An Open Book

Dorothy Allison is telling a story. Sitting at the dining room table of her house in the outer Noe Valley, she sips from a bottle of Diet Pepsi and describes the redemptive power of language, the way words restore us to ourselves. Outside, the streets possess a midafternoon languor: A mother walks her daughter home from school while, down the hill, a streetcar rattles on its track. Here, however, the air is charged with urgency, as if Allison’s story reveals not only who she is, but also how she’s kept herself alive.

“I try to make a distinction between storytelling as a survival technique and storytelling as an art form,” she explains in a voice as dry as dust. “But there’s a really complex, deep connection. Kids in extreme situations of poverty or abuse, or even queer kids, live in these cauldrons of stress in which they deliberately create fictions of survival. I spent vast sections of my childhood living in the story of my life I was writing in my head. Sometimes it was a movie. More often it was a book, because I loved books. But I was re-imagining the life.”

Listening to Allison, one can’t help but get a picture of someone for whom narrative represents the fabric, the very texture, of the world. At the same time, it’s sometimes hard to reconcile her comments with the simple, matter-of-fact way she recalls her life. At 48, Allison is direct, self-confident, unpretentious, a solid woman in bare feet and jeans, eyes flashing behind large-framed glasses each time she leans forward to make a point. After half a decade living near the Russian River area, she moved back to San Francisco last summer with her longtime lover, Alix Layman, a trombone player, and their 5-year-old son, Wolf; they share this house with Wolf’s biological father, Dan Carmell, a gay man who works for the Oakland transit district. Now the four of them make up what Allison calls a “weird extended queer family” or, as she once wrote, “Mama and Mom and Dad and son.”

In some sense, it’s a peculiarly California kind of household, but even more important, it serves as a vivid reminder of the distance Allison has traveled and the idea that, at this point, she lives according to no agenda but her own.

“I feel like I’ve stumbled onto my notion of paradise,” she says. “I love this state. I don’t feel like such a freak here. My son is in a classroom where his assistant teacher has a ring through her nose and purple hair. I think that’s a good thing.”

*

Despite her engagement with the present, however, Allison continues to live in close proximity to her past. You can see it in the gallery of family photos hanging along one wall, and in the heavy, nearly Victorian furniture that fills her living room--a room, one imagines, not unlike those in her childhood home. Then there’s her writing, which has always focused on personal reclamation as a central theme. Both her essay collection “Skin” and her memoir “Two or Three Things I Know for Sure” create a context for Allison’s personal history, while her most famous work, the novel “Bastard Out of Carolina,” is nothing less than an attempt to redeem her childhood, especially the physical and sexual abuse she suffered for 12 years at the hands of her stepfather, beginning at the age of 6.

Even her new novel, “Cavedweller” (Dutton), although less intimate, addresses similar issues. The story of Delia Byrd, an abused wife turned rock singer who returns to Cayro, Ga., to reconnect with the daughters she abandoned 10 years before, can be read as the other side of the equation, where the power of the victim is restored.

“I’m not supposed to be a person who writes,” Allison says of this process, a patina of defiance hardening her words. “I’m not the kind of person who’s supposed to be doing books. I’m supposed to be a waitress. I’m supposed to be a cook. I could be a housecleaner; I did that for a while. 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.”

If, as Allison suggests, her career is an exercise in defying expectations, it’s an activity she’s been involved in for many years. Born in Greenville, S.C., she moved north (“one woman at a time”) until she landed in New York City, where she ran the Information Center at Poets & Writers, a service group, before moving to California a decade ago. Today, when she’s not writing, she teaches at several places, including the San Francisco Art Institute. Still, her most stunning act of transformation remains the way she not only survived the ordeal of her childhood, but also has used it to empower the rest of her life.

“I left home when I got a scholarship to college at 18,” she says. “But from about 16, I left emotionally. I’ve got a couple of years there that are just blank. When I was about 16, I tried to kill myself with a better focus than I had attempted at any earlier point.

“And my mother cut me a bargain. She basically said, ‘Just hang on, and I’ll get you out of here.’ She didn’t have any place to get me out of there to, but she wanted me to hang on long enough. Still, the only way I got out was to go to college, which was accomplished because I won a national merit scholarship.” Allison draws a long breath, as if the act of remembering can be both liberating and constricting at the same time. “It was very close,” she adds. “As it is, I barely made it.”

*

What ultimately saved her, Allison believes, is feminism, which she discovered accidentally in 1973.

“If there had not been the women’s movement,” she says, relief still resonant, “I’d be dead.”

At the time, Allison was working for the Social Security Administration in Tallahassee, Fla., where she’d moved to get clean after two years of taking drugs. With little to occupy her, she drifted into a women’s center and found a whole new world.

“I just walked in,” she laughs, “and stepped into a different reality. The first group I went to was a consciousness-raising session, and the first person I heard speak was a middle-class white woman talking about being raped as a child. I didn’t think that happened.

