SAM BRIGER, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Sam Briger. We're going to remember writer Dorothy Allison, who wrote the critically acclaimed bestselling novel "Bastard Out Of Carolina, " about violence and sexual abuse in a poor Southern family. Allison died last week at the age of 75. The cause was cancer. Allison based the book on her own experience, being physically and sexually abused by her stepfather. When the book was published, George Garrett wrote in The New York Times book review, quote "the literary territory that Allison has set out to explore is dangerous turf, a mine field. It is a great pleasure to see her succeed, blithe and graceful as Baryshnikov in performance." The book was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Allison also wrote a collection of short stories called "Trash," a second novel called "Cavedweller" and a memoir titled "Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure."
Terry Gross spoke with Dorothy Allison in 1992, when "Bastard Out Of Carolina" was published. Allison said she tried to avoid the pitfalls of a literature of victimology by being as honest as possible. That honesty meant describing the disturbing, confusing thoughts of the victim. Here's a reading from a third of the way into the book. And please note, this interview includes a difficult discussion about child sexual abuse, and you may consider not listening further.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
DOROTHY ALLISON: (Reading) I didn't daydream about fire anymore. Now I imagine people watching while Daddy Glen beat me, though only when it was not happening. When he beat me, I screamed and kicked and cried like the baby I was. But sometimes, when I was safe and alone, I would imagine the ones who watched. Someone had to watch - some girl I admired who barely knew I existed, some girl from church or down the street, or one of my cousins or even somebody I'd seen on TV. Sometimes, a whole gang of them would have to be trapped into watching. They couldn't help me. They couldn't get away. They had to watch.
In my imagination, I was proud and defiant. I'd stare back at him with my teeth set, making no sound at all - no shameful scream, no begging. Those people who watched admired me and hated him. I pictured it that way, and I put my hands between my legs. It was scary, but it was thrilling, too. Those who watched me loved me. It was as if I was being beaten for them, and I was wonderful in their eyes.
TERRY GROSS: You understand this fantasy of having people watch you and admire you as you're beaten but remain defiant?
ALLISON: Yes. It's curious because it's what I did as a child, and I've talked to other survivors, and it's one of the ways in which you can fight the feeling of being this contemptible being. Because basically, when you're being - when you're subjected to that kind of abuse as a child, you almost always begin to feel that it's justified, that there is really something wrong with you, that you're this terrible person that this is happening to. And the only way I ever found, really, to deal with the emotional onslaught of those feelings was to begin to feel like a martyr, this almost Joan of Arc figure in my own mind.
GROSS: Something that really upsets the girl on this story - she hates the beatings. She hates the incest. She hates her stepfather. But she's turned on by the stories she tells herself about the beatings. And she feels terribly guilty about this.
ALLISON: Absolutely.
GROSS: And she thinks that maybe she's as guilty as her stepfather is. That's something you understand, too?
ALLISON: Oh, yes. And it's hard to explain to people on the outside of the experience, mostly because it's really hard to admit that you could take that experience and convert it into your own erotic charge. I don't know how to explain it. I don't know how to analyze it. I simply know that it happens, and it becomes a way to make it your own experience.
GROSS: I think one of the reasons why someone might be reluctant to admit to a feeling like that is not only their own kind of fear at what they were feeling, but also the fear that somebody would say, well, see, that must have - mean she enjoyed it, you know?
ALLISON: Absolutely. It's like the myth of rape, you know? Obviously, if you orgasm during rape, then it must not have been rape. So if a child begins to feel erotic excitement while being manipulated by an adult, does that give the adult permission to do it? It's a horrible thing to even imagine. And you don't - part of the reason to keep it a secret and to be quiet about that feeling is that you might give someone any small measure of encouragement to feel they have a right to do this. They have no right ever to sexually touch a child. It's just not possible to do. There's no justification for it. And the fact that the child might, in fact, manufacture some erotic excitement is not a justification for it. But if we pretend that it doesn't happen, then that guilt, that self horror, stays - never goes away.
GROSS: When you hear about somebody having experienced sexual pleasure while they were being victimized...
ALLISON: Well, what upsets me is it that they're then ashamed of themselves for it. That I find upsetting. We don't have - especially if you're a child - I mean, my incest started when I was 5 years old. I wasn't capable of making any decision about what I wanted to do. I didn't have the capacity to do that. If - when I began to feel all these funny feelings that I could not explain to myself, all I experienced was horror. I began to think that I was the terrible person. I was being told I was. And it's taken me most of my life to make the decision that that's not the case.
GROSS: Would you tell us the story your relatives told you about how you were born?
