The events that happen in our day-to-day lives, help create who we are. It will help develop your personality, your outlook on life, and your day-to-day attitude. For instance, you go to your first class of the day and there is a pop quiz, which you fail, it puts you in a bad mood for the rest of the day. Tragic incidents too will assist in creating who you are, and depending on the severity of the incident, will through your whole world upside down. How do ones life happenings reflect upon their lives? Some people may go to see a psychiatrist; others may just bottle it up inside. Another way for one to get these things off their mind would be to write about them. Most, if not all authors tend to write about a real life happening. One such person would be fifty-two year old author and feminist, Dorothy Allison.

Dorothy Allison was born April 11, 1949, in the town of Greenville South Carolina ( ). She was born the first child of Ruth Gibson Allison, “a fifteen-year-old unwed mother who dropped out of the seventh grade to work as a waitress” (5). She grew up in the low class end of society. “Allison was raised in extreme poverty by her mother’s family; she remembers “h

iding out under the porch” so she could listen to her grandmother and aunt tell randy stories” (5). All was well until about the age of five, her mother married and there was now a stepfather; not your typical nice guy who loved the kids, or maybe he did love them just a little to much. “When Allison was five, her stepfather – her mother having since married – began sexually abusing her” (3). Although he did sexually abuse her, it was physical abuse also, not to mention the mental damage it may have caused. “Her childhood was scarred from the time she was five to eleven years old, when she was often beaten and rap!

In these as well as in her more recent works, which include the nonfiction accounts Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature and Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, Allison has secured her reputation as a writer who deals frankly and

boldly with the issues of gender, class, and sexual orientation (3).

For a day, a week, a month, then a year, I made myself wait a little while to burn my stories. Now it is twenty-three years later and I have more than twenty years of journals, six books written and more working. The women that stopped me that

This was her calling, she now knew that she was meant to be a writer. Being an avid reader as she already was, she was influenced by other writers. “The book that helped me to begin to believe in my own work was Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. It gave me the idea that telling dangerous stories was the thing I needed to do” (7). “ With that base I went to the southern classics—Flannery O’connor, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams” ( 7).

Some topics in this essay:
Gibson Allison, Uncle Bo, Tallahassee Previously, Childhood Creation, Literature Allison, Gun Craz, Dorothy Allison, Gun Crazy, Bluest Eye, Carolina…”3 Novel, dorothy allison, society 217, uncle bo, literature society 217, shoot guns, desire shoot, shoot gun, literature society, real life, mother married, power equal,