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Willamette Week: When I heard you talk at Lewis and Clark at the gender symposium earlier in the year, you tapped into Titanic’s popularity and talked about who got in the boats and who got left behind. But if we’re all trying to get into lifeboats, what’s sinking?
Dorothy Allison: We’re all in this together. And I do think some days we’re sinking. Some days I can barely stand it. I read the paper this morning; it said a black child on the streets in America has the same odds of being shot as a soldier in World War II.
Yeah, I just sat down on the bed with the paper, with my mouth open, for a good ten minutes thinking about that.
WW: That sounds like we're in an absolute war zone.
Allison: Well, it means this is a damn unsafe lifeboat we’re all in, but safer on some ends of the boat than others. I don’t separate it off, I think we are all in the same boat. This is a fucked-up lifeboat we're all in. I think the problem is a lot of people think they’re in different boats. Only the boat's damned big, and the water’s coming over the side some days.
WW: Do you think reading is coming back? Is Oprah making an impact from your end?
Allison: I do. She chooses darn good books, books that I have loved. I don’t know if she has increased the number of people reading so much as she has, to a certain extent, raised the common denominator of what people are reading. I think all those women who would pick up romances or pick up mysteries and read at lunch or on the way to work in the subway now pick up Oprah books.
WW: What do you think that's going to do to the lifeboat, with literature expanding people's perspective, people who used to only read romances?
Allison: I believe that literature is a way to make people you have never imagined or you have been afraid of real to you. I have great hope of the ultimate impact of good books. They changed my life. I believe absolutely in the work, aside from Barnes and Noble versus independent bookstores, bottom line I believe in books and I believe in that intimate thing that happens between the reader and the book.
WW: Do you think the books will carry us through the loss of the independent bookstores?
Allison: They will carry us through but I'm not sure what they will carry us to. It's quite frightening to watch. In the last few years I've found myself doing benefits for bookstores, which is a horrific concept. Yet I did a reading in New York and deliberately went to the independent store first, but a good third of the people who came to the reading had stopped at Borders on the way and gotten the book at a 40 % discount and brought it to me to sign, still in the bag. They were kids, and women who work jobs that don't make enough money. They were really blunt: I need the discount.
I miss those little bookstores. I could always go anywhere, and find a little bookstore, walk in and feel safe - buy myself a moment of absolute emotional security because people who are in bookstores are the type of people you can trust in your lifeboat. Watching those bookstores disappear and the big corporate bookstores dominate has been very frightening to me. And then, there are the online services.
My publisher did a web site and they wanted to put up book ordering link. I said if we're going to have a book ordering link, can't we use the technology available to refer back to a local bookstore that has an ordering mechanism like Powells or Book Passage in California? And they're like uh, uh, well you know, Barnes and Noble has offered to sell it. We had long talks and finally they said if you want it we can make the link to Booklist, which does a referral, which is one more step. And I know damn well that one more step will mean a whole lot of people won't make it.
In a hushed tone. But I talk to a lot of writers. We use Amazon. I know people who've posted reviews there.
I've got Powells bookmarked on my computer now and Book Passage and I'm making the choice to go there, but I'm really concerned about what's going to happen. I'm pushing independents to do more and to provide something at their web sites to draw people in, because you know, we don't have the money. those Barnes and Nobles and those Borders with those couches and that lighting. I did a reading in New York a couple years ago at one of the superstores and it's like a library. They had great lighting, there were all these little nooks and tables. And I thought - this is the big chance. But what happens when all the little bookstores are gone. Are they going to take the couches out and go to warehousing to hold more books? And in fact, I have seen that happen in a couple of the big bookstores because all the little independents who were competing with them disappeared and stopped pressure and they started moving things around and they have become less comfortable. But they have learned. They're corporate and they do what sells, what helps. It's not quite as bad as I feared it would get. I fear what it will get. It makes me nervous. but I believe in the use of the internet. I believe in that kind of wild anarchist spirit.
WW: Do you use it a lot?
