Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

wow. so i don't like everything dorothy allison has ever done, but when i do like it, holy fuck i love it. this is beautiful and raw and real and honest and tearing and still beautiful. it's an incredible statement and i cried and soared all the way through it.

"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."

"Two or three things I know for sure and one of them is that telling the story all the way through is an act of love."

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 show more 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. show less

Finding out that this slim memoir began life as a performance piece made it make more retroactive sense for me. Dorothy Allison's prose ping-pongs between "concisely beautiful turns of phrase" and "cloying and occasionally even unconvincing", which is a hell of a thing to feel about a book that's in large part about generational trauma and child abuse.

"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.

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 show more 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. show less

this is exhilarating in the writing and honesty. it is so raw and jagged while being so beautiful and true. it's amazing writing. amazing.

5 stars.

from 2017:
wow. so i don't like everything dorothy allison has ever done, but when i do like it, holy fuck i love it. this is beautiful and raw and real and honest and tearing and still beautiful. it's an incredible statement and i cried and soared all the way through it.

"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."

"Two or three things I know for sure and one of them is that telling the story all the way through is an act of love." (5 stars)

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 show more 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. show less