together again, and their individual relationships with their abusive stepfather. The sisters try their best to make their mother comfortable in her final days, but they often misstep or disagree or have totally different perceptions of both the past and the present. Despite all of their anger, resentment, and despair, the three of them find a way to truly come together in their mother’s final hours, an act of staggering grace for their mother and for each other that seemed unlikely just a little earlier in the story. I was so struck by the enormity of their love and consideration for each other despite everything that preceded that moment that I couldn’t get the final line of the story — “We held her until she set us free.” — out of my mind for days. I was hooked.

As I made my way through the rest of Trash and eventually to Bastard Out of Carolina, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure, Cavedweller, and Skin, I would come to see that radical acts of mercy pervaded Allison’s work, not just through her characters’ fictional actions and recounting the people who impacted her lived experiences but also in the ways she writes about them. When you read her work, you can feel how profoundly she loves so many of these characters and people, and for the ones you know she doesn’t, it isn’t disdain that wafts from the page but empathy and a desire to understand them more deeply. As a survivor of domestic abuse and childhood sexual abuse, Allison experienced some of the most horrific acts of violence in our culture, and in response, she found ways to discuss what happened to her and so many others by illuminating the nuances surrounding those experiences and refusing to reduce them to simple explanations and condemnations. Her work humanizes poor people in the South who live on either side of the victim-perpetrator dichotomy or whose life experiences force them to live on both sides equally. In Bastard Out of Carolina, Cavedweller, and a few of the stories in Trash, for instance, Allison draws direct connections between the pervasiveness of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse and abandonment amongst poor white people in the South directly to the oppressive class system these characters are forced to contend with every day. She proves how the stigmatization of her family (and so many others) as poor “white trash” combined with the actual material conditions created by the ruling class, the bourgeois, and stigmatization against marginalized people are the ultimate enemy in the fight for survival faced by so many of us who were born in the margins.

These books came out in the 1980s and 1990s. And in 2024, we’re still not able as a society to talk about poverty and abuse with nearly the same insight, gradation, and compassion contained in just one Allison chapter, short story, or essay.

Through these works and so many others, Allison proves over and over again how our most dominant discourses on class obscure the truth about poverty and the social ills and taboos that often accompany it and detangle it entirely from the crushing brutality of racial capitalism. In her essay “A Question of Class,” she reminds us,

“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. It is a belief that dominates this culture. It is what makes the poor whites of the South so determinedly racist and the middle class so contemptuous of the poor. It is a myth that allows some to imagine that they build their lives on the ruin of others, a secret core of shame for the middle class, a goad and a spur to the marginal working class, and cause enough for the homeless and poor to feel no constraints on hatred or violence.”

The rage, hatred, and barbarity comes from the top, which means we must fight it not by condescending those who are experiencing the brunt of racial capitalism’s ire but by questioning it, disrupting it, and challenging the narratives it’s trying to sell us all the time. If we don’t do this, we not only ensure the continuation of this oppression, but we will also always be barring ourselves from interacting and engaging with the truth about ourselves and those around us.

Over the course of her career, Allison was often criticized for her frankness on the subjects of her family and her sexual abuse as well as her candor about her sexual relationships with butch lesbians, her proclivity towards BDSM and aggressive sex, and her beliefs in the power women hold over their bodies and the actions they choose to engage in with them, even from the other women she was working with in feminist movement spaces. In response to this, Allison grew more steadfast in her belief that women must not hide themselves away or bury their desires in order to appeal to the values of our repressive heteropatriarchal society. In “Public Silence, Private Terror,” Allison writes,

“Instead of speaking out in favor of sexual diversity, most feminists continue to avoid the discussion. It is too dangerous, too painful, too hopeless, and the Sex Wars are supposed to be over anyways. But when women remain afraid of what might be revealed about our personal fears and desires, it becomes clear the Sex Wars are far from over. When it is easier to dismiss any discussion of sexuality as irrelevant or divisive rather than look at all the different ways we have denied and dismissed each other, the need to break the public silence still exists. We have no choice. We cannot compromise or agree to be circumspect in how we challenge the system of sexual oppression. We dare not willingly deny ourselves, make those bad bargains that can look so good at the moment. […] I know of no other way to do this than to start by saying I will give up nothing. I will give up no one. […] I hope we can all write out our fearful secrets and sign them or not as we choose, to honor our secrets and break the public silence that has maintained so much private terror.”

Her work consistently presents us with an important call to action: stand up against the systems that are keeping us on the margins by creating new meaning for ourselves and for the people who are the most repressed under these systems.

In order to do this, Allison instructs us, we must tell our stories, and we must tell them without sparing anyone the grisly, joyous, and sexually explicit or illicit details because doing that won’t break us or others out of the binds those in power have created for us. She writes in her essay Survival is the Least of My Desires: “As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their systems of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them. The only hope you have, the only hope any of us has is the remade life. It is the only way we will all survive, and trading any of us for some of us is no compromise.”

Through the telling of our actual stories and the sharing of our lives with one another, we can “remake” both ourselves and the world around us and help liberate others who share in or don’t share in our experiences. She continues later in the essay, “I need you to tell the truth, to tell the mean stories, and to sing the song of hope. I need all of us to live forever and to remake the world.”

I need all of us to live forever and to remake the world. I need all of us to live forever and to remake the world. 

Allison passed away this week of all weeks, when so many are scrambling to figure out what to anticipate in the uncertain future we’re facing. I can’t imagine a better set of words to keep close to the vest right now. Allison saw the fractures and fissures of our society so clearly, but she also understood we had all the concrete and glue we needed to fix them within us if we’re willing to learn, relearn, unlearn, and stop running from what we know is true. I hope, in her memory, more of us can finally give it a shot and remake the world.

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