Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

Content Warning: This Important Quotes section includes references to the sexual assault of children and physical abuse.

“Call us the lower orders, the great unwashed, the working class, the poor, proletariat, trash, lowlife and scum.”

This quote captures Allison’s early awareness that most viewed her and her family—white, working-class Southerners—with contempt because of the overlap between their race and class identities.

“Sometimes I became people I had seen on television or read about in books, went places I’d barely heard of, did things that no one I knew had ever done, particularly things that girls were not supposed to do. In the world as I remade it, nothing was forbidden; everything was possible.”

Even as a girl, Allison sees storytelling as a means of not only countering negative stereotypes about her class but also creating space where she can imagine a gender identity that differs from those available in Greenville and to her family. In this sense, storytelling is a transgressive act that empowers Allison. Her awareness that who she imagines herself to be violates gender norms possibly was her first inkling that she was a lesbian woman.

“She was one of them, one of those legendary women who ran away. A witch queen, a warrior maiden, a mother with a canvas suitcase, a daughter with broken bones. Women run away because they must. I ran because if I had not, I would have died. No one told me that you take your world with you, that running becomes a habit, that the secret to running is to know why you run and where you are going—and to leave behind the reason you run.”

Allison uses retrospection to capture both her past worry about not having gender-role models of women with autonomy and her more contemporary understanding that fleeing from the models available to her as a girl and young woman didn’t free her because she internalized damaging gender norms during her early life. One purpose of Allison’s memoir is to help her explore the norms and to understand what parts of her family history are useful today.