Lesbian writer Dorothy Allison, who rose to fame based on her critically acclaimed 1992 novel Bastard Out of Carolina, died earlier this month of cancer at her home in Guerneville, California, at the age of 75, per The Bay Area Reporter.
According to The New York Times, critics compared Allison to Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner and Harper Lee after the South-set Bastard—which examines poverty, violence and abuse—was released; the book made numerous best-seller lists and was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction. A bold work, Bastard’s main character is Ruth Anne “Boat” Boatwright, a pre-teen whose stepfather has been raping her since she was 5 years old. “It’s what I’ve done. Bastard out of Carolina used a lot of the stories that my grandmother told me and some real things that happened in my life,” Allison told The Times Magazine in 1995.
Actress Anjelica Huston directed a television movie based on the book that starred Jennifer Jason Leigh as Bone’s mother and aired on Showtime in 1996 after TNT passed on it because of the graphic content. (Allison told Windy City Times in 2006 that the film “is accurate in its depiction of sexual violence but it’s a misrepresentation of the family,” adding, “Anjelica Huston and her company were wonderful people but they had no sense of humor and no concept of how working-class families survived dire times, which was not to weep all the fucking time but to find the absurd and the hubris in the monstrous lives we lived.”)
Allison was born on April 11, 1949, in Greenville, South Carolina. She left the hospital with the word “bastard” stamped on her birth certificate, as the boy who got her mother pregnant vanished almost immediately.
Allison and Alix Layman, a couple since the late 1980s, were married in 2008—two days before Proposition 8 passed, banning same-sex marriage in California. Layman passed away in 2002. Allison is survived by their son, Wolf Michael Layman; and two sisters, Barbara and June.