Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

Allison includes an image of herself with her children. She recounts having her first child—Wolf—at 42, after she moved to California. Her sister Wanda came, and the two bonded over what motherhood does to you. It tries you, and makes you change in unexpected ways. In their cases, it made them more like their mother. Allison ends this section by sharing that a back injury ended her karate practice. The truth she shares here is that telling a complete story about herself and others is “an act of love” (90).

After Allison completed a reading one night, a young man and woman approached her to ask if they could collect her stories into a hyperlinked site that would allow for a more flexible reading of them. Allison was ambivalent about the idea. That night, she had a dream in which key events from her life became hypertext and came to life as a museum of her photograph collection and moments of her life. Using a cane and compensating for her blind eye, she eventually ran into a wall of bricks. The bricks were key people and moments in her life.

The bricks included someone calling Allison illegitimate and her mother denying that she was about to die, asking Allison’s stepfather if he’d treat her daughters well, and struggling to explain to an incredulous doctor how Allison came to have a broken arm.