Welcome to Litsy!

This short memoir (94 pages) packs a lot into its length. Allison focuses on her childhood, the women she grew up with, some of the men, the abuse she suffered, her refusal to let that abuse define her, and her mother‘s death. It‘s a lovely book that‘s necessarily short and less detailed because it was written to be performed. Written after Bastard Out of Carolina but before Cavedweller (my favorite), it provides insight into Allison‘s life.

I loved this. One of my professors let me borrow this and I loved it so much, I‘m buying my own copy. Her prose is so fluid, so conversational. You just want her to keep telling you stories. It‘s so raw and honest. I can‘t wait to read Bastard Out of Carolina.

Dorothy Allison's memoir is a dreamy, brutal, slap of reality as filtered through a perspective hard won by time. Her writing is, as always, painful and true and ugly-beautiful in a way that I can't objectively speak to. Her voice rises off the page, like she's slung an arm around you and whispered in your ear.

These 94 pages are a reminder that length does not equal impact. In this small space, Dorothy Allison conveys the importance of storytelling: how it can heal or break us, how we need to tell our own stories in our own voices, how we can overcome. This memoir gives glimpses of her life and family in rural South Carolina along with black and white photos of her family. This was one of my #bestbooks2016 and should be #requiredreading #LGBTQ

I know. I am supposed to be deeply broken, incapable of love or trust or passion. But I am not, and part of why that is so is the nature of the stories I told myself to survive. Like the stories my mama told herself, and my aunt Dot and my cousin Billie, my stories shaped my life. Of all the stories I know, the meanest are the stories the women I loved told themselves in secret - the stories that sustained and broke them.

That beautiful boy my mama loved, as skinny as her, as ignorant and hungry, as proud as he could be to have that beautiful girl, her skin full of heat, her eyes full of hope. And when he ran away, left her to raise me alone, she never trusted any man again - but wanted to, wanted to so badly it ate the heart out of her.

#firstlines - "Let me tell you a story," I used to whisper to my sisters, hiding with them behind the red-dirt bean hills and row on row of strawberries.