Allison: Yes, but I'm nervous. I think it's my age. Kids aren't nervous. the kids are doing things like ordering. I cannot bring myself to turn my credit card over to an online service. I always use the little protective gate. Kids aren't scared at all. 12 year olds are ordering books from Amazon.
One of the reasons I like independent bookstores is that they tend to be stores that have been established and shepparded by people who truly love books. It's one of the things I saw some of the web sites like Amazon are recognizing. But it makes me a little nervous because, you know, I used to trust Betty Crocker, and I'm pretty sure I can't trust Betty Crocker any more. You can't see what's behind the face of an online service. I bookmark independent bookstores, I know the people in Powells. It it hurts my heart to do a benefit for a bookstore.
WW: Do you see fiction writing changing at all with the net, the way people present their material?
Allison: laughs uproariously. I heard a whole lot of talk about that a few years ago, but they don't talk that much about it anymore because nobody bought the books. They couldn't read them.
Every time I've been invited to do something like that it's been really clear to me that I'd be doing a whole lot of work for nothing. They want you to give them rights to your work and they are going to put it on the 'Net, saying, oh we're not making any money, we're trying to create a literature. I'm creating a literature and I'm trying to raise a child. At the same time, a lot of the little magazines and independent journals that I worked with as a young writer are gone and all the kids are working on zines online, which I have trouble reading because they love to do interesting visuals and frankly, my eyes are 48 years old. I can't do it. I think that, too, is a whole world that is in the process of being created and we don't really know yet what it's going to look like. but I love anything that gets young people writing. and they're doing it for free. Somebody's making money.
WW: Do you use e-mail?
Allison: I had to cut that off. I was getting too much mail online and just in the world. I use e-mail to converse with my editor and send stuff back and forth, but other than that I've tried to eliminate it because boy, people expect you to write back in a couple hours.
WW: I just had this conversation with a friend. We've become bored and overwhelmed by the expectation of e-mail. We've both simultaneously and independently of each other stopped responding to people and then stopped apologizing for not responding to people immediately and slowed it down to the pace of actual letters. So far, the people at the other end have lived.
Allison: That instant gratification thing is a bit of a problem. And that damn buddy list on America Online where they can tell you're online and they start talking to them as if you're going to be able to stop your work and chat. I don't chat. I don't go to chat rooms. Besides when I did some research and tried to figure it out, they're all 14-year-old boys. They are not my primary conservational goal.
I have done two online conversations, one with American Online. They are peculiar, and interesting, and alienated at the core. I was in a hotel room on my book tour, talking on the phone to somebody who's reading questions to me, then she types them in. I don't see the questions. Somewhere away from the person I'm talking to there is another person who looks at all the questions. I quickly got the sense they were picking the questions. A couple of times I would tell her what I wanted her to type in and she would say, "Oh, I can't say that." It was this 19 year old from Biloxi who'd just gotten a job at America Online, They finally got one question that had the word lesbian in it and she asked me, "Now if this offends you, you don't have to answer this." I'm like, "Do you know who I am? It's a constructed community and I don't trust the people doing the construction.
WW: Cavedweller is an amazing book, and very different from Bastard Out of Carolina. Do you feel like you’re done exploring around yourself?
Allison: No, but I think part of the problem is that, from the outside, my novels look autobiographical. But the only memoir I’ve written is Two or Three Things, and then Skin as essays. In terms of fiction, I’ve never thought I was writing particularly about me. I was, though, writing about people I can identify with and am impassioned about, which does tend to be people like me.
WW: I expected Delia to go back to Cayro and have to accept the scorn of the town, but then win over her daughters by overwhelming them with devotion. But all she did was show up in town, put them all together in a house, and wait.
Allison: You think that's what's going on. I think of myself as a lyrical realist and I wanted to write an honest portrayal of what forgiveness is about. I believe in forgiveness. I believe in redemption. I believe in working your stuff out and I know that real change is long and slow, especially between mothers and children. I don't believe in that John Wayne, wham, bam structure. And I wanted some ending like in Bastard where you hit that wall and you're sitting there with your mouth open. When you want to hunt me down and shake me. Writers want to do that.
