The American Lit Wayback Machine: "Magic against the meanness": Storytelling in Dorothy Allison's...

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"Magic against the meanness": Storytelling in Dorothy Allison's

Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

Dorothy Allison's book Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, a piece that reads like a memoir, but is about "fictional and real families" (Dietzel), begins with Allison as a child, whispering to her sisters, "Let me tell you a story" (Allison 1). As the book continues, vignettes intertwine to tell many stories about Allison's life, though it is not clear which are factual and which are fictional. These stories, in turn, help to tell a tale of storytelling itself, and what it means to Allison to tell her story. Sometimes storytelling serves to disguise her or the people around her; sometimes, instead, it reveals them. Sometimes stories serve as escape, and sometimes as a way of facing her problems head-on. Whether or not the details of the story are literally true is not really important; the storytelling itself reveals deep truths about the storyteller, gives her control over which story gets told (and even which life gets lived), and serves a healing and restorative purpose for both her and her audience.

Allison is well known for her willingness to tell hard truths about her childhood and her life since then; this makes it all the more interesting that she starts this book by asserting that storytelling can be a way to disguise the self: "The story of what happened, or what did not happen but should have... can become... a disguise, a razor, a tool that changes every time it is used and sometimes becomes something other than we intended" (3). In using the hybrid fiction/memoir format for her book, Allison allows herself to obscure whichever parts of her story she wants to, and reveal the truth in whichever way she chooses. Nonetheless, storytelling is also a way to reveal the self. The kind of revelation that Allison is famous for is, according to her, part of a process of unraveling her own history and revealing what she chooses to, but not necessarily everything: "Not until I began to fashion stories on the page did I sort it all out, see where the lie ended and a broken life remained.... Behind the story I tell is the one I don't.... Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness" (Allison 38-9). It is by laying herself almost bare, both in fiction and in sharing the fact of her history of incest rape, that Allison uses storytelling to get at the real truth of her life. It is not important whether or not each individual story is literally true, however; the telling itself reveals a deeper truth about the storyteller. Allison blurs the line between truth and fiction quite deliberately: "I'll work to make you believe me. Throw in some real stuff, change a few details, add the certainty of outrage. I know the use of fiction in a world of hard truth, the way fiction can be a harder piece of truth" (Allison 3). Fiction can be a way of getting at truth from another angle, of adorning it "with legend and aura and romance" (1). Allison uses this meta-story to examine that interplay, and to discuss a few vital functions of storytelling by way of weaving this quasi-memoir of her own life as a girl and woman.

One important function of storytelling is to give the storyteller a way to have control over which story gets told. It is important to Allison that her story not be presented as the cliche tale of the broken rape victim. Nor did she want the fact of her rape to be the only thing people knew about her, "as if that thing I never wanted to happen and did not know how to stop is the only thing that can be said about my life. My theory is that talking about it makes a difference--being a woman who can stand up anywhere and say, I was five and the man was big. So let me say it" (Allison 44). In telling her story, whether fictionalized or not, Allison gets to be the one who decides what is told, as well as how to present the telling to give the truest interpretive spin on the events she tells about. She says, "I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.... All of [my stories] have to be told in order not to tell the one the world wants, the story of us broken.... I tell all the others so as not to have to tell that one" (Allison 70, 72). In this way, Allison takes ownership of her story, rather than letting other people decide for everyone what they mean. In this way, she has created a "loved version" of her own life story: "Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you make" (3). By taking control of the telling of her own difficult and complicated story, she avoided having her life story told by others in ways that would diminish her.

Even more powerful than controlling what story gets told is influencing what life gets lived in the first place, and Allison speaks to this function of storytelling, as well. When she stood up to her stepfather on her sixteenth birthday and told him he would never touch her again, she says:

It was a story to tell myself, a promise. Saying out loud, 'You're never going to touch me again'--that was a piece of magic... In the worst moments of my life, I have told myself that story, the story about a girl who stood up to a monster. Doing that, I make a piece of magic inside myself, magic to use against the meanness in the world. (Allison 68)

This piece of magic was transformative for Allison, and it transcends the conventional wisdom that telling the literal truth is always the best or healthiest path. In telling her story as she wished it to be, as she was determined it would be, Allison facilitated her own transformation and empowerment. In the book, she attempts later to do the same thing for her niece by telling her about the Gibson girls' beauty: "All right, I thought. That will do. For one moment, this moment leading to the next, the act of storytelling connecting to the life that might be possible, I held her attention and began" (Allison 84). By spinning a tale of beauty for her niece, she latches onto "the life that might be possible," hoping to change the course of the young woman's life in the way her own life was changed, through the power of imagination. "I tell stories to prove I was meant to survive, knowing it is not true," she says, making it clear that the literal truth is not as important as the power of telling the story that will help one live through the hard times and come out minimally damaged in the end (Allison 51).

Telling a story, perhaps especially one about trauma, can be a lifeline to both the teller and the audience. At first, as Allison told her stories as an escape from the real circumstances of her life, "there was only the suspicion that making up the story as you went along was the way to survive. And if I know anything, I know how to survive, how to remake the world in story" (Allison 4). In telling herself stories, she saved herself from some of the emotional damage her stepfather could have inflicted on her in the long term. She says, "I know I am supposed to be deeply broken, incapable of love or trust or passion. But I am not, and part of why that is so is the nature of the stories I told myself to survive" (Allison 69). Later, she told her story as a way of regaining her power over the events of her childhood, and over other people's perception of those events: "The need to tell my story was terrible and persistent, and I needed to say it bluntly and cruelly... without being hesitant or self-conscious, or vulnerable to what people might be saying this year" (Allison 42). From very early on, she realized that her stories were working their magic in other people's lives, as well: "After a while the deepest satisfaction was in the story itself, greater even than the terror in my sisters' faces, the laughter, and God help us, the hope" (2). She kept herself and her sisters as safe as she knew how, with the only real tool at her disposal, her ability to spin a story out of nothing.

Storytelling serves many functions in Allison's life and work. She doesn't tell about her frightening childhood and fraught family life in order to cause shock or harm, but in order to heal, and to express love, whether toward herself or to her audience, whether to heal the past or influence the future. "These days I... tell stories. It is not an act of war.... Telling the story all the way through is an act of love" (Allison 90). It is an ambitious goal, opening up your deepest truths and presenting them as a gift of love to your fellow humans, but it is not purely a selfless act. It benefits both the storyteller and the one who hears the stories. As Allison says, "Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world" (72).

Works Cited

Allison, Dorothy. Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. New York: Plume, 1995.

Dietzel, Susanne. "An Interview with Dorothy Allison." Tulane University Zale Writer in Residency Program. Nov. 1995. Web. 2 June, 2012.

Unsurprisingly, this book passes the Bechdel Test easily.