September 28–October 5, 1995

book quarterly

Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure

Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure

By Dorothy Allison, Dutton, 94 p., $14.95.

"'Let me tell you a story,' I used to whisper to my sisters, hiding with them behind the red-dirt bean hills and row on row of strawberries. My sisters' faces were thin and sharp, with high cheekbones and restless eyes, like my mama's face, my aunt Dot's, my own. Peasants, that's what we are and have always been. Call us the lower orders, the great unwashed, the working class, the poor, proletariat, trash, lowlife and scum. I can make a story out of it, out of us. Pretty or sad, laughable or haunting. Dress it up with legend and aura and romance."

That's what storytellers do, at least good ones.

And Dorothy Allison's a great one.

A professor for a spiritual autobiography class once told me that if you can't tell your story — if you don't have your own story to tell — then you're spiritually lost. And that's one of the two or three things I know for sure. We reinvent ourselves everyday, fictionalize our own lives to make them more interesting or less painful, to have control over ourselves and know who we are: to ensure our survival.

This is Dorothy Allison's survival piece. Her testament of youth. Her explanation. Her forgiveness. Yes, it's still another story, but one that self-consciously cuts through the bullshit: It's honest and painful and tender; not a story of pain and loss, but one of strength and maturation and of the process of becoming who she is now.

And it's a very cute book. She has pictures of herself and her family scattered throughout, more memoirs, more landmarks — this-is-how-I-looked-then kind of stories, and you can see the leanness in her eyes, the never-say-die attitude. There's always a bittersweet nostalgia in photos, and her book captures that too well through her vignettes: when she came out to her sister, her first sex with a woman, her mother's death, even the bad times that have a little bit of good in them. Her book is a family and personal history, as good as any photo album.

It is a spiritual autobiography: It renews the human spirit, showing that it hasn't (or can't) be broken. Her text, which was originally designed for performance, is an ultimately optimistic work, an affirmation of life. She does a beautiful job of articulating what she's learned from the women in her family, the interconnectedness and the community — not only sharing the same stubborn bone structure, but the family myths, the tried and true methods, the "two or three things I know for sure" that every family has.

On one hand, you know how special it is to her to be a part of that community, to have a place there. To become a legend herself. To have a sense of self that allows the self-conscious act of telling stories, of living the writing life.

At the same time, you feel how she has, how we all, suffer to belong to a clan, and suffer through belonging to a clan. To have the same face as her mother and her grandmother, to have their lives ingrained in her, to be a part of that fabric whether she wants to or not — how she belongs, yet doesn't. She's an intellectual and a dyke. She's 12 and white trash and hungry for that inexplicable something.

The inner conflict may never go away, becoming part of who we are, mellowing or dulling into something we need to write about, to fictionalize, to get it out, purge, cleanse, make peace with.

And it feels like this is what she's doing, ending the text with the introduction of her son, a new beginning and a new generation.

And she's telling stories.

The only thing wrong with this book is that it's too short. I never want to stop reading this story.

— Jennifer Hemler