Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [4]
Some of these stories are easily ascribed to rage. “Monkeybites,” “River of Names,” “Her Thighs,” “Muscles of the Mind,” “Demon Lover,” “Steal Away,” “Violence Against Women Begins at Home”—all of them began with me walking back and forth in front of my desk in the dark of night. Sometimes it was a person that had filled me with outrage, but sometimes it was someone else’s story. I had to figure it out. I did it on the page. Reading these stories again, I go back to the time in which they were written. The early women’s movement was a genuinely remarkable moment in history, perhaps most of all because we were all so sure that we were going to change the world. Talking to twenty-year-olds these days, I find it difficult to get them to understand what it was like being part of the early liberation movements that so impacted this country in the sixties and seventies. We were fighting for our lives, I say, and I mean it literally. The life I was meant to have is what I was fighting. I did not want to be a waitress my whole life, to be poor or to come to accept being treated with contempt. I did not want to be ashamed of my family, my sexuality, or myself. I did not want to despair or commit suicide out of hopelessness. One generation back, I can name people who did just that—who despaired and died. They were no fiction. When I talk to young people, I find myself telling very specific stories. I tell them about my first decent job, the one with the Social Security Administration, where I was put on probation and almost fired for wearing pantsuits to the office—tasteful, respectable outfits with high-buttoned white blouses, paired with low heels and nylons, even in that Tallahassee humidity. A shinyhaired eighteen-year-old boy at Stanford laughs and says, “What were they thinking?” What indeed? I tell how when, at twenty-three with my respectable government job, I tried to get a credit card, I was asked to have my stepfather cosign the application. We were never quite adults, I explain, we women. You have no idea how different was the world we set out to change. That was the world in which I began to write these stories. That was the context. Reading them over, I fall back in time and remember the writing of them. I remember working long hours, hurrying home, and napping briefly in order to have the ability to spend more long hours at my desk in the night. I never went after a grant, never believed I could get one. I took it as a given that a woman like me would have to do it the hard way, steal time from my day job, work without an editor or ready reader, and never have any confidence that what I was writing would be anything anyone would want to read. But I never imagined not writing.
What I did not imagine was publishing. I read my stories often—at benefits and open readings, and always afterward people would come up and ask me, Didn’t I have a book yet? I was startled every time. No, I had to say. I had been writing stories, not thinking about a book.
It is possible this collection would never have come about if I had not lost my temper. I read a review of a book I loved—My Mama’s Dead Squirrel by Mab Segrest, a witty, revealing collection about humor—full of stories about her family. The review was not critical, it was nasty. It made easy jokes about southerners and their “funny” families. In a rage, I called that woman who had asked me if I had a book. “I’ve got a book,” I told her. “I’ve got a book will make that reviewer’s teeth hurt.” It took me more than two years to finish the stories and let this book go. By then I had moved from New York to San Francisco, and was living month to month on what I could put together teaching and writing freelance for whoever would hire me. My temper had run its course, and my first impulse was long past. When I was correcting the galleys, I kept thinking back to that review, anticipating the criticism