Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (edition 1996)

superb.
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Simply; candid, arduous, inspiring and eerily familiar. "I am no longer a grown-up outraged child but a woman letting go of her outrage, showing what I know: that evil is a man who imagines the damage he does is not damage, that evil is the act of pretending that some things do not happen or leave no mark if they do, that evil is not what remains when healing becomes possible."

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Dorothy Allison's life has been nothing like my own, except that we both live in South Carolina and we both have strong women in our family. This slim volume is very packed with experiences, some not so great, of the author and her family. Apparently, it was culled from a performance piece she did a while about. There are moments that are poignant, like when Allison, was in fourth grade and trying to complete a homework project on family trees. The teacher had instructed the children to go home and talk to adults or look in the family bible for who their ancestors were. But Allison came up empty in the search for the bible. "We don't have a family Bible?" she asked her aunt. "Child, some days we don't even have a family," comes the response. And there are some downright horrifying things that occur within the family as well. But the memories are told with an honesty and, yes, with love (though it's often tinged with bitterness.) The photos included were nice, but I would have liked to know who I was looking at. There is a value in captions. ( )

Simply; candid, arduous, inspiring and eerily familiar. "I am no longer a grown-up outraged child but a woman letting go of her outrage, showing what I know: that evil is a man who imagines the damage he does is not damage, that evil is the act of pretending that some things do not happen or leave no mark if they do, that evil is not what remains when healing becomes possible."

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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. ( )