Abstract: Conversations with Dorothy Allison. Edited by Mae Miller Claxton. Literary Conversations Series. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. xix + 179 pp. [$40.00] cloth.7ae Miller Claxton has performed an admirable service in compiling interviews with fiction writer Dorothy Allison. Scholars and fans of Dorothy Allison's work will appreciate the convenience of being able to find all these interviews in one place, but this book is an illuminating read as well for those interested more broadly in southern writers, women writers, working class fiction, and gay and lesbian issues. Allison is an engaging and outspoken interviewee who offers thoughts on quite a few artistic, cultural, and political topics. This book is a delightful read.One of the things that emerges from these interviews is the remarkable consistency in Allison's loyalties and views over time. (The interviews range from 1993-2009.) In most of the interviews she credits the women's movement of the 1970s for giving her a start as a and the gift of a community wanting to hear her stories, but beyond that she claims the movement literally saved her life. As she told the Los Angeles Times in 1998, If there had not been the women's movement ... I'd be dead (95). Winning a national merit scholarship in high school allowed Allison to attend college-It was very close, she states in one interview, barely made (95)-but it was the women's movement that empowered her intellectual life and her career as a writer. not supposed to be a person who writes .... I'm supposed to be a waitress. I'm supposed to be a cook. I could be a housecleaner .... But I'm not supposed to have a mind. I'm supposed to be this animal creature that the world chews up and spits out (94). amazing trajectory of Dorothy Allison's life is remarked upon in almost every single interview-born in 1949 to a 15-yearold unmarried waitress in Greenville, South Carolina, eventually becoming a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award for her novel Bastard Out of Carolina. Anjelica Huston made the novel into a film in 1996 starring Jason Jennifer Leigh. Without the women's movement Allison doubts she would have made it.Another repeated theme is the South. Most of the interviews stress Allison's identity as an iconoclastic, queer, Southern writer, and she sees herself within a tradition alongside Flannery O'Connor, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, and Carson McCullers (14). She also identifies, however, as a working class and she has a lot to say about poverty and class in America. One interview from 1995 is headlined The Rosanne of Literature but Allison puts her working-class identity a bit differently: My view of the world is pretty complicated, and Flannery O'Connor, she saw the world the way I see the world now. She sees people hurt and desperate and astonishing, and occasionally a little scary (167). In another interview she states, basically write about the working class in the way that, I think, Flannery O'Connor wrote about the middle class. …
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot