Dorothy E. Allison was born on April 11, 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina to Ruth Gibson Allison, who was fifteen at the time. Her single mother was poor, working as a waitress and cook. Ruth eventually married, but when Dorothy was five, her stepfather began to abuse her sexually. This abuse lasted for seven years. At age 11 Allison told a relative about it, who told her mother. Ruth forced her husband to leave the girl alone, and the family remained together. The respite did not last long, as the stepfather resumed the sexual abuse, continuing for five years. Allison suffered mentally and physically, contracting gonorrhea that was not diagnosed and treated until she was in her 20s. The untreated disease left her unable to have children.
Allison held a wide variety of jobs before gaining any success as a writer. She worked as a salad girl, a maid, a nanny, a substitute teacher, and helped establish a feminist bookstore in Florida. She also worked at a child-care center, answered phones at a rape crisis center, and clerked with the Social Security Administration. In certain periods, she trained during the day and at night sat in her motel room and wrote on yellow legal pads. She wrote about her life experiences, including the abuse by her stepfather, dealing with poverty, and her lust for women. This became the backbone of her future works. Her first novel Bastard Out of Carolina was published in 1992. It was later adapted as a film of the same name, directed by Anjelica Huston for TNT. The book and film both generated controversy because of the graphic content, and the TV film was aired on Showtime rather than TNT. The Canadian Maritime Film Classification Board initially banned distribution of the film in Canada, but it was reversed on appeal. In November 1997, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court affirmed a State Board of Education decision to ban the book in public high schools because of its graphic content. In 2007, Allison announced that she was working on a new novel entitled She Who, to be published by Riverhead Press. Allison held a three-month residency at Emory University in Atlanta in 2008 as the Bill and Carol Fox Center Distinguished Visiting Professor. .
Writing
Themes in Allison's work include class struggle, child and sexual abuse, women, lesbianism, feminism, and family. French literary scholar Mélanie Grué, describes Allison's work as a celebration of "the vilified transgressive lesbian body." Grué also notes Allison's ability "to make desire and pleasure public" in her writing, in contrast to the second-wave feminist views on "correct expressions" of sexuality. Allison's first novel, the semi-autobiographicalBastard Out of Carolina, was one of five finalists for the 1992 National Book Award. Her influences include Toni Morrison, Bertha Harris, and Audre Lorde. Allison says The Bluest Eye by Morrison helped her to write about incest. In the early 1980s, Allison met Lorde at a poetry reading. After reading what would eventually become her short-story "River of Names," Lorde approached her and told her that she simply must write.
Allison has advocated for safer sex and is active in feminist and lesbian communities. In 1977, she became an associate of the American nonprofit publishing organization Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press. She and Jo Arnone cofounded the Lesbian Sex Mafia in 1981.
Honors
In 2007, Allison was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
