Mad Lit — Dorothy Allison
Issue #28
The author fills in the blanks about the Toni Morrison book that helped her to confront an abusive childhood and write Bastard Out of Carolina
By Jenny Sabella
Published: June 1st, 2006 | 10:00am
Dorothy Allison's fiction often deals with poverty, childhood abuse, being queer, and attempting to grow up as a woman through circumstantial struggles. Her novels, such as Bastard Out of Carolina,Cavedweller, and her 1988 short-story collection, Trash, all attest to Allison's knack for telling the stories of underrepresented voices, especially those of working-class women and families from backgrounds similar to her upbringing in Greenville, South Carolina.
The feminist and queer activist now travels the country teaching and speaking at various universities. When she's not swamped with projects, she's organizing fundraisers for independent bookstores and presses or spending time with her life partner, Alix, and 13-year-old son, Wolf, in northern California.
In the midst of working on her third novel, She Who, Allison took a moment with Venus to talk about the influence of one of her favorite works, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. — Jenny Sabella
1. The book I chose is: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.
2. The book is about: this little girl that this family takes in, Pecola. It is told in the voice of one of two little girls — sisters — who live in Ohio, who are black, who are being raised in a community that's not bottom-rung but is really struggling. They hate her for lots of reasons and not the least of which is that she hates herself. The Bluest Eye is about the fact that Pecola wants to be white. She wants blue eyes.
3. I chose this title because: it so obviously was written by a woman with a gift of language. The poetry of it is so exquisite. I fell madly in love with it. I read everything I could ever find by Toni Morrison. I adore her.
4. The first time I read it: I was 20 or 21, in late college. The world changed when I read this book.
5. My favorite part is: the opening. It reads, "There were no marigolds in the fall of 1941," and I remember when I read that, not knowing what the rest of the book was about. It’s such a biblical line. What terrible thing has happened that God wouldn't let the flowers grow?
The terrible thing that has happened is that Pecola has been raped by her father. Until I read that book I had not read a book in which that was written with compassion. I had read porn on the subject. I had read monographs on the subject. I was a survivor myself and I was in the early women's movement and I was just beginning to be able to admit that I had been raped as a child. But to find that in a book with such beautiful language and such compassion and to have it be so exquisitely rendered as "There were no marigolds in the fall," because that's how I felt as a girl — that there would be no flowers.
It gave me permission [to write Bastard Out of Carolina.] It was written in the little girl's voice, and that's what I figured out I wanted to do, although it took me a long time to figure out how to do that. There's a core of resilience in that voice. Reading that book told me that my life was a fit subject for fiction, that I could write about my life and the people I love. It opened that door, and it also opened that door of having compassion, because I was full of rage.
8. My favorite character is: the little girl who tells the story, the narrator. She's a little older than Pecola. Her mother loves her, but her mother is just really demanding and mean with her. It's that push-pull between mother and daughter and it's so beautifully rendered. All of the relationships between the narrator and her sister, and the narrator and her mother felt so true to me — so strong and so comforting.
The thing I love about novels is that they can show you how you can both love and hate people at the same time, and how people can be both loving and hateful at the same time. I've never seen any book that can introduce you to that notion as strongly as The Bluest Eye.
9. You should read it while listening to: a little Big Mama Thornton wouldn't hurt. She's got a song called "Let Your Tears Fall Baby” that's pretty damn good. She also does “Hound Dog." Elvis did a pretty good job, but Mama's version is better.
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