SOURCE: “Fiction in Review,” in Yale Review, Vol. 84, No. 3, July, 1996, pp. 162–67.

In the following essay, Kendrick explores the balance between the autobiographical and the fictional elements in Allison's works.

In Dorothy Allison's five books, she has never repeated herself. She has published a volume of poems (The Women Who Hate Me, 1983), a collection of short stories (Trash, 1988), a novel (Bastard Out of Carolina, 1992), a collection of essays (Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, & Literature, 1994), and an unclassifiable book “written for performance” (Two or Three Things I Know for Sure,). Although Allison ranges across the genres and has even created one, she has a single subject: herself. She writes repeatedly, even obsessively, about growing up poor and white in the South, about her childhood rape by her stepfather, about being lesbian, and about the kind of lesbian she is, devoted to practices that many of her fellows find politically abhorrent...