Dorothy Allison, "who wrote with lyrical, pungent wit about her working-class Southern upbringing--and about the incest and violence that shaped her--and whose acclaimed 1992 novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, based on her harrowing childhood, made her a literary star," died November 5, the New York Times reported. She was 75.
Before her bestselling novel, Allison had published Trash, a collection of short stories, and a self-published poetry chapbook, The Women Who Hate Me.
She "was flat broke in 1989 when she decided to try to sell Bastard Out of Carolina, the novel she had been writing for nearly a decade, to a mainstream publisher," the Times noted. The book was published in 1992 and quickly became a bestseller.
"I believe that storytelling can be a strategy to help you make sense out of your life," she told the Times in 1995. "It's what I've done. Bastard Out of Carolina used a lot of the stories that my grandmother told me and some real things that happened in my life. But I took it over and did what my grandmother did: I made it a different thing. I made a heroic story about a young girl who faces down a monster."
As the Times wrote, critics compared Allison with Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, and Harper Lee. Actress Anjelica Huston directed a 1996 TV movie based on Bastard Out of Carolina, which aired on Showtime.
Allison became a hero to incest survivors, young lesbians, and runaways, the Times noted, adding that she was mobbed at readings, but "there was blowback, too. The book was pilloried by some school boards as pornography, and banned at high schools in Maine and California."
In Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, her 1995 memoir adapted from a monologue she had been performing, Allison recalled a lesbian therapist friend who cautioned her about speaking frankly of her abuse. "People might imagine that sexual abuse makes lesbians," her friend told her. Allison replied: "Oh I doubt it. If it did, there would be so many more."
She was the first in her family to go to college--"armed with a National Merit Scholarship, a new dress and a new pair of glasses donated by a local civic group," the Times wrote.
"Thank God it was the '60s and everybody was pretending to be poor anyway," she said later. "But I had to start dating upper-class girls to learn about shoes." Allison also discovered feminism and joined a lesbian collective. She opened a feminist bookstore and ran a women's center.
In addition to teaching creative writing at Emory University, Davidson College, and other institutions, Allison wrote erotica, although she preferred the term "smut." Her most recent novel, Cavedweller (1998), was made into a movie starring Kyra Sedgwick and Aidan Quinn in 2004.
"Every time I sit down to write, I have a great fear that anything I write will reveal me as the monster I was always told I would be," Allison observed in an essay included in Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature (1994). "But that fear is personal, something I must face in everything I do, every act I contemplate. Writing is an act that claims courage and meaning, and turns back denial, breaks open fear."