Delia is really a great mother. She's broken, and she gives up a little more than I would be willing to give up. She's so hurt and so hungry to be loved, and absolutely won't do anything that will risk her girls.
WW: Why can't Cissy, her youngest daughter, see that? She seems colder than she needs to be
Allison: I've been a child in a small town, stared at. It makes you a little cold and angry. She was terrible in the early drafts of the book. I sent a draft to my agent and two readers and they were like, get rid of her. she is making my teeth on edge. Deedee's (the second daughter) so charming, she can get over. Amanda, the oldest, is so stiff-necked that you don't have to pay much attention. She'll go on the way she's going anyway. But it's Cissy who is going to be whiny and obnoxious and irritate the shit out of you. I have been that child. I know what that feels like - sheer hormone poison. I was a really obnoxious teenage girl. Oh, you haven't got a clue. Obnoxious teenage girls become wonderful women. but there is a period there…
WW: Without giving the plot away too much, I want to talk about the fact you basically try to kill all three of the girls off.
Allison: Everybody has to have some confrontation with the self. You don't have to change, but if you're lucky, you will. I don't write biography, but I write myself into each of my characters. I had not really looked at how embattled and uncertain is my ability to trust love. That's really what I was writing about: learning to trust love, learning to take that risk. Learning to be different in the world doesn't happen simply, easily or quickly and I wanted to show how it really happens, so I give you moments in their lives in which you feel them changing and what I hope to make, I think I almost got it right, is that sense of you're going along, going along, going along, and then you look back and you realize what an enormous terrain you've crossed.
WW: Have you been caving?
Allison: Oh, yes! When I was in my early 20s and was going through my brief but determined jock phase, I went caving with a group of women. When you get to the bottom you turn off the lights, but your eyes cannot accept the blackness. It is such an intense darkness that you immediately begin to hallucinate. I had been clean a couple of years when I went caving, but I immediately thought I was having an acid flashback. Yes. I was terrible. The really great cavers.are skinny girls with lots of upper body strength. This is not me, no. I could get wedged really fast and get exhausted really fast.
I went caving. with a group of women, it was put together by a woman in medical school studying to be a pathologist. Tell you right away the kind of mind set there. I should have thought about that before we agreed to go with her. She was tiny. and very very strong. A jock. We trailed along behind her just for the adventure. I have never been so terrified, exhausted, exhilarated in my life because back then, you used carbide lamps, which stink and hiss. They don't do that any more, almost never. It's very bad. Going down in the cave with this huge heavy metal helmet on with this fizzing stinking thing above you. Caves are filthy. Climbing around - rock caves have no path - you're climbing over boulders and sliding in pea gravel. But I was down there I was saying to myself, "I'm going to do this, I'm not going to be afraid, I'm going to do this. And I liked it. I wasn't any good at it.
By the time we'd been down a couple hours and came out, I was weeping with exhaustion. We had to climb a 30-foot cliff to get out of this hole in the ground and you're exhausted and your covered with mud and you've gained like 40 pounds of wet mud and you've got this heavy helmet. Climb a few feet, sit, weep. climb a few feet, sit, weep. That's how I got out of that hole in the ground and I immediately wanted to go back.
WW: Let’s talk about bastardy, which is such a prominent theme in your first novel. There’s a group called Bastard Nation leading a movement to open birth records to people adopted as children.
WW: I understand that enormously because I was deeply curious about my real father. I know that when I decided to have a child, the first thing out of my mouth was, “I don’t want some anonymous donor. I want him to know who his dad is.” I don’t believe in protective legislature. I think it causes far greater difficulties. And I have had friends who have been-there whole life has been structured around this mystery. It’s quite unfortunate.
WW: The mystery of trying to find?
Allison: “The mystery of their own identities, and the assumption that there is some secret that they can;t get to you, that something is being with-held from them-whether that’s true or not. I did some research on my father, and from what I can tell he was a very uninteresting man. But because his absence was so profound, it does make a certain focus. Not knowing takes away half the ground from under you, and it’s very unsettling.