ALLISON: (Laughter) I was born in a car accident. My mother was on the way to the airport with a bunch of my uncles and aunts, and they hit another car. And she was in the back seat asleep, so she was thrown over the front seat through the windshield, over the other car. She wasn't hurt too bad, except that she had a concussion and was unconscious for three days. And, of course, I was born while she was unconscious, which meant that my grandmother and my aunts were at the hospital, and they got into an argument while talking to the clerk and didn't manage to manufacture the tale of the manufactured marriage my mother had been going to get through. So I became a certified bastard.
GROSS: How old was she when she gave birth to you?
ALLISON: Fifteen - one month past her 15th birthday. She was a child.
GROSS: She did eventually marry, right?
ALLISON: My mother married three times. Well, the first marriage was annulled. But she married my stepfather when I was 5 and lived with him until she died.
GROSS: And he was the man who abused you when you were growing up?
ALLISON: Yes.
GROSS: Did she know about it?
ALLISON: Yes and no. One of the things that's hard to explain to people is that my mother knew because there were - I told her. Actually, I didn't tell her. I told one of my cousins, who told her. What's hard to explain is that she did not let herself know all of everything that was happening. She couldn't have. And when I grew up and I would go home and talk to her, we would have these very long, slow, painful conversations, and she was enormously guilty that she had not been able to stop it. And she tried.
That's one of the hard things that I try to show in the book, is, like my mother, Anney in the book tries desperately to prevent what she sees happening, even though she doesn't see a lot of what's going on. And she tries to protect her children. She believes absolutely that the man she loves will - is going to change, that what's happening is just because he can't find a job, because his father is mean to him, because he's hurt and wounded, that he's just - she thinks of him as this little boy that she's going to mother into being a good man. And she cannot believe that that's not happening.
GROSS: So you must have been very angry with your mother for staying with your stepfather after she knew for certain what was happening to you.
ALLISON: Not until I was in my 30s did I really start to get angry at her in that way. My mother loved me. My mother spent her whole life desperately trying to make my life and the lives of my sisters better. She literally worked herself to death taking care of us, trying to make some small difference. And if you had ever had a way to meet her, you would have met someone that was just extraordinarily loving and a very large soul human being. And that's - I was madly in love with my mother. And I knew how impossible her life was. She worked as a waitress her whole life. The best job she ever had was as a cook.
She was constantly sick. There was enormous bills. She never, never got her life under control. And she always thought if she just worked a little hard or did this little thing more, it would be possible, that having her there, having her like this barrier between me and what was essentially a really cruel world, I loved her enormously. I could not possibly have been angry at her while I was at home. And for a long time after, she was my heroine.
GROSS: And - yeah.
ALLISON: It was only when I began to really deal with the problems in my own life that had resulted as being - that getting out of being the victim and into being a survivor was when I started to get angry, and it was nightmarish to be angry at her that way.
BRIGER: We're listening to Terry's 1992 interview with Dorothy Allison, the author of the bestselling novel "Bastard Out Of Carolina." More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 1992 interview with Dorothy Allison, who wrote the bestselling novel "Bastard Out Of Carolina." She died last week at the age of 75. Please note - this interview is about the impact on her of being physically and sexually abused as a child, which includes a period of self-harm and suicidal ideation. Remember, if you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, you can reach out to the suicide and crisis lifeline by calling or texting 988.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
GROSS: Dorothy, I'm going to ask you to read something from the preface to a collection of short stories that came out a few years ago. And the collection of short stories is called "Trash." Would you read the opening of the preface for us? It's titled "Deciding To Live."
ALLISON: (Reading) I became the one who got away, who got glasses from the Lions Club, a job from Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty, and finally went to college on a scholarship. There, I met the people I had always read about - girls whose fathers loved them innocently, boys who drove cars they had not stolen, whole armies of the middle and upper classes I had not truly believed to be real, the children to whom I could not help but compare myself. I matched their innocence, their confidence, their capacity to trust, to love, to be generous against the bitterness, the rage, the pure and terrible hatred that had consumed me. And like so many others who had gone before me, I began to dream longingly of my own death. I began to court it cowardly, traditionally - that is, in the tradition of all those who had gone before me - through drugs and drinking and stubbornly putting myself in the way of other people's violence. Even now, I cannot believe how it was that everything I survived became one more reason to want to die.
GROSS: Why do you think you went through a self-destructive period after having decided to live and getting away from home?
