Dorothy Allison, revered and award-winning lesbian feminist author, has died

Dorothy Allison, the lesbian feminist author of the novel Bastard Out of Carolina and other noteworthy books, has died at age 75.

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Allison, who had cancer, died Wednesday at her home in Northern California, Sinister Wisdomreports.

“Allison wrote about a queer, poor South with dynamism and ferocious love,” Literary Hub notes. “Her books tangoed frankly with historically taboo subjects, like sexual abuse, and spotlit characters under-glimpsed on the shelves of hegemony.”

Her books reflected her life. She was born in 1949 in Greenville, S.C. Her mother was just 15 years old, and Allison “had a difficult childhood marked by poverty and sexual, physical, and emotional abuse,” as Sinister Wisdom puts it. With the help of scholarships, she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and she became involved in the feminist and lesbian rights movements in the 1970s and ’80s in Florida, Washington, D.C., and New York City.

She became editor of Amazing Grace, a feminist newspaper, and contributed poems and essays to LGBTQ+ and other publications. She served on the editorial board of Conditions, a lesbian feminist journal. “Sitting on the floor at editorial meetings talking about writing and manuscripts and how women might work toward a more just and equitable world, I looked around and felt my heart thudding between my breasts,” she wrote about Conditions in an essay for Sinister Wisdom. “I loved each and every one of us. I loved what we were trying to do even as we quibbled over line breaks in a poem or structure in an essay.”

In 1983, Allison published a chapbook of poetry, The Women Who Hate Me, and in 1988 came a collection of her short stories, Trash, which was honored with two Lambda Literary Awards and the American Library Association’s Award for Gay and Lesbian Writing. Allison “exposes with poetic frankness the complexities of being ‘a cross-eyed working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language, and hope,’” Publishers Weeklywrote of Trash.

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Bastard Out of Carolina, published in 1992, brought Allison widespread critical praise and a National Book Award nomination. It is the story of Ruth Anne Boatwright, nicknamed Bone, tracking her life up to age 13 in an impoverished family in Greenville, as Allison did, and being abused by her stepfather, as Allison was.

“The literary territory that Dorothy Allison has set out to explore is dangerous turf, a minefield strewn with booby traps where the least false step could lead to disaster,” George Garrett wrote in The New York Times.Those “booby traps” include stereotypes about the South and poverty, he explained. “It is a great pleasure to see her succeed, blithe and graceful as Baryshnikov in performance,” Garrett wrote.

The novel was adapted into a television movie starring Jena Malone as Bone and Jennifer Jason Leigh as her mother, Anney, and directed by Anjelica Huston. It aired on Showtime in 1996 after media mogul Ted Turner refused to air it on his outlets because of the graphic depictions of sexual abuse.

Allison’s second novel was 1998’s Cavedweller, which “gradually discloses the inner lives and secret histories of four bewildered, determined women who eventually come to understand themselves,” aKirkus Reviewscritic wrote, calling it “an altogether wonderful second novel.” It became a TV movie in 2004, starring Kyra Sedgwick, Aidan Quinn, and Kevin Bacon, and directed by Lisa Cholodenko.

Allison’s other works include the essay collection Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, & Literature (1994) and the memoir Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995). She was a prolific writer of erotica and helped found the Lesbian Sex Mafia, a women’s BDSM support and education group that is still active. She received the Publishing Triangle’s Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement this year, among many other honors.

Allison’s wife, Alix Layman, preceded her in death. Survivors include her son, Wolf, and many friends.