WW: Do you think that’s one of the reasons the relationship in your household has evolved as it has?
Allison: The reason that has happened is we’re damn lucky. Simply good people who are damned lucky, because we didn’t know what we were doing.
WW: It’s very common in such situations to keep the birth father as a separate entity.
Allison: Yeah, I can see that. If the man is involved, the rest of the society looking at your family sees him and the child. They don’t see the two women. The women don’t have as much primacy. A lot of this culture thinks that. Looking at my family, they see Wolf, Dan and Alix. I ’m over here, the weird aunt. I don’t register. But to him [my son], it’s simple. I’m Wolf’s mom.
I just read this interview with Reggie White, who’s quite convinced we’re going to hell. A lot of this culture thinks that. Before Wolf was born I thought of babies as this tub of butter I could would mold into this gorgeous, complicated, strong, and wonderful person. But my son was himself from birth. He looked up and there was a real person there already. And he promptly fell in love with his father. And Dan was trying to be extremely respectful and honor our arrangement and keep his distance - didn’t work,didn’t happen, wasn’t gonna happen. If we had gotten scared, or felt threatened, we would have done him Wolf damage and ourselves. We were very lucky because Dan moved slow and because we had so much emotional muscle to work with. Dan’s been sober more than a decade, and Alix has been sober for fourteen years. That’s a shared history. They have a language and an understanding. They trust each other on some basic level, and know each other in a way that they don’t know other people. That helped a whole lot.
WW: So, it was just a natural evolution?
Allison: “That’s why I say we’re lucky. Otherwise we would have had to have a bunch of meetings and figure everything out. Sometimes it’s necessary, but Lord...(trailing off). I believe in people of good will making each other vulnerable to each other and taking risks. It’s astonishing to me how well have I have done when I am willing to do that. I get in trouble when I get scared and hard nosed, and pull up back into myself, stare at people like they not in my lifeboat.”
WW: How long have the three of you you been living together?
Allison: Since August.
WW: Oh, so it’s relatively new.
Allison: “Well, in one house. We’ve been visiting and sharing and moving back and forth, and being with each other for a few weeks at a time for several years. We’re trying it out. And having Wolf go live with his dad, spend some time there. It’s just, just on the practical day to day level, everybody should have three parents.”
WW: Now, the kids who you were talking to at Lewis and Clark, a private college, are they’re in a different end of the boat than where you come from?
Allison: Did you look around? Did you talk to those kids? There were a lot of Lewis and Clark students there, and that is a fairly upscale and expensive institution. But there were a lot of Portland State students who had made the trip over. There were kids there who weren’t even in college; a couple kids I met were working at Starbucks, and wanted to talk to me. No, the peculiar thing about our country is that people assume they’re walled off from those dangerous distant people, but they’re not; you’re sittin’ right beside them. Half the time you can’t tell if there's someone in trouble standing next to you unless they do something to suddenly make you feel the risk they feel all the time. One of the reasons I loved that was because it was an open campus, an open conference, all kinds of people.
WW: What other things did you do? Did you to other symposiums?
Allison: I did, I did! (laugh) I went to one of the literary symposiums in which the professors were analyzing writers.. I came in late and was sitting in the back of the room. One of the women was talking about Zora Neale Hurston and about literary history and critics. The voice in which they were talking about writers was as if writers were some kind of archaic animal. Kinda like this creature in the zoo that occasionally produces interesting spoor, and that only "we" (meaning the academics) can tell what the spoor really means. It was just so daunting, and one of them read a paper analyzing my work. I didn’t know that was coming. And then when it was all over, I asked one of them, “Do any of you write any thing besides criticism? Do you write fiction?” One of them said, “Well, I used to write fiction, but somehow writing criticism has gotten in the way.” I can see why. Scare you right off. It’s weird.
The curious thing is that people believe writers are different from them. They impose some kind of mystique, and writers play into it. But it’s not true. This is a job. It’s just a damn good job when it goes well.
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