Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

Rating:
Summary: Hurting Truths and Healing Stories
Review: I believe Ernest Hemmingway said "All you have to do
to be a writer is write one honest sentence." Well by
that definition, and although this slim book with its
refrains of the title in different contexts reads
almost like a performance piece between two covers--it
is in fact reconstructed from texts used in
performances used to publicize 1993's Bastard Out of
North Carolina--Dorothy Allison is certainly a writer.
And yet curiously, and at times almost bewitchingly,
Allison plays with and cozies up to the notion of
story in its ability not just to tell the truth but to
conceal it--here, in the simplest possible language,
and using her own experiences as a child abuse victim
by her stepfather in the American South, she
psychoanalyzes the nature of story and story-telling
as a means of healing the ego and reinventing the
self. The book is integrated with arresting
black-and-white photos of the book's principles and
protagonists, the hard-working and depressed women and
the hard-drinking men acting tougher even than they
are and old before their time. She tells stories of a
happy-go-lucky ladies' man uncle so depressed after
being jilted that he feels that his "heart is going to
leap out of his chest"; of the balletic wife of her
young karate instructor, a woman whose confidence she
rewrote as prose; and of seducing an army woman, the
repressed overweight daughter of a gangster, taking
her by surprise in the shower. She even owns up to

fantasies of sexual pleasure in the act of violence,
refusing to deny the truth even as she realizes its
malleability, its inability to withstand the greater
caress of good storytelling. This is a book about
truth and lies, and the arts of transformation. Beyond
lies and self-deception the truth hurts...and
"fiction"--conscious now, in the hands of the
lover...of the damaged self--has the power
to heal.

Rating:
Summary: Riveting!! Rich in Poignancy and Learning
Review: I read this in October 2001 and looved it. One of my favourite non-fiction reads. A terse and disturbing account of the author's life in the South where she is abused by her step father and eventually goes on to derive her strength from herself and knowing who she really is and what she stands for.

What I liked about this autobiography - if you can call it that is the plain candidcy that shines through the book. Ms Allison clearly states that her being a lesbian has nothing to do with the abuse she faced and its true. It's ridiculous how one tends to believe that one's sexuality preference is a result of something and not out of choice.

While reading this so-called non-fictional novella, I came to realise what it was like for me when i came out of the closet. I related to the book on so many levels because being gay in a country like India is so difficult - the atrocious remarks, the unwelcoming feeling in the family and apart from all this Dorothy Allison's book always comforted me in a weird way and I loved that comfort food!

Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: The very last chapter of this amazing book is the best illustration of what it is to read that I know. Dorothy Allison shows how stories save lives. Writing about "hypertext" she has a girl say, "After a while it's like a skin of oil on the water. If you loook at it from the side, it would go down and down, layers and layers. All the stories you've ever told. all the pictures you've ever seen. We can put in everything. Hypertext."Then follows Dorothy's dream of life seen as though "through a scrim of water, oily water. Way way down three or four corridors, around a turn, I hit a wall. My story was on this wall. I stood in front of my wall....words were peeling across the wall, and every word was a brick. I touched one....The brick fell away and a window opened....

Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: The very last chapter of this amazing book is the best illustration of what it is to read that I know. Dorothy Allison shows how stories save lives. Writing about "hypertext" she has a girl say, "After a while it's like a skin of oil on the water. If you loook at it from the side, it would go down and down, layers and layers. All the stories you've ever told. all the pictures you've ever seen. We can put in everything. Hypertext."Then follows Dorothy's dream of life seen as though "through a scrim of water, oily water. Way way down three or four corridors, around a turn, I hit a wall. My story was on this wall. I stood in front of my wall....words were peeling across the wall, and every word was a brick. I touched one....The brick fell away and a window opened....

Rating:
Summary: Dorothy Allison sure knows how to write!
Review: The writing in Dorothy Allison's TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW FOR SURE has such a razor edge you'll want to protect your fingers as you hold the book. With unwavering honesty -- and with a somtimes suprising attitude toward the terrible events that have shaped her life -- Allison deftly avoids the two traps so common to pieces of this kind. There is no whining in this book, and there's no smug tone of "but just look at me now" either. Allison comes from a long line of women who have lived difficult, often unhappy lives, but she never condescends to apologize for any of these women. Rather, she understands -- and brings to life for the reader -- the deeply-buried strength and courage that so often these days is interpreted as weakness or lack of imagination. Allison's story is fascinating, peopled by characters who ring as true as our own families (sometimes to devasatatingly personal effect). But it is Allison's harshly poetic prose, even above the subject matter, that makes this book soar. The writing is simple, never showy, and so focused that it seems at times a magnifying glass held at just the proper angle to catch the rays of a white-hot desert sun. The words burn into us, cleansing and scarring at the same time, and when we turn the final page we know that we've just experienced something increasingly rare these days: the truth

Rating:
Summary: A "Little" Memoir--little being the operative word here
Review: This autobiography of 94 pages gives a rather sketchy glimpse of author, Dorthy Allison's life. Perhaps she already told it all in her other fictional novels. I can't say, having never read them. Also perhaps if I had read some of Ms. Allison's other works, I would have found her autobiography more interesting.

I'll give her the benefit of the doubt on that.

Ms. Allison was quite in love with the words "Two or Three Things I know for Sure", and uses the term throughout this small book, along with listing something she feels she knows, such as "Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that change when it comes cracks everything open."

The book is rather tiresomely filled with such pithy little sayings.

She also enjoys using the phrase: Let me tell you a story. Unfortunately she never does.

It is apparent from what little she does tell us, that she led a very hard life as a child, and that most, if not all, of the members of her family, likewise had very bleak lives, especially the women. I don't doubt this for a moment, but I would have liked to have read a bit of detail about these people's lives.

We just never get that in Dorothy Allison's "Two or Three Things I Know for Sure." We also never get any real details about the author's life either.

The author has included some black and white photos of herself and various family members, some of whom she is unable to identify, not that it makes much difference.

It is kind of like looking at the photo album of someone else's family, that aren't nearly as interesting as the person showing you the pictures, thinks they are.

All in all, this was a very disappointing book.

Rating:
Summary: Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
Review: This book was enjoyable to read even though it was assigned work. It has a mysterious tone and a level of depth that might escape less involved readers. Allison tells the classic story of a person trying to "find themself", but avoids making any concrete conclusions. Some of the photographs bring life to the book and others confuse the reader because they are not parallel with the text. Read it and you might realize that in the great search to find yourself you may come up empty-handed.

Rating:
Summary: You do not have to be a lesbian to love this book.
Review: You do not have to be a lesbian to love this book. The author's brilliant prose, combined with photos such as you and I would find in our own family albums, help the reader to connect with the people in her stories. While the book made me cry more than it made me laugh, I felt very empowered after reading it. We are all damaged, and we can all survive