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Telling Stories in Dorothy Allison's Two or Three Things I Know For Sure

Telling Stories in Dorothy Allison's Two or Three Things I Know For Sure Telling Stories in Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know For Sure by Timothy Dow Adams “Memory heals the scars of time. Photography documents the wounds.” —Michael Ignatieff Dorothy Allison’s strong and sustained autobiographical im- pulse is evident in much of her writing, including some of the poems in The Women Who Hate Me, the stories in Trash, her fi rst novel Bastard Out of Carolina, many of the essays in Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature, and especially in her memoir, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure. Although Two or Three Things I Know For Sure carries the label “memoir” on its back cover, the text was originally a performance piece, and eventually became the subject of a documentary fi lm. As she moved through the genres, from poetry to short fi ction to novel to per- sonal essay to performance piece, and fi nally to memoir, Allison’s liter- ary output consistently told the same story: But what may be the central fact of my life is that I was born in 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina, the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family, a girl who had left http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Southern Literary Journal University of North Carolina Press

Telling Stories in Dorothy Allison's Two or Three Things I Know For Sure

Adams, Timothy Dow.
The Southern Literary Journal , Volume 36 (2) – May 19, 2004
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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 the Southern Literary Journal and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of English.
ISSN
1534-1461

Abstract

Telling Stories in Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know For Sure by Timothy Dow Adams “Memory heals the scars of time. Photography documents the wounds.” —Michael Ignatieff Dorothy Allison’s strong and sustained autobiographical im- pulse is evident in much of her writing, including some of the poems in The Women Who Hate Me, the stories in Trash, her fi rst novel Bastard Out of Carolina, many of the essays in Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature, and especially in her memoir, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure. Although Two or Three Things I Know For Sure carries the label “memoir” on its back cover, the text was originally a performance piece, and eventually became the subject of a documentary fi lm. As she moved through the genres, from poetry to short fi ction to novel to per- sonal essay to performance piece, and fi nally to memoir, Allison’s liter- ary output consistently told the same story: But what may be the central fact of my life is that I was born in 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina, the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family, a girl who had left

Journal

The Southern Literary Journal – University of North Carolina Press

Published: May 19, 2004

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