Summary

Dorothy Allison details how the circumstances of her own life made her write these stories. Her family was the "bad poor" (vii). In American stories, her family had always been in the background. Allison is now an older woman, and she recognizes how when she wrote the stories in Trash she was a different person. At the time she was writing, she did not expect to publish the stories anywhere but in small literary magazines. Many of the stories she wrote in rages. However, while her stories are like her family's stories, Allison reminds us that she makes up characters -- "a fictional Mattie Lee, a pretend Shirley" in "Meanest Woman Ever Left Tennessee" (x). Sometimes she wrote to celebrate these people but other times she wrote "to take a little revenge" (xii).

Allison notes that sometimes she would write...