ALLISON: (Laughter) Oh. Dear, it's like math. It's like one and one. You take a child and rob that child of all self-esteem, you will get an adult that has no sense of their own worth. I spent a good portion of my late teens and early 20s trying to find a way to die without having to actually take the responsibility to kill myself. It's a direct result. I've seen it in so many other people. I've seen it in some of my younger relatives. It's just - it's a devastating impact. The hard thing is to change it, to crawl out of that black depression and begin to think of yourself as a human being like other human beings instead of a monster.
GROSS: What helped you do that?
ALLISON: I'll tell you the truth. I think it was feminism. It's - I began to believe that there was an explanation for what had happened to me, and I came to it largely through a political understanding. I went away to college, and somebody talked to me about Marx and showed me - you should be a communist. They said you're working class. Well, I'm not much good at that cause communists need to do what they're told. But I started reading and trying to study why is it that these things happen and why is it that everybody especially believe that incest and violence happens to poor and working-class kids. And I looked into a study group, a feminist study group. And all of a sudden, it was bigger. It wasn't just that we were poor. It was because I was a girl child and because girl children in my family are taught to endure and survive and not to fight back. And that began to let me be angry. It began to let me believe that I wasn't this monster that deserved what had happened to her but somebody who had fallen under somebody else's madness.
GROSS: You did something that it sounds like nobody else in your family had done before. You left home. You went someplace else. You tried to have a life different from the lives you had seen around you. How did you make that move?
ALLISON: Oh, I did something. I did a number of things nobody else in my family had done before. I was the first person in my family to graduate from high school, the first person to go to college. There have been two since. And I have come of an enormous family. It's just that both of my sisters dropped out of high school in the ninth and 10th grades. It's just not something that we were given the idea that we could do. But a lot of it had to do with my mother. My mother believed that I was this incredibly special person, that I was brilliant. She thought that I was just amazing. So when I was 5 or 6 years old, she started getting me books, and she started saving money to send me to school. She would put quarters in a tip jar. She did it my entire childhood. At the point I went to college, she had almost $200, and she'd been saving for more than 10 years.
GROSS: Wow.
ALLISON: It wasn't exactly a life in which you could keep money.
GROSS: Yeah.
ALLISON: But that when you're - if you make that decision with my mother's encouragement, believing that I was different, a lot of other things come along. The fact that I was so bright and won so many prizes and awards and things drove me away from my family. I didn't have any choice about leaving. I didn't know how to talk to them after a while. The hard part was going back.
GROSS: Right. Something else that set you apart from your family and probably from a lot of people who you knew growing up is that you're a lesbian.
ALLISON: Yes.
GROSS: How old were you when you figured that out?
ALLISON: I think it was about 11. And I wasn't entirely sure all of what it meant. I just knew that I didn't have any of the same desires as everybody else around me. I wasn't much interested in boys or the whole cycle that you get into of getting boyfriends and doing that whole thing. But I was madly, passionately in love with a little girl down the street. And I was always in love with a little girl down the street, no matter what little girl it was or where we were. I don't think there was a day in my adolescence that I was not madly in love with somebody, and she was always female.
GROSS: Now, when you were young, things were much less in the open about homosexuality than now. And...
ALLISON: Yeah.
GROSS: ...I think...
ALLISON: It's scary.
GROSS: ...People who were gay and lesbian were really encouraged to think of themselves as sick and perverted. Coming from a kind of background where you were already really worried and really guilty about who you were and why your stepfather was abusing you, thinking that you liked girls probably or might have brought on...
ALLISON: It made it complicated.
GROSS: Yeah. Right (laughter).
ALLISON: I began to think or worry that people would think that I loved girls because my stepfather had raped me. It was one of the...
GROSS: Well, I'm sure a lot of our listeners are thinking that right now, frankly.
ALLISON: Oh, I - yeah, almost everyone that I've ever talked to says, well, that's it. That's why. But I don't believe it. I believe that my lesbianism has been a source of energy and power in my life. It's almost as if, oh, you must hate men because he did these terrible things to you. That's why you love women. I don't - but I don't think of it that way. I don't love women because I hate men. I don't even particularly hate men. I happen to love women. And lust is a little bit more basic than running away, you know?
GROSS: Well, Dorothy Allison, I want to thank you very much for talking with us.
ALLISON: Thank you.
BRIGER: Dorothy Allison recorded in 1992. She died last week at the age of 75.
On Monday's show, actor and stand-up comic Jimmy O. Yang. He co-starred in the HBO show "Silicon Valley" and the film "Crazy Rich Asians." Now, he's the star of the new television show "Interior Chinatown," based on the National Book Award-winning novel of the same name. I hope you can join us. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm Sam Briger.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
