Dorothy Allison, the lesbian-feminist author best known for the novel Bastard Out of Carolina and the story collection Trash, died in November 2024.
Born Dorothy Earlene Allison on April 11, 1949, in Greenville, South Carolina, to a 15-year-old mother, Ruth Gibson Allison, she was the first in her family to graduate from high school. She attended Florida Presbyterian College (now Eckerd College) on a National Merit Scholarship, earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, and later earned a master’s degree in anthropology from the New School for Social Research. In the early 1970s she joined a lesbian-feminist collective, and the women’s movement and the feminist press shaped her career. In Tallahassee, Florida, she edited the feminist newspaper Amazing Grace and worked at a feminist bookstore, and in 1981 she joined the editorial collective of the journal Conditions. She published a poetry chapbook, The Women Who Hate Me, in 1983. She also wrote erotica throughout her life, which she preferred to call smut, and she taught creative writing at Emory University, Davidson College and other institutions.
Trash (1988), her first story collection, was published by Firebrand Books and won two Lambda Literary Awards. Its stories of loss and redemption, shame and forgiveness, love and abuse, and the healing power of storytelling laid the groundwork for her first novel. The Plume edition in the collection adds a new introduction in which Allison discusses writing the book.
Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), published by Dutton, follows Ruth Anne “Bone” Boatwright, a girl growing up poor in Greenville County, South Carolina, who is abused by her stepfather. Drawn from Allison’s own childhood and rendered as fiction, it became a bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award.
Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature (1994), published by Firebrand Books, gathers essays, autobiographical narratives and performance pieces, including updated versions of earlier magazine and anthology pieces alongside new work. It won a Stonewall Book Award.
Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995), published by Dutton, is a short memoir adapted from a monologue Allison performed. It uses photographs of the Gibson women of her family as anchors for an account of growing up poor, white and lesbian in Greenville, South Carolina.
Cavedweller (1998), published by Dutton, follows Delia, a former rock singer who returns to the daughters she left behind in rural Georgia, and the four women whose lives converge as they come to terms with the past and the future. It won a Lambda Literary Award, was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was adapted for film in 2004 by director Lisa Cholodenko, with Kyra Sedgwick in the cast.
Allison’s work also appears in five anthologies in the collection: Amy Scholder and Ira Silverberg’s High Risk (1991), Naomi Holoch and Joan Nestle’s Women on Women (1990), which includes her story “A Lesbian Appetite,” Eric Garber and Jewelle Gomez’s Swords of the Rainbow (1996), Douglas Ray’s The Queer South (2014), and Jeff Mann and Julia Watts’s LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia.
Critics compared Allison to Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner and Harper Lee, and Bastard Out of Carolina has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Anjelica Huston directed a television film of the novel that aired on Showtime in 1996, and the book was banned from high schools in Maine and California. Allison was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors in 2016 and received the Publishing Triangle’s Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2024.
Complete Bibliography
Novels: Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), Cavedweller (1998)
Short stories: Trash (1988)
Poetry: The Women Who Hate Me (1983; expanded edition 1991)
Memoir: Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995)
Nonfiction: Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature (1994)
Allison died of cancer at her home in Guerneville, California, in November 2024. She was 75. Her death was announced by the Frances Goldin Literary Agency, her longtime representative. She married her longtime partner, Alix Layman, in 2008; Layman died in 2022. Allison is survived by her son, Wolf Michael Layman, and two sisters, Barbara and June. She had worked for many years on a novel, She Who, which remained unpublished at her death.
Further Reading
Interviews, reference entries and studies of Allison in the collection include Sandra Pollack and Denise D. Knight’s Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the United States (1993), Harold Bloom’s Lesbian and Bisexual Fiction Writers (1997), Suzanne Juhasz’s A Desire for Women (2003), Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings (2003), Mae Miller Claxton’s edited Conversations with Dorothy Allison (2012), and Jaime Harker’s The Lesbian South (2018).