I have explained what I know over and over, in every way I can, but I have never been able to make clear the degree of my fear, the extent to which I feel myself denied: not only that I am queer in a world that hates queers, but that I was born poor into a world that despises the poor. The need to make my world believable to people who have never experienced it is part of why I write fiction. I know that some things must be felt to be understood, that despair, for example, can never be adequately analyzed; it must be lived. But if I can write a story that so draws the reader in that she imagines herself like my characters, feels their sense of fear and uncertainty, their hopes and terrors, then I have come closer to knowing myself as real, important as the very people I have always watched with awe.

– Dorothy Allison, “A Question of Class”

I lost something special.

Perfect, really, though some might only see it as a simple scrap of paper. The note had been mailed to me in a plain envelope, my name and address printed on the side in shaky ballpoint pen. I received this letter in the early summer of 2019, directly before the publication of my debut novel Mostly Dead Things. That book was about taxidermy, but it was also about being queer and sometimes hating that part of yourself. It was an ode to fucked up families and simultaneously a frustrated love letter to Florida. I was proud of the work, but I was also incredibly nervous. You make something, trying your hardest to shine light into one small, dark corner of a world heretofore unknown. I’d switched on my writer’s flashlight, trained it on something deeply personal. To fear your desires but still ache for them. But would anyone else catch that same glimpse of flickering hope I’d found? Know that same jumbled feeling, a heart ran through the tumble cycle of a dryer?

The letter, via my publisher, had come from Dorothy Allison. My favorite author. They’d sent her a copy of my book and she’d read it. Then she’d decided to send me a short note.

Your Florida is my Florida.

That was it. I held that scrap of paper to my chest and marveled over it. There she was, her flashlight pointed directly at my heart. How incredible to be seen. How wonderful to be known.

Bastard Out of Carolina was the book that made me want to become a writer.

I’ve said that phrase many, many times before. Honestly too many to count. Dozens of times. Told it to people in passing and noted it at my own book events, said it with pride whenever anyone mentioned Dorothy’s name. I’ve typed it into best-of queer lists, passed it on to workshop attendees, brought it up at writing conference panels. Once, luckily, I got to tell it to her myself. We were at the Tin House Writer’s Workshop in 2015; she let me cry sloppily onto her shoulder while I told her how much her work had meant to me. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who did that over the course of the week. There are a lot of us out there, people who read Dorothy’s books and find sudden sunlight, plant roots, grow strong.

I started out evangelical, Southern Baptist, and that took all the God out of me, but I know what it means to worship something larger than yourself. The phrase about the book’s influence has taken on holy usage for me, I think, a sentence that means more with every passing utterance. Because that book made me want to become a writer, certainly, but the story and its main character also held up a mirror to my life. Southern, poor, secretly queer. It showed me what I was — and what I could ultimately become, if I chose to be brave. If I let myself want. If I was ready to try.

It goes like this:

I was in the sixth grade. My parents only allowed me to read the books they selected, which meant that I generally only got them from school or the Baptist Book Store in town. Bastard Out of Carolina was smuggled home from a classroom (stolen, if I’m being honest — but I think Dorothy would forgive me this particular transgression). I hid it the way I did all things that weren’t allowed: stuffed beneath my dresser next to teen fashion magazines, candy bars, other stolen books. I read it furtively, in spurts, whenever I was alone (which wasn’t often). Dorothy wrote about South Carolina in a way I’d never experienced before. It was as if the place had its own physical body; it walked and talked and sang, as alive as any other character in the book. Tangled roots of black walnut trees jutting out of the muddy berth beside the river, everything dirty, but still capable. Still hardy. It’s a story about survival. How the gristle of a body might be cut, maimed, bruised, but somehow still find the strength and determination to carry on.

Bone Boatwright, a girl whose tangled hair refused a brush. Who ambled and yelled and learned all her lessons the hard way. A small child in a large, hard world, continually — willfully — misunderstood. That was me. I sat astonished at this discovery, saw that the world had room to hold every version of myself. And that was a heart-wrecking thing at the time, because I did not know what to do with all that sudden understanding.

Dorothy Allison approached intimacy from all sides, ready to tackle it to the floor. Sex, yes, but also trauma and things that refuse to heal. Unafraid of the pain, she poked at the wound; she excavated. I tell students in workshop that a memory is actually only the remembrance of the last time you called that particular piece of nostalgia up. I attribute that idea to Dorothy, though I can’t find that anywhere online, either. I regularly have to remind myself that trust isn’t a dirty word. To say the thing you mean, straight on, without flourishes or jokes to detract from the pain and the very real hurt that comes from cracking yourself open, exposing a length of soft white underbelly.

I was young and scared. I wasn’t ready to crack open yet. The power sat unused inside of me, hidden away for many years. Silted dirt over the top like a grave. But despite my fears, that book stayed with me, clinging to my heart like a burr. And when I finally began to write my own stories, I found myself hearkening back to her voice. Untamed, unafraid. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it’s safe to say my work was her biggest fan. I wanted my stories to have the same swagger, the same rage. I wanted characters to love hard and risk it all. I wrote to force the world to look directly at these kinds of people — queer, poor, messy — and not look away.

I learned all this from Dorothy Allison. Owe all my work to her.

Hearing about her passing this week filled me with disbelief. It could not be true, I reasoned. If she was not alive, then how could I be?

I went in search of my treasured scrap — that small comfort she’d once sent me in the face of great stress and anxiety over my art — and found that over the course of several moves, I’d lost the letter. It was as if it never happened. And that made her death feel violently, joltingly real.

I know I’m not alone in my grief. Search Dorothy Allison’s name online and a slew of tributes just like this pop up. Many other writers and readers feel torn up and ragged over her passing. But there’s beauty in that, too, I think. For so long, I thought that I was alone, that there was no one who would want to listen to me, to see me, to know me. Dorothy’s work showed me that was not the case. And because of that — because of her fearlessness, her ability to say the hard thing and shout it with her whole chest — we found community. She taught us we can and should demand more from life. To feed not just ourselves, but each other.

That letter Dorothy wrote me might be gone, but there is something else. A friend, upon hearing I’d received this meaningful letter, decided to commission me an embroidery of it. Words inscribed over a flamingo background. Your Florida is my Florida, Dorothy wrote, and it’s true. The paper is gone, but the words live on, immortalized not just through Dorothy, but from the network of writers and artists I get to call friends.

It’s not enough for me to say Bastard Out of Carolina was the book that made me want to be a writer. The truth is: Dorothy Allison is the reason I’m alive at all.

Thank you for all of it, my friend. I’ll miss you something awful. I love you.

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