In an essay published in the
New York Times Book Review, Allison commente d on the importance of literature that deals honestly with such themes: "We are the ones they make fiction of--we gay and disenfranchised and female--and we have the right to demand our full, nasty, complicated lives."
A "White Trash" Upbringing
Allison was born in 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina, to a poor, unmarried fifteen-year-old girl. When Allison was five, her stepfather--her mother having since married--began sexually abusing her. The abuse lasted for several years before Allison was finally able to tell a relative; the relative informed Allison's mother, who put a stop to the abuse and moved out with her three daughters for a time. Soon, however, the family was reunited. Though her childhood was permanently marred by such abuse, there were bright moments. Allison found that the female members of her family were natural storytellers; she would hide under the front porch to listen to ribald tales the women shared with one another. As Allison noted to Minnie Bruce Pratt in an inter view for the Progressive, there was also a tradition of reading in the family. "My mother believed in books, as peculiar as that was.
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