Skin [Paperback]

Tamara M. Powell

Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. Dorothy Allison. New York: Dutton Books, 1995. 94 pp.

Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature. Dorothy Allison. Ithaca: Firebrand, 1994. 261 pp.

Two or Three Things I Know for Sure has been widely hailed as the newest offering from recent Showtime special Bastard Out of Carolina author Dorothy Allison. The slim novel can be seen as a coming together of the anger Allison poured into Bastard and Trash and the growth she has experienced as she has matured and become a parent herself. Trash reveals the struggles behind her decision to live, while Two or Three Things elucidates the wisdom she has gained along the way. However, between Trash and Two or Three Things, Allison created another work, Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature. And while Two or Three Things has gained much attention, Skin has been all but ignored. But it is Skin that reveals the growth and thought that took place between Trash and Two or Three Things, and instead of looking inward, as Allison's other works do, Skin looks outward, allowing Allison to analyze, contemplate, and theorize upon how she sees the world. Allison is known as a writer who tells her stories over and over. She is conscious of this--and opens Two or Three Things with the line "Let me tell you a story" (1). "Two or three things I know for sure" she closes the first chapter, "and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you make" (3). Allison makes version after version of many events of her life, from scaring her sisters with her stories, to being raped by her stepfather, to receiving glasses from the Lions Club, one of Allison's many talents is that she can make the reader listen to the same story over and over, awestruck, mesmerized. Allison creates herself and re-creates herself in all her works. "Behind the story I tell is the one I don't" she writes, "Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear" (Two or Three 39); "The story I do not tell is the only one that is a lie" (71). But before these stories, before these pictures in Two or Three, there was Skin. Often ignored, it is Skin that pierces below the stories and drawl to stress the importance of addressing the emotions in writing. If Bastard, Trash, and Two or Three are Allison in practice, then Skin is Allison in theory. And it's no ordinary theory. In Skin Allison stresses the importance of addressing emotions in writing. Her quest to divulge her own fear, confusion, shame, lust and love spans twenty-three loosely related essays which discuss what prompted her to read, what prompted her to write, and what her writing is and means to her. However, this is not just a work on understanding Dorothy Allison; she includes large amounts of herstory, both social and political. Like many other of her works, Skin describes how active Allison was in the lesbian feminist movements of the 60, 70s and 80s. Also like many of her other works, it describes her journey from her childhood in a backwater South Carolina shack to her home in the suburbs of New York, through poverty, child abuse, finding herself as a lesbian and joining the feminist and lesbian communities around her. Like her other works, Skin is a description of a very determined woman's life. And her candor draws the reader in, giving the reader points of reference and view so clearly that the reader can position himself or herself in relation to Allison. Unlike in Two or Three, where the reader must take Allison's perspective for herself in order to take the story in, Skin makes it possible for the reader to almost debate with Allison on issues. In a sense, this ignored novel might tell more about Allison, make her more human, than all of her other works combined. All twenty-three of these easily accessible--if you don't mind a lot of graphic sex--essays foster critical thinking on a very deep level.