As you read and prepare for class on Thursday, take note of the passages from this text that you find especially engaging or provocative. Underline or mark them as a reminder of what captured your attention. Sketch out brief notes, as well, about what you were thinking as you read. Use these notes to help you generate your response to the questions below.
Identify a passage (or two) from Two or Three Things I Know for Sure that you think most powerfully captures the main point of this piece. Then, write a paragraph or two in which you explain what you think Dorothy Allison is trying to persuade her readers to think, believe, or understand through her writing. Use the passage(s) you identified to support your analysis and integrate it into your paragraph, taking time to explain what these passages or brief quotations mean and how they relate to Allison’s overall purpose and argument. Post your response here as a comment and aim for about 250 words.
Where do stories begin and what purpose do they serve? Are they meant as distractions for children at bedtime, or are do they weave threads of both truth and fiction into an easily comprehended pattern? Whatever their meaning, Dorothy Allison makes a point of defending them and the art of storytelling in her memoir, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. She states very plainly in the middle of her narrative, " Behind the story I tell is the one I don't. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear" (Allison 39). It is in these quotes, and the passage that follows, that we can derive her overall meaning. Stories, for her, are the building blocks of social life. People's experiences and beliefs can all be summed up by tales which are then layered upon each other like bricks in wall. This is indicated by the way she suggests that, while there is an untold story, it is a story nonetheless. In this way, stories resemble the truth- or as close to the truth as one can get. The last line of the memoir captures this concept perfectly, it reads: "I can tell you anything. All you have to do is believe the truth" (94).
ReplyDeleteWhile her argument may seem unduly epistemological, it is only meant to highlight the way people see the world around them- through the eyes and analyses of others. Allison makes this point very clear when she writes about the time she spent with her mother, going through family photos. Every time they did so, her mother's stories about the photos' subjects would change in ways either subtle or dramatic, allowing the truth itself to transform and be redefined. This brings us back to the quote on page 94 where it seems that Allison's words are almost mocking. In her opinion, believing what one hears is, in a way, synonymous to believing the truth.
Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know for Sure is a captivating and intriguing memoir in which the author encapsulates her own life with a simple, single phrase – “two or three things I know for sure.” Near the end of the memoir, one key phrase stood out to me – “Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world” (pg. 72). Because this piece is a memoir, I think that Allison is trying to use her life stories and experiences in order to bring about her main point. Another passage stood out to me even nearer to the piece’s end – “Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form” (pg. 86). This, I believe, summarizes the main point of the piece – beauty is a very personal thing, and in order for beauty to exist the people surrounding us must reinforce its notion. For example, Allison thought that her little sister Anne was more beautiful than herself because Anne had fair hair and skin and had the “perfect” body type. Others in the community reinforced this notion with their negative actions – they felt threatened by her beauty, and so they tried to discredit it by saying that she was just trash trying far too hard to look pretty. Allison uses personal stories such as this one throughout the piece and as the main body of the piece in order to convey her beliefs about beauty and the stories that must be told, sometimes more for the sake of the storyteller herself than for the sake of the audience.
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ReplyDeleteIn her short and poignant memoir Dorothy Allison writes deep into the depths of her family and the poverty and misfortune that defined it. Allison finds through a jumbled narrative and recollection through pictures a varied story of often tragedy and triumph. As she describes on page 39 "Behind the story" she tells "is the one" she doesn't. "Behind the story" I heard "is the one" she wishes she "could make" me "hear." While through vivid descriptions and anecdotes Allison attempts to illustrate the obstacles such as rape, poverty, homosexuality, etc, as often defining her life. Through a roller coaster of emotions she uses others to formulate what her family was and what she never wanted to become. "Behind" her "carefully buttoned collar" was her "nakedness" and the "struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money" (39). Never does anything in her life derive from one emotion or motivation, "behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence" (39). Allison's repeated use of the word behind in this passage indicates her passion to tell the story behind the silence, the story that no one has heard. The story of poverty and complacency, of love and lust, and ultimately the searching of meaning in a life that could like meaningless.
ReplyDeleteDorothy Allison’s memoir is meant to give readers perspective on the realities many women face in this world and why issues such as domestic abuse and violence continue today. Allison tells the story of her family, whose women have endured an endless cycle of rape and domestic abuse from men for generations. She brings to light how such a situation is hard to escape for many women. Though running seems a simple solution, the author explains that running is only part of the downward cycle because, “…running becomes a habit… the secret to running is to know why you run and where you are going—and to leave behind the reason you run” (4). The women in her family, her mother, aunt, and cousin could not run. She described them, and herself, as “tender and fragile and hungry for something besides dispassionate curiosity” (58). These women learned to be resilient and endure the pain that their family went through.
