THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 3, 1995 TAG: 9508310617
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL PEARSON
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW FOR SURE
DOROTHY ALLISON
Dutton. 94 pp. $14.95.
From reading Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, Dorothy Allison's elliptical reminiscence, I can imagine the brutal power that her fiction and poetry must contain. Nevertheless, this book is difficult to define.
It's autobiographical, but it's too slim to be an autobiography. It has many qualities of a memoir, but it ends up feeling far more expository than dramatic. Finally, it seems like a series of poetic sermons, personal and polemical at the same time.
Perhaps this is precisely what Allison wanted to communicate. After all, the book was first written in 1991, shortly after her novel Bastard Out of Carolina was completed, and it was written as a performance piece - and maybe as a gloss on the fiction.
Two or Three Things I Know for Sure comes complete with family photographs, mostly of the women, who are beautiful and have bitter laughs, and a few of the men, who invariably are hard-faced, silent, destructive and abusive. Allison's story is of the poor white South. She says, ``My family has a history of death and murder, grief and denial, rage and ugliness - the women of my family most of all.''
A native of Greenville, S.C., Allison was, as she says, ``born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats.''
The tragedy of her family was silence, ``a silence veiled by boasting and jokes.'' She says that the men in her family went to jail the way other boys went to high school, and they took up girls as if they were a craft. The women suffered at the hands of these men, and when the women got older and the hard life took its toll on their looks, the men abandoned them.
Allison's story, which she tells with unflinching frankness, is of a child raped at 5 years old by her stepfather, beaten and abused until she was a teenager. It is the story of a young woman who came to believe that ``behind sex is rage.'' It is the story of a young woman who fought to remake her life and to find love. She did it through storytelling. For her, the story ``becomes the thing needed.''
Allison writes, ``The need to tell my story was terrible and persistent, and I needed to say it bluntly and cruelly, to use all those words, those awful tearing words.'' She found love with other women, and she describes her lesbianism with great passion and tenderness.
The most interesting and enlightening aspect of this book is Allison's discussion of the storytelling need. One of the things she knows is that ``stories are the one sure way . . . to touch the heart and change the world.''
For those readers seeking a dramatic autobiography, I suggest Mary Karr's wonderful new memoir, The Liars' Club. But for those interested in eloquent thoughts on how stories can scar or heal or for those who want to know some of the details behind the story of the author of Bastard Out of Carolina, Allison's slim volume will certainly be a worthwhile performance.
- MEMO: Michael Pearson teaches creative writing and literature at Old Dominion
University and is the author of ``Imagined Places: Journeys into
Literary America'' and ``A Place That's Known.'' by CNB