Excerpt from The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors by Laura Miller, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Allison belongs to that Bible-tinged, Southern-myth-spinning tradition of which Faulkner is the most prominent bloom; she's probably its earthiest. She no doubt acquired these skills, as Bone did, at her grandmother's knee, listening to the old woman "start reeling out story and memory, making no distinction between what she knew was true and what she had only heard told. The tales she told me in her rough, drawling whisper were lilting songs, ballads of family, love, and disappointment. Everything seemed to come back to grief and blood, and everyone seemed legendary."

See Also: Carolyn Chute strives, like Allison, to capture the lives of working- and underclass families in Maine. Blanche McCrary Boyd is another Southern lesbian with a rich sense of humor and a wild streak. —Laura Miller

Every Novel Is a Lesbian Novel
By Dorothy Allison

When I think of the books that shaped my lesbian imagination, it is frankly embarrassing. The truth is that my ideas of romance and erotic authority and lesbian life patterns came out of some truly awful books—when there were any books that mentioned lesbians at all. I don't mean embarassing and bad in the sense that they were badly written—though, of course, that is a factor—but embarassing because I believed, truly and completely, in the fatalistic and brutal things that were told to me about who I could be as a grown-up lesbian. I was born to a very poor, violent family where most of my focus was purely on survival, and my sense of self as a lesbian grew along with my sense of myself as a raped child, a poor white Southerner, and an embattled female. I was Violet Leduc's Le Batard much more than I was Le Amazon, that creation of upper-class Natalie Barney. People tell me that class is no longer the defining factor it was when I was a girl, but I find that impossible to fully accept. Class is always a defining factor when you are the child one step down from everyone else.

At the age of thirteen I was always calculating how to not kill myself or how not to let myself be killed. That tends to stringently shape one's imagination. I did not plan to fill up a hope chest and marry some good old boy and make babies. I did not want to be who the world wanted to make me. I was a smart, desperate teenage girl trying to figure out how to not be dismissed out-of-hand for who I was. I wanted to go to college, not become another waitress or factory worker or laundry person or counter help woman like all the other women I knew. Everywhere I looked I saw a world that held people like me in contempt—even without the added detail of me being a lesbian.

The only "lesbian" books I could find then were the porn under my stepfather's bed or those gaudy paperbacks from the drugstore which inevitably ended with one "dyke" going off to marry while the other threw herself under a car. This did not persuade me to be straight, but it did prove to me that fiction should be distrusted. No way I would kill myself for falling in love with my girlfriends. No, I had more deadly reasons to feel hopeless. To find a way out of the world as I saw it, I read science fiction. To sustain my rage and hope, I read poetry and mainstream novels with female heroines. And I read books by Southerners for ammunition to use against Yankees who would treat me mean. Always I read as a lesbian.

Everyone says that their first lesbian book was Radclyffe Hall's wretched Well of Loneliness, but that didn't do it for me. I knew from a very early age that I was a femme, and while I might fall in love with Stephen, I did not want to be her. (Well, actually, I couldn't even imagine falling in love with Stephen—that brooding, bossy, ridiculous upper-class creature who would never fall in love with someone like me anyway.) If you limit the list to self-defined lesbian books, then we get down to just one: Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle. But looking for self-defined lesbian books was never how I approached the subject. I always reinterpreted books to give me what I needed. All books were lesbian books—if they were believable about women at all, and particularly if they were true to my own experience.

Reproduced with the permission of the publisher, Viking Penguin. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher.