Dorothy Allison, author of ‘Bastard Out of Carolina,’ dies at 75

Dorothy Allison, who wrote with lyrical, pungent wit about her working-class Southern upbringing — and about the incest and violence that shaped her — and whose acclaimed 1992 novel, “Bastard Out of Carolina,” based on her harrowing childhood, made her a literary star, died Tuesday at her home in Guerneville, California, in Sonoma County. She was 75.

Her death, from cancer, was announced by the Frances Goldin Literary Agency, her longtime representative.

Allison was flat broke in 1989 when she decided to try to sell “Bastard Out of Carolina,” the novel she had been writing for nearly a decade, to a mainstream publisher. “Trash,” a critically praised collection of short stories, had already been published by Firebrand Books, a feminist publishing house; so had her collection of poetry, “The Women Who Hate Me,” which she first published herself as a chapbook in 1983. In both books, she tackled lust, the scrum of feminist politics and her chaotic, beloved family. Feminism had saved her life, she often said, and she was certain that because of her political convictions, the mainstream press would not welcome her.

Allison liked to describe herself, as she told the New York Times Magazine in 1995, as a “cross-eyed, working-class lesbian addicted to violence, language and hope.”

But at the time, she and her partner, Alix Layman, a trombone player who had been kicked out of the Army for being gay, were living on grits. Allison, who was legally blind in one eye, had numerous other health concerns and medical debt, and she could no longer support her writing with part-time clerical jobs.

The novel’s heroine is Bone Boatwright, a flinty preteenager from a family of charismatic no-hopers — that would be the men — and exhausted, sharp-tongued women, whose children often go hungry despite their hard work. Bone’s secret is an unspeakable horror: Her stepfather has been raping her since she was 5 years old.

“Bastard” was Allison’s story, too, but rendered as fiction.

“I believe that storytelling can be a strategy to help you make sense out of your life,” she told the Times in 1995. “It’s what I’ve done. ‘Bastard out of Carolina’ used a lot of the stories that my grandmother told me and some real things that happened in my life. But I took it over and did what my grandmother did: I made it a different thing. I made a heroic story about a young girl who faces down a monster.”

Dutton published the novel in 1992, to almost unanimous acclaim. Critics compared Allison to Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner and Harper Lee, and the book made numerous bestseller lists. Here was a novel that did not romanticize the noble poor, as Allison might say, or make cartoon characters of an eccentric Southern family, or lard its hardscrabble tale with ideology.

Actress Anjelica Huston directed a television movie based on the book, which starred Jennifer Jason Leigh as Bone’s mother and aired on Showtime in 1996 after TNT passed on it because of the graphic content. Allison was lauded — along with other contemporary Southern writers, including Harry Crews and Bobbie Ann Mason — as pioneering a new genre, often called Grit Lit or Rough South.

“When I finished ‘Bastard Out of Carolina’ I wanted to blow a bugle to alert the reading public that a wonderful work of fiction by a major new talent has arrived on the scene,” poet and novelist George Garrett wrote in the Times Book Review. “It is one of those once-in-a-blue-moon occasions when the jacket copy seems inadequate and all the blurbs are examples of rhetorical understatement. Please reserve a seat of honor at the high table of the art of fiction for Dorothy Allison.”

Allison became a hero to incest survivors, young lesbians and runaways. She was mobbed at readings. Her editor at the time called her “the Lourdes of writers.”

But there was blowback, too. The book was pilloried by some school boards as pornography, and banned at high schools in Maine and California, Allison’s adopted state. And there were subtler digs. In “Two or Three Things I Know for Sure,” her 1995 memoir, adapted from a monologue she had been performing, she recalled a lesbian therapist friend who cautioned her about speaking frankly of her abuse.

“People might imagine that sexual abuse makes lesbians,” her friend told her.

“Oh, I doubt it,” Allison retorted, furious. “If it did, there would be so many more.”

Dorothy Earlene Allison was born April 11, 1949, in Greenville, South Carolina. Her 15-year-old mother, Ruth Gibson Allison, had left school to work as a waitress; the good-looking boy who got her pregnant vanished almost immediately.

Dorothy’s birth, as she told it, was as violent as her childhood. Ruth was eight months pregnant and asleep in the back seat when her drunken brother plowed his Chevy into another car. Ruth was thrown through the windshield, and Dorothy arrived soon after.

That became the opening scene of “Bastard Out of Carolina,” although the details — family lore, as told by Dorothy’s aunts — may or may not be apocryphal. They loved a good story.

Dorothy left the hospital with the word “bastard” stamped on her birth certificate, a source of shame and rage for her proud mother. Like most of her family, Ruth was unlucky in love. She married soon after Dorothy’s birth, but her young husband died a year later.

Dorothy was 5 when her mother married the man she would live with for the rest of her life. A few months later, while her mother miscarried his child, Dorothy’s stepfather molested her in the hospital parking lot. That abuse, and regular beatings, continued until she was 13.

Decades later, when she was a famous author, she explained in an oral history for Smith College how she was able to escape the fate of most of her female relatives — teenage pregnancy. Her stepfather had given her syphilis when she was 12, and she was sterile. It also helped that she was a lesbian. She wasn’t drawn to the young men who would woo her, and hold her back.

After graduating from high school — the first in her family to do so — she entered Florida Presbyterian College (now Eckerd College), a private liberal arts college in St. Petersburg, armed with a National Merit Scholarship, a new dress and a new pair of glasses donated by a local civic group. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology.

“Thank God it was the ‘60s and everybody was pretending to be poor anyway,” she told the Times. “But I had to start dating upper-class girls to learn about shoes.”

That was when she discovered feminism and joined a lesbian collective. She opened a feminist bookstore, ran a women’s center and began a series of relationships with abusive women. She would long wrestle with the tangle of desire and shame that is the legacy of sexual abuse.

“I call myself high-function broken,” she said. Friends called her a badass.

Allison and Layman, a couple since the late 1980s — they met at a safe-sex demonstration in San Francisco — were married in 2008, two days before Proposition 8 passed, banning same-sex marriage in California. (It would be overturned two years later.) Allison had to be coaxed into matrimony. She was determinedly anti-marriage, thanks to her background, but she settled in nicely.

Layman died in 2022. Allison is survived by their son, Wolf Michael Layman, and two sisters, Barbara and June.

In addition to teaching creative writing at Emory University, Davidson College and other institutions, Allison wrote erotica, although she preferred the term “smut.” Her most recent novel, “Cavedweller” (1998), was about a rock singer who returns to the daughters she abandoned in rural Georgia. It was made into a movie starring Kyra Sedgwick and Aidan Quinn in 2004.

“Every time I sit down to write, I have a great fear that anything I write will reveal me as the monster I was always told I would be,” Allison wrote in an essay found in “Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature,” a 1994 collection. “But that fear is personal, something I must face in everything I do, every act I contemplate. Writing is an act that claims courage and meaning, and turns back denial, breaks open fear.”