“I thought it was only us, that it was only families like mine. I thought it was white trash, which is what my culture had told me, and I was deeply ashamed. It took a couple of meetings before I had the nerve to say, ‘Yeah.’ But it was like somebody had handed me a tool. It ain’t you. And it ain’t your mother, and it ain’t your family. It happens to rich kids, it happens all the way across the line, and something can be done about it. That was what the women’s movement meant to me.”

Feminism also provided her with another apparatus by reawakening her interest in words. Although as a child, she’d had aspirations of writing, she’d let them go in college.

“The thing you need to know about early feminism,” she explains, “is that it was an enormous drive for a writing community. It was about creating a culture that was not in place before, creating a politics and an analysis. Even now, I don’t think I can avoid my politics when I write.”

*

That’s not to say Allison considers herself a political writer--or purely political, anyway. Over the years, she’s clashed with fellow lesbians and other feminists who embrace too much writing that gives precedence to politics, not life. Of these conflicts, she says, “I’ve read a lot of bad books, books that club you in the head with politics. Flat, hackneyed, sloganeering. Can’t stand that, can’t read it, can’t abide it. It doesn’t do justice to the politics. What’s more, I find it insulting. Because it feels as if I am the subject of those novels and I am not done justice. Their women are so small. None of the women in my life have been small. When I set out to write characters, I set out to create a tribe that’s as complex as the people I know.”

For this reason, Allison notes, it’s not enough to have a message; one must also have a story to tell. In some sense, this goes back to her childhood and the narratives she invented to preserve herself. Even “Bastard Out of Carolina,” for all its rigorous truth-telling, is first and foremost a work of imagination; as Allison explains, “Fiction is fiction. I’m clear.”

Asked to elaborate, she says, “The whole thing about ‘Bastard’ is, I’m caught. I know that, to keep myself sane, I can’t ever compromise on my childhood. But other than the fact that Bone [the novel’s protagonist] has some of the same elements of my childhood, it’s really distinct. When you become a writer, you step away a little, and you begin to see the stories you’ve told yourself, the stories other people tell themselves, and you start thinking about the story itself and how it functions. Then you start crafting it. What if? What if she’d left? And in some ways, I think, ‘Bastard’ is me telling myself the story of what would have happened if my mother had had the good sense to leave.”

In reality, of course, Allison’s mother didn’t leave, a decision with which her daughter has had to come to terms.

“My mama,” she says, “told herself she was a good woman. That was a good story. But she also told herself she was going to save that man, and she was going to hold that family together, when the story I would have told her was, get out.”

Before her mother’s death in 1990, Allison found some resolution by holding her responsible for not protecting her yet still loving her.

“There’s this notion,” she suggests, “that forgiveness is something that happens, that it’s a discrete event. And one of the things I’ve become clear about is that it’s not. Forgiveness is something where you get up every day and you set out on this path again. But it’s like the Zen arrow: You don’t ever really get there.” In any event, Allison admits, “I’m still working on forgiving myself. For not dying. Because you’re supposed to. The really good ones die. To get through, to survive, you have to trade off pieces of yourself, you have to compromise with your abuser. You have to pretend that you’re not hurt, that you’re inhuman, that you find all this deeply amusing or not very substantial. But every time you do that, you’re compromising with the devil, and you begin to hate yourself.”

*

Given Allison’s efforts to reach accommodation, it seems somehow fitting that, with “Cavedweller,” she should investigate the issue of mother-daughter reconciliation and the way that against all odds, old hurts may be resolved. Partly, she says, this has to do with her experience of parenthood, which has given her “a closer understanding” of what her own mother went through and even helped her understand “why my stepfather felt so angry. Aside from the fact that the man was broken, I understand now more about his sense of being trapped.”

In many ways, that’s what she’s spent nearly 30 years working toward, but now that she’s confronting it, she admits to some concerns. As an author, after all, Allison has always operated from the assumption that “the best fiction comes from the place where the terror hides,” which makes her unsure of what to do with all this newfound resolution, or even where it leads. “I’m changing as a writer,” she declares flatly, “and it’s a little scary to me. I have confidence in the process, and I figure if it’s a little scary, then it can’t be too far wrong. But I worry sometimes about getting soft.”

For all that, Allison sees these changes as welcome, fundamental even, a necessary part of the story she wants to tell.

“I’m a lot more settled now,” she says, taking a pull on her soft drink. “I’m 48 years old; I’m not a child. Although I find that a bit unnerving, as well.”

*

Ultimately, she believes, it all boils down to “another story we get told where you can tell a different story to yourself”--which is, of course, a process on which she’s staked her entire life.

“It’s a lot like moving to California,” she explains. “When I lived in New York, I was sick, really exhausted, working myself to death. So I moved to California to learn how to be a normal human being. The hardest part was quitting my job, because my mama didn’t raise nobody who quits a good-paying job. But I wanted to live a little longer. People in my family have a tendency to die young anyway. I’m going for my Grandma Shirley’s record. She lived to be 110. Can you imagine how many books I can write?”