Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

by Dorothy Allison

Paperback, 1996

Status

Available

Call number

PS3551.L453 Z476 1996

Genres

LGBTQ+

Biography & Memoir

Biography

Collections

Your library, University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh

Publication

Plume (1996), Edition: First Edition. first thus, Paperback, 94 pages

Description

Bastard Out of Carolina, nominated for the 1992 National Book Award for fiction, introduced Dorothy Allison as one of the most passionate and gifted writers of her generation. Now, in Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, she takes a probing look at her family's history to give us a lyrical, complex memoir that explores how the gossip of one generation can become legends for the next. Illustrated with photographs from the author's personal collection, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure tells the story of the Gibson women -- sisters, cousins, daughters, and aunts -- and the men who loved them, often abused them, and, nonetheless, shared their destinies. With luminous clarity, Allison explores how desire surprises and what power feels like to a young girl as she confronts abuse. As always, Dorothy Allison is provocative, confrontational, and brutally honest. Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, steeped in the hard-won wisdom of experience, expresses the strength of her unique vision with beauty and eloquence.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member EBT1002

This brilliant and boldly honest little memoir touched me deeply. Allison explores her southern working class roots, the meanings held therein for the women and the men of her family, the traps and trappings of false bravado and determined survival. Giving full voice to her experience of childhood

sexual abuse, she barely flirts with the understandable self-pity and, instead, chooses strength of voice and strength of character.

Musing on the fate and demands upon the girls and women in her family:
"Beauty is a hard thing. Beauty is a mean story. Beauty is slender girls who die young, fine-featured delicate creatures about whom men write poems. Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time. And I loved her for that."

And
"The women I loved most in the world horrified me. I did not want to grow up to be them. I made myself proud of their pride, their determination, their stubbornness, but every night I prayed a man's prayer: Lord, save me from them. Do not let me become them."

And later, exploring the impact of the childhood rape and her efforts to transcend what this necessarily taught her about herself, her determination to define her own place in the world:
"Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I would rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me."

At moments poetic, certainly not linear, this memoir also lets the reader into deep sibling rivalries and adoration. Beautiful.

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LibraryThing member Crowyhead

This slim autobiographical volume packs a lot of punch. With photographs and a storyteller-ish quality, Allison reflects on her impoverished childhood and on the love-hate relationship she long had with the other women in her family. The overall effect is to leave the reader somewhat in awe of the

strength that Allison and the other women in her family had in the face of incredible hardship.

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LibraryThing member donkeytiara

this book made you relive her other novel...because she lived it. pretty frank reading.

LibraryThing member whirled

"We were not beautiful. We were hard and ugly and trying to be proud of it. The poor are plain, virtuous if humble and hardworking, but mostly ugly. Almost always ugly."

Dorothy Allison's moving memoir, Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure, is full of almost unbearably frank observations such as

that. Yet, by dint of her skill as a storyteller, Allison's reflections on poverty, sexual abuse and hard living in the American South are lifted from the depths of self pity to become a celebration of the sheer dogged determination of Allison and the other women in her family. An excellent companion to her bestselling novel Bastard Out Of Carolina.

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LibraryThing member pokylittlepuppy

I got this book from the Strand for my first semester of college in 2000. I was supposed to read it during a writing class about memoir. I didn't read it, but I read an additional essay by Dorothy Allison and I liked that, so I always kept the book. In retrospect that was my best class that term.

My sister is at the same point in college now, so it seemed fitting to work this one out finally. When I finally opened the book I discovered a receipt for its purchase tucked inside, from a Brentano's in Connecticut in December 1995, along with the ISBN's for Jane Smiley's Duplicate Keys and Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, $50 cash.This book falls squarely into the category of things I avoided because I worried there wasn't time, that turn out to take no time at all. It's so slight, which surprised me the whole time until I got to the last page where the author notes that it was written as a performance piece and modified for publication. The prose is so fluidly voiced, but it seems somewhat unreal that it could be performed aloud. Though, that might explain why the framing device of the title looks a little hokey on the page, which is too bad because most of the rest of it is vivid and warm.Sometimes the lesson of my bookshelf is to stop waiting.

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LibraryThing member AntT

Allison is a wonderful writer.

LibraryThing member AntT

Allison is a wonderful writer.

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