Dorothy Allison

5 Pages 1369 Words

Dorothy Allison – A Childhood Creation

The events that happen in our day-to-day lives, help create who we are. It will help develop your personality, your outlook on life, and your day-to-day attitude. For instance, you go to your first class of the day and there is a pop quiz, which you fail, it puts you in a bad mood for the rest of the day. Tragic incidents too will assist in creating who you are, and depending on the severity of the incident, will through your whole world upside down. How do ones life happenings reflect upon their lives? Some people may go to see a psychiatrist; others may just bottle it up inside. Another way for one to get these things off their mind would be to write about them. Most, if not all authors tend to write about a real life happening. One such person would be fifty-two year old author and feminist, Dorothy Allison.
Dorothy Allison was born April 11, 1949, in the town of Greenville South Carolina ( ). She was born the first child of Ruth Gibson Allison, “a fifteen-year-old unwed mother who dropped out of the seventh grade to work as a waitress” (5). She grew up in the low class end of society. “Allison was raised in extreme poverty by her mother’s family; she remembers “hiding out under the porch” so she could listen to her grandmother and aunt tell randy stories” (5). All was well until about the age of five, her mother married and there was now a stepfather; not your typical nice guy who loved the kids, or maybe he did love them just a little to much. “When Allison was five, her stepfather – her mother having since married – began sexually abusing her” (3). Although he did sexually abuse her, it was physical abuse also, not to mention the mental damage it may have caused. “Her childhood was scarred from the time she was five to eleven years old, when she was often beaten and rap!
ed by her abusive stepfather” (5). There was nothing she could do at first b...