^& Trash

Here is how Dorothy Allison introduces herself in TRASH:



"The central fact of my life is that I was born in 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina, the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family, a girl who had left the seventh grade the year before, worked as a waitress, and was just a month past fifteen when she birthed me. That fact, the inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow oddly deserved, has had dominion over me * * *."



The literate, well-heeled portion of our society that runs mainstream media tends to ignore the poor, and when forced to acknowledge their existence it often prefers to romanticize or mythologize them as the sturdy, stoic, hard-working backbone of America. That wasn't Dorothy Allison's folks. "We were the bad poor. We were men who drank and couldn't keep a job; women, invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours and bearing too many children; and children with runny noses, watery eyes, and wrong attitudes." Her people were trash.



Originally published in 1988, TRASH is a collection of 15 powerful stories of life as experienced by Dorothy Allison. Judging from this book alone (I know very little about Allison from beyond the covers of the book), the stories must have a high quotient of autobiography.



In ten of the stories, the "bad poor" are front and center, in discomfiting bluntness and detail. Allison limns the world of textile mills, waitressing, belt-wielding (and much worse) step-fathers, fishing camps, gospel-singing, shoplifting, male lust, and cheap alcohol delivered in a myriad of ways. It is just as much America as 50th floor corner offices, ivy-covered college campuses, health clubs, and amber waves of grain.



Exacerbating her pariah-hood, Allison is lesbian. In five of the stories in this collection, it is lesbianism that is front and center, including some very graphic sex scenes. To me, those stories are misplaced. If TRASH had been presented as a memoir I would feel differently, but it is a collection of stories entitled "Trash" and billed as a stark portrayal of Southern poverty. The lesbianism, though very much a part of Allison's life, is not necessarily part of the existence of the bad poor and its presence in this collection distracts from the depiction of the bad poor. No doubt I am somewhat influenced by the fact that I am repulsed by the scenes of lesbian sex - just as I am repulsed or annoyed by scenes of male homosexual or male/female sex. (I have never bought or browsed through any collection of overtly sexual or erotic stories; sex, like prayer, is too personal to experience vicariously.) I think the lesbian stories would be more effective portrayals (at least for non-lesbians) of the social challenges of lesbianhood without the raw sex, but even so I believe they should not have been included in a collection of stories about trash.



Ultimately, TRASH is about surviving and struggling to maintain some dignity, some sense of self-worth. For Allison, both anger and humor have been essential in doing so. The stories are well-written, if not brilliantly so. Ten of them are well worth reading by everyone in this country. Indeed, if the book contained only those ten stories I would give it five stars.
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