ReplyDeleteOne of the most striking aspects of the book is the question it raises about homosexuality in women. Throughout her story, it is easy to understand why women in her situation could never trust a man, and it is easy for one to assume that this would influence her to become a lesbian. But Allison reveals that there is more depth to every woman’s experiences. While she was harassed and abused by men her entire childhood, she also experienced relationships with women who treated her in a similar fashion. Allison’s story is less about a women who ran away from men, and more about a person who ran from love, sex, and people in general. It was not until she learned the ability to love herself, that she was able to embrace relationships with others. One of the things she lists as knowing for sure is “how long it takes to learn to love yourself…[and] how much love [she] need[s] now” (67).
One of the most powerful messages of Dorothy Allison’s memoir, Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure, is the importance of story telling, and of defining ourselves by the stories we tell about our lives. Allison was always a storyteller, and growing up, the stories she told helped her through the many hardships she endured. She says, “I am supposed to be deeply broken, incapable of love or trust or passion. But I am not, and part of why that is so is the nature of the stories I told myself to survive” (69). For Allison it is important to assert her herself through her own story, not through the stories she is “supposed” to tell, or the ones others might tell about her. The experience of being raped as a child is one that undoubtedly shaped her life, but something she refuses to succumb to and be defined by. “I did not want to wear that coat, to be told what it meant, to be told how it had changed the flesh beneath it, to let myself be made over into my rapist’s creation” (70-71). Allison talks about how rape changes the way people perceive her, almost as if it the experience becomes a generalization or stereotype, “as if that thing I never wanted to happen and did not know how to stop is the only thing that can be said about my life” (44). In her memoir Allison shows the strength she had to move beyond what people expected of her, strongly denying “[the] stories other people would tell about my life…those are the stories that could destroy me, erase me, mock and deny me” (71). My favorite quote from the book demonstrates the courage, strength and love Allison was able to find as a woman: “When I make love I take my whole life in my hands, the damage and the pride, the bad memories and the good, all that I am or might be, and I do indeed love myself, can indeed do any damn thing I please” (69).
ReplyDeleteIn the heartfelt memoir of Dorothy Allison, a blunt and yet beautiful narrative reveals the broken past of a woman. Through the beauty of storytelling, Allison displays a strong love of exposing the reality behind the story of a person’s life. Her narrative weaves anecdotes of her family with small stories about her interactions with sexual partners. A key idea that is repeated throughout the memoir is the idea of beauty. Her “memories” (19) guide her thoughts to beauty even as an adult. As a child, Allison never felt beautiful compared to her “beautiful sister” (78) Anne. Through the passage of time and the various stories pasted together in a cluttered timeline, Allison shows a gradual discovery of beauty and its personal meaning for individuals. Stories give life to the understanding of beauty. Stories give life to the “body” (65) of the person standing before you. Allison wishes to emphasis through stories the importance of acting “beautiful to each other” (86) otherwise “we cannot know beauty in any form” (65). When human beings interact with each other based on outward beauty, the inner beauty may never be revealed. Allison always judged her sister for being so beautiful in youth, but never looked to see how the beauty forced Anne to be “dogged by contempt” (78). Allison’s “act of storytelling” (84) throughout the memoir “connect[s]” (78) the idea of beauty to the people sprinkled throughout her life. Through these memories and stories, Allison shows how her act of discovering beauty can apply to humanity as a whole.
ReplyDeleteIn Dorothy Allison, “Two or Three Things I Know for Sure” the moment that stood out to me was when she was talking about her mother being “an actress in the theater of true life.” Dorothy also goes on to describe her idea of this theater as “pretending you know what you’re doing when you don’t know anything for certain and what you do know seems to be changing all the time.” This one passage speaks volumes about Dorothy’s life, and also about her mother’s life and lives of people in similar situations.
ReplyDeleteWe can see here the idea that putting forward your true self is not the best option, at least in Dorothy’s mother’s opinion. She felt a need to be an actress and put forward a different version of herself so that she could seem more socially acceptable to the people she served as a waitress. This strikes me as incredible telling. It must have been extremely difficult to act completely different from how you feel to fit into the seem of society just to make some better tips. This must have created some sense of dejection for Dorothy’s mother since she was never able to act like herself and must have felt that her true self was not good enough to present to her customers. Or, at the very least, that her true self would not have been able to support her family as well as the act she put on.
