Publisher's Weekly Review
Allison's much-praised novel Bastard Out of Carolina was inspired by her childhood in Greenville, S.C., but in this memoir, adapted from a performance piece, she cuts even closer to the bone. ``We don't have a family Bible?'' the author's fourth-grade self asks her aunt. ``Child, some days we don't even have a family,'' comes the response. If Allison suffered horrors, notably rape by her stepfather when she was five, she has transmuted pain into stories, gaining control with maturity. Indeed, her title prefaces several hard-won aphorisms she uses to counterpoint her memories: ``No one is as hard as my uncles had to pretend to be.'' Her mother was a beauty, as was her sister, but Dorothy, smart and plain, felt a legacy of ugliness, one she shook off slowly as her feminism and her heart led her to lesbian relationships, often painful, finally rewarding. She is now, in her 40s, a new mother, and her storiesand lifeare a triumph of love over cruelty. Read it aloud and savor the rhythms. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
``Oh, I could tell you stories that would darken the sky and stop the blood,'' writes Allison in this rich memoir, which originated as a performance piece. And indeed, she tells such storiesof her beautiful mother, abandoned as a pregnant teenager by the boy she loved; of the rape of a little girl; of a family history of ``death and murder, grief and denial, rage and ugliness.'' As a girl, Allison writes, she told stories in order to escape. Here she tells stories to revisit what she had earlier tried to escapehome, family and family secrets, the hard, burdensome womanhood of the poor in her hometown, Greenville, S.C. But Allison, who courted both literary acclaim and notoriety with her first novel, Bastard out of Carolina (1992), tells her sad tales with a lyricism that lifts them into another realm. ``Let me tell you a story'' is her refrain. And we do, we let her tell away. (Author tour)
Booklist Review
Adapted from a performance piece, Allison's little memoir sifts through old family photos that capture a childhood filled with a "white trash" girl's recollections of love, hate, revenge, rural Southern poverty, beatings, incest, and women whose hard eyes betrayed their broken dreams and lives. It also writhes and screams in pain, need, and outrage. By contrast, shafts of sudden insight illuminate it, so that it dances and belly laughs and proclaims its multifaceted discoveries of the two or three things of its title, discoveries such as "What it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you make" and that "Change, when it comes, cracks everything open." The 96-page tapestry of remembrances both bright and muted compresses the loss, lust, rape, rage, and love from which Allison fashioned her acclaimed Bastard Out of Carolina and, like the novel, shows a heroine--in this case, Allison herself--determined to transcend an anguished childhood and celebrate life with stories of and for survival. --Whitney Scott
Library Journal Review
Allison (Bastard Out of Carolina, LJ 3/1/92) is a poet, essayist, and novelist, but in all these she is a storyteller. For her, stories are not simply creations but the very things that create us. Resounding with a familiarity of the intimate turned universal, this brief memoir recounts the episodes and people of Allison's life who created her and her own re-creation of herself. Often painful and mean, the stories are never bitter or despairing because of Allison's ability to move beyond, if not transform, the meaningless cruelty of life. Written as a performance piece, the cadence of the prose reverberates in the head and begs to be read out loud: "Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I would rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me." With this retelling, Allison remakes that coat in her own image and leaves readers waiting for more stories. Highly recommended. [A BOMC and Quality Paperback selection.]Eric Bryant, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
