writerly jealousy
g asked me, over our umpth glass of happy hour wine at an overpriced tapas place in LA, if iâve ever been jealous of a lover who was also a writer. i was surprised at how immediately i knew the answer to this question. it was a lover who was on *texting relations* with the venerable, feminist priestess of no fucks, survivor bad ass, dorothy allison. as in, âaw, dorothy just *texted* she got my package in the mail.â inside i was pretty much having a nuclear meltdown from excitement and wild jealousy. holding it together, i just said, oh really, thatâs cool. i all but asked this lover to send a friendship bracelet from me in the next package. for some reason, this seemed like the most reasonable strategy to friend-court a stranger-writer in a seemingly non-threatening manner. i understand this is creepy.
anyways, reliving this memory recently got me into a dorothy allison interview reading binge. this oneâs pretty good from 1994:
âI have a theory about writing fiction. I often run into young writers who ask me the question "How can you tell those terrible stories about people? How can you make them seem almost real, or liveable or loveable?" And my theory is that if you create a character and if you tell enough about that character, even if you are creating someone who is a villain or someone who does terrible things, if you tell enough about them, then you have the possibility of loving them.â
âI don't know any southern writer who doesn't begin with momma.â
âI'm 46. If I had published that novel when I was 23...I couldn't have written that novel when I was 23, but let's imagined I had, which ain't gonna usually happen, I probably would not have managed it. It's a part of what I did those two or three things was because of some of the stuff that happened as a result of writing BASTARD, what it felt like emotionally to be that naked was a little bit higher pitch than I had expected, because y'know, I finished the novel when I was 42. And at 42, you're not quite grown up, but you're almost there. I have been working at this material which is my stuff. I figure as a writer you get your stuff. You don't have a whole lot of choice. I could go off and write mysteries, I could write really bad mysteries. But this is what I can do with passion, intensity and great caring. And it is the truth that I have spent two decades becoming this kind of person who can stand up in public with this material. Um, I don't think you can do it real young, real easily and I think even at 42 I ran into trouble. I got angry at the wrong times. I got hurt at the wrong times, and I sometimes had trouble seeing that I was being hurt. Y'know, cause you, one of the things that feminism taught me was the stance of being tough in public, and that's extremely useful, but sometimes it'll cover some damage you're taking, and you won't know you're taking damage until you're by yourself and quiet.â
















