Dorothy Allison

American · 1949 to 2024

Born Dorothy Earlene Allison on April 11, 1949, in Greenville, South Carolina, to a fifteen-year-old unmarried waitress, Allison grew up poor and often on the move through mill towns of the Carolinas and Florida, the eldest of three daughters. Her mother's second husband began sexually abusing her when she was five, a violence that continued through much of her childhood and that she would spend her career refusing to keep secret. She was the first in her family to finish high school, and a National Merit Scholarship carried her to Florida Presbyterian College (now Eckerd College), where she earned a degree in anthropology in 1971 before pursuing graduate study at Florida State, the Sagaris Institute, and the New School for Social Research. In New York in the 1970s she found the feminist and lesbian communities that shaped the rest of her life, cofounding the Lesbian Sex Mafia, a BDSM support and education collective, with Jo Arnone in 1981. Her early books, the poetry collection The Women Who Hate Me (1983) and the story collection Trash (1988), winner of two Lambda Literary Awards, laid the ground for the semi-autobiographical novel that made her famous: Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), a finalist for the National Book Award. When TNT commissioned Anjelica Huston to adapt it for television in 1996, the network's own executives, including owner Ted Turner, judged the finished film too harsh to broadcast; it aired instead on Showtime that December, one of the first American television films to depict child sexual abuse without flinching. Allison followed it with the memoir Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995) and the bestselling novel Cavedweller (1998). She spent her later years in Guerneville, California, with her partner Alix Layman and their son, Wolf Michael, and received the Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2024, months before she died of cancer on November 6, 2024, at seventy-five.