Remembering Dorothy Allison

by Mab Segrest

[Originally posted on Facebook, this version was slightly expanded by the author. Republished with permission from the author.]

Even though my friend Dorothy had shared with me that she was dying, it was from condolences on Facebook that I learned that she had passed. Word goes out into the lesbian and queer cosmos as remembrances and pictures begin to accumulate in the obituaries section in The New York (and various other) Times.

This death, the November Wednesday after this election, leaves that hole in the universe that Dorothy’s so particular voice, from crackling fury to tender, and back again like lightning, also inhabits. 

Many of us who knew her from formative relationships decades old are weirdly assimilating this news via “social” media into our own universes. For our generation, perhaps, it became hard not to drift, as our lives took particular shapes from that galvanizing moment that Jan Clausen named “A Revolution of Poets.” Or perhaps it was somewhere between “A revolution of lovers cannot fail” and “A revolution of ex-lovers cannot fail”? 

I thought I would share some of my recent texts with Dorothy in which she worked to prepare me for her death. I do not think she would mind me sharing some of them here with you.

I am reserving the right to go down other rabbit holes with Dorothy until later. 

Remembering Dorothy, First Take

I last saw my friend Dorothy Allison on a short visit before she received the Thomas Wolfe Prize from the University of North Carolina (UNC), in Chapel Hill, where she delivered its lecture in 2019. It was no small feat for her to pierce the veil of Southern literati, many of whom were still couched in the “new criticism,” for which her style, voice, and brilliance, and outfit were antithetical (in the Hegelian sense of “struggle [politely] to the death”). 

George Garrett’s glowing review in the  The New York Times July 5, 1992, of her breakthrough novel Bastard Out of Carolina is the kind of perfectly written example of what most authors might die or kill for, and is worth quoting here:

“The technical skill in both large things and details, so gracefully executed as to be always at the service of the story and its characters and thus almost invisible, is simply stunning, about as close to flawless as any reader could ask for and any writer, at any age or stage, could hope for and aspire to. When I finished Bastard Out of Carolina I wanted to blow a bugle to alert the reading public that a wonderful work of fiction by a major new talent has arrived on the scene. It is one of those once in a blue moon occasions when the jacket copy seems inadequate and all the blurbs are examples of rhetorical understatement. Please reserve a seat of honor at the high table of the art of fiction for Dorothy Allison.”

Remembering the lecture that evening, I am reminded that Dorothy was always a working-class writer who did not have the security of an academic position that even for many newcomer women, people of color, and queers was very recent and hardly stable. But Dorothy made her living in part by shorter-term college gigs and by speaking before such academic audiences as the one at UNC, where the crowds also had rows of her ardent and grateful queer fanbase from campus and off.

And she knew how to be performatively Southern, working class, and queer even as she delivered her puncturing observations with a string of chuckles. 

She was frank about this practice in a 2024 interview with Kaitlyn Greenage about the effects of having been “born poor”: “You had to be smarter, faster and better than anybody else, and you had to follow the rules because they were always out to get you. . . . [This makes for] an independent sense of honor to deal with the world in that way when you are so constantly denied, . . . [and]i it can lead to a certain arrogance, which I always observed in myself.”

I last heard from Dorothy in a thread of texts reproduced in part below, and in a phone call. Over the years we had been sure to see each other if I was in San Francisco, or if she was at a university more or less near me on the East Coast on a gig.  

But this contact was intermittent because I did not hear of her partner Alix Layman’s death from brain cancer until a year after it had happened. Horrified, I reached out by phone, and she answered immediately, grief-stricken and furious at her loss and at Alix’s suffering. I listened for a long time. We were grateful to hear each other’s voices. Above all, we appreciated each another’s sense of humor and sentence style. I pinned our subsequent texts to my message page. I wanted to keep her writing, at least writing texts. 

I pinned our subsequent texts to my message page. I wanted in a period of her desolation to keep her writing, at least writing texts.

Over these usually very funny, at other times very sober conversations, Dorothy at one point worried for the young authors she has mentored and birthed into this “maelstrom” of a country. I said that I figured she had made them stronger to meet the times.

In this regard, she apologized to me for leaving me so much to do, and I accepted her apology. We shared about children and my grandchild; worries and joys; her dog Koda; and the raging climate-induced fire on the other side of the river that (thank God) never jumped its banks to her house.

She shared how much she cherished the community of women, many of them also widows, that she had in Guerneville, north of San Francisco. 

Then came this one text. 

Dorothy wrote on October 26, 2024, at 3:11 pm:
It’s day by day here. But the doc is clear that I am dying. Matter of weeks most likely but not in pain, so grateful. Tumor in my belly—bile duct cancer going everywhere. I am sanguine. Ha!

Me, on October 27, 10:14 am:
Is this true? I am so sorry, but glad you are not in pain. Trying to get my head around it. 

What do you need? Can we set up a time to talk?

Dorothy:
I am at the Chinese restaurant take out (with my caretakers). They are ordering soup, which is about the only thing I seem able to consume. Going home after this and would love to talk to you. Or call this phone now. 

Me:
How’s it going? Who are your caretakers?

Dorothy, on October 28, 12:41 pm:
Day by day.  Joy is here and very loving. I seem to be dying slowly enough to cope. The social workers are persistent and occasionally useful. My sense of humor is life saving though occasionally rough on my caretakers. Sending you much love. Eat a biscuit for me… Dorothy. 

Me:
Please don’t say goodbye too soon. You are not dead yet, and I still can hear your voice. 

Dorothy:
Thank you honey.

Dorothy, on Oct 28:
I am here and conscious for calls any time today.  Call at your convenience. 

The last conversation was reassuring in that Dorothy’s voice was strong, and she was totally there. She won’t die soon, I told myself. But I think she knew, and she was preparing me.

For anyone wondering what her last words to them might have been, perhaps these words that she said or wrote to me will do: 

 “Just remember that I love you.”

AND “Eat a biscuit for me.”