SOURCE: “Dorothy Allison: A Family Redeemed,” in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 245, No. 9, March 2, 1998, pp. 44–45.

In the following essay, Reynolds discusses Allison's childhood and literary career, including excerpts from an interview with Allison.

Back in 1992, when Dorothy Allison burst into the literary limelight with her bestselling novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, she dubbed herself the “Roseanne of Literature.” That shocking, autobiographical story of a young girl in the South who is raped and beaten by her stepfather helped open the floodgates to the rush of memoirs that has since poured into American bookstores. Allison's audience flocked to her in droves, bearing their own stories of prejudice and abuse and poverty. Their heroine, it turned out, was a fast-talking, brash motorcycle mama whose previous books included everything from lesbian porn to feminist theory and had titles like Trash and Skin. Photographs from the early 1990s show a woman whose fists are...