Customer Reviews

Trash

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Trash is a great book of short stories written by Dorothy Allison. Although she the winner of book awards for lesbian fiction, her stories also tell of a tragic childhood, growing up as white trash, and of a family life involving alcholism, abuse and tragedy. The stories are difficult to read at times, due to the agonizing adversity the she has faced, but it is peppered with comic relief, sarcasm and wit.

Trash, billed as a book of short stories, was more like a book of essays - anticdotal, reflective, sometimes funny, often tragic - which give the reader a sense of sitting around the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and an old friend named Dorothy Allison. I loved Trash because I felt closer to Allison after reading it - she is one of my favorite authors, and this book brought me to a better understanding of her both as a person and as a writer.

Dorothy Allision's "Trash' is a collection of essays and loosely connected anecdotes about being born into, growing up in, and surviving a horrific childhood in a white trash community in America. The stories recall nightmares you wouldn't wish on your enemies. Allison writes with such bitterness, anger and ferocity it's frightening. I found it a tough read and had to tackle it a bit at a time. The essays/stories are not all compelling. Some I found esoteric and skipped. The earlier ones like "River of Names" were mostly excellent. The later ones which tell of Allison's voyage of sexual self discovery were harder to get through. It's not the graphic sex that's hard to handle but the emotional landscape that's alien to those outside the community she writes of. Personally, I found "Trash" an unpleasant read and while I respect Allsion's integrity, she's obviously not going to be everybody's cup of tea.

In the shadows of society lie the ugly truth of what many must overcome just to survive. Set in, then rural South, this book moves you through the landscape of poverty, sadness, and grave dysfunction. When education is absent and substance abuse prevalent, unthinkable tragedy can occur. But the will of a girl to survive in spite of her lack of resources is heartbreaking, but the encouragement of at least one person in her life helps her overcome adversity. Written with detail to the usually inviisible details of life, Trash draws you in & holds you until the end. Even then the book haunted me with sadness for what some children have faced. While it is a novel, it closely aligns with real life events.

What an amazing book. Ms. Allison illustrates vivdly the many componets that go into making each of us who we are. This is not a book of stories to be quickly read through-- each one resonates intensly,like an unforgetable piece of music on a long drive.

Powerful and not to be missed. This is a collection of autobiographical narratives, essays, and performance pieces that you will never (and should never) forget.

The author Tee A. Corinne in her book `Lovers: love and sex stories' says "Dorothy Allison crafts from her own life powerful erotic passages that defy circumspect parameters..."

This was the most intense reading I have done in a long time. This should be recommended reading in all colleges and universities.

Not to be missed other titles from the author are - Bastard Out of Carolina, Skin, and The Women Who Hate Me. More information can be found at he author's web page.

If you need to feel a whole lot better about how the author triumphed over her horrendous childhood she and her family of choice are profiled in the book - Love Makes a Family: Portraits of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Parents and Their Families by Peggy Gillespie, Kath Weston, Gigi Kaeser, and April Martin (Paperback - May 1999).

I really loved this book - it grabbed me from the beginning to end. Its so much more than "lesbian fiction". The last story where her mother dies, had me cold. It really made me feel so depressed and sad that I had to call home just to hear a voice I knew. That part...its harrowing.

TRASH is exactly that...trash. And that is where it landed ... in the trash bin. I enjoy short stories and reading the other "glowing" reviews posted on Amazon...I expected so much more. I did not expect "Lesbian Porn"...even though I don't mind lesbian literature if it's written well. Yet, since this was written many years ago, I will give the author some leeway. However, after reading some negative reviews of her most recent book, I will not bother to purchase that one either. I'm hoping Ms. Allison redeems herself in the future with more interesting characters and less filler.

Here is how Dorothy Allison introduces herself in TRASH:

"The central fact of my life is that I was born in 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina, the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family, a girl who had left the seventh grade the year before, worked as a waitress, and was just a month past fifteen when she birthed me. That fact, the inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow oddly deserved, has had dominion over me * * *."

The literate, well-heeled portion of our society that runs mainstream media tends to ignore the poor, and when forced to acknowledge their existence it often prefers to romanticize or mythologize them as the sturdy, stoic, hard-working backbone of America. That wasn't Dorothy Allison's folks. "We were the bad poor. We were men who drank and couldn't keep a job; women, invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours and bearing too many children; and children with runny noses, watery eyes, and wrong attitudes." Her people were trash.

Originally published in 1988, TRASH is a collection of 15 powerful stories of life as experienced by Dorothy Allison. Judging from this book alone (I know very little about Allison from beyond the covers of the book), the stories must have a high quotient of autobiography.

In ten of the stories, the "bad poor" are front and center, in discomfiting bluntness and detail. Allison limns the world of textile mills, waitressing, belt-wielding (and much worse) step-fathers, fishing camps, gospel-singing, shoplifting, male lust, and cheap alcohol delivered in a myriad of ways. It is just as much America as 50th floor corner offices, ivy-covered college campuses, health clubs, and amber waves of grain.

Exacerbating her pariah-hood, Allison is lesbian. In five of the stories in this collection, it is lesbianism that is front and center, including some very graphic sex scenes. To me, those stories are misplaced. If TRASH had been presented as a memoir I would feel differently, but it is a collection of stories entitled "Trash" and billed as a stark portrayal of Southern poverty. The lesbianism, though very much a part of Allison's life, is not necessarily part of the existence of the bad poor and its presence in this collection distracts from the depiction of the bad poor. No doubt I am somewhat influenced by the fact that I am repulsed by the scenes of lesbian sex - just as I am repulsed or annoyed by scenes of male homosexual or male/female sex. (I have never bought or browsed through any collection of overtly sexual or erotic stories; sex, like prayer, is too personal to experience vicariously.) I think the lesbian stories would be more effective portrayals (at least for non-lesbians) of the social challenges of lesbianhood without the raw sex, but even so I believe they should not have been included in a collection of stories about trash.

Ultimately, TRASH is about surviving and struggling to maintain some dignity, some sense of self-worth. For Allison, both anger and humor have been essential in doing so. The stories are well-written, if not brilliantly so. Ten of them are well worth reading by everyone in this country. Indeed, if the book contained only those ten stories I would give it five stars.

I was very pleased with this book - the packaging, the timeliness of the shipper and the condition of the book. From one Southern belle to another, Dorothy Allison rocks the Mason Dixon Line! A must read.