That sense of dejection and not being good enough to present yourself to the world at large must have been very difficult to deal with. The situation that Dorothy and her mother grew up fostered this idea of not being good enough or having to hide your feelings from those around you. It also highlights the concept of putting forward projections of what people want to see and that we have to sometimes change ourselves in ways, both subtle and drastic, to fit in some times.
Dorthy Allison’s “Two or Three Things I Know for Sure” illustrates the dynamic principles and complexities of the construction of love, both love of self and sharing that love with others, through a collection of narratives depicting her growth from an abusive childhood to her adult life and role as a mother.
ReplyDeleteDue to her exposure to abuse, both physical and sexual, Allison’s view of sex was one which encompassed fear and love. She mentions how she concluded that she had begun to “hate and love something [that she was] not sure [she understood]” (7). In this particular statement she is referencing her view of sex; however it is a broad statement for the overall theme of the memoir. It can be applied to her view of love, sex, and her body, all which are intertwined throughout the various vignettes Allison depicts.
Allison loves and hates the concept of love because she fears it. By accepting love she is also accepting the possibility of hurt. She tracks the development of her understanding of love from “a mystery…a calamity”(55) to her acknowledgement that “if there is love in the world…there was no reason I should not have it” (65). Coming from an abusive childhood she was not raised in a loving atmosphere, and she struggled with the concept. She therefore had to first learn that she deserved love and that she needed to love herself. This came about from learning to love her body, another concept that offered fear and love due to confusion, before she could give it to another person to love as well. She forced herself to previously separate sex from love in order to make sense of being repeatedly raped, and then as she matured learning to reform the bond between feelings and actions was a necessity. Through the concept of loving herself and becoming aware of her self-worth she could allow others to love her, as well as expect it.
Her personal stories capture her growth and illustrate for the audience her thought process and how she dealt with abuse to now being able to share her love with her partner and her son.
“Wanda was being Mama, doing what Mama would have done, comforting us the way only Mama had known to do. I looked around and saw Anne holding my stepfather’s shoulder as he sobbed, looked down and saw my own hands locked on the little bag of Mama’s jewelry we had found in her dresser. For a moment I wanted to cry and then I didn’t. Of all the things I had imagined, this was the one I had not foreseen. We had become Mama”. (15-16)
ReplyDeleteAs I was reading Allison’s stories, I found myself not liking the writing. I think I would have much rather want it to be done as intended, for a performance. It is this that I think Allison most wants her readers to understand. As indicated by the quote above, Allison and her sisters became their mother, a woman that Allison had described not necessarily wanting to be. She wanted her stubbornness and pride, yet did not want the mean stories that her mother had grown up with. Yet, Allison found herself possessing some of the qualities of her mother which shows that no matter what is wanted or what goes down on paper, ultimately life must be acted out. Her stories are about crucial things that have happened, interconnecting love, family, friendship, and experiences to create a holistic person. Yet it seems to me that the family aspect is the most important. It is the one Allison kept going back to, especially as she watched her sisters become mothers and then herself as a mother. She focused on the intense bonds families have to allow people to understand the life-defining power it holds.
Dorothy Allison’s “Two or Three Things I Know for Sure,” portrays the persistent and admirable character of a broken little girl who was never willing to give up and give into her family’s unfortunate and unhealthy pattern of relationships. Dorothy showed how a woman’s strength and persistence, her will to survive her painful circumstance, is more important than the circumstance itself. Dorothy says, “I know. I am supposed to be deeply broken, incapable of love or trust or passion. But I am not, and part of why that is so is the nature of the stories I told myself.” (69) Dorothy believed in mind over matter, and faking it until she made it by choosing an optimistic fantasy world created through her stories instead of her struggling reality. Her belief in a positive future carried her through the reality of a broken past. Dorothy says, “Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Men eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made.” (51) It would have been so easy for Dorothy to give up hope and fall into the dangerous patterns of the rest of the women in her life, allowing history to repeat itself through the generations, but Dorothy maintained strength through her belief in a separate reality.
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ReplyDeleteYes, Dorothy Allison feels the surging power of telling a story. Yes, she refuses to stay silent. Yes, she believes in the act of telling a story- to unveil and unmask the gripping truth. But that is not the point of her writing her story. She sees the significance but does not prescribe it her purpose. She is telling a story about beauty and about love and how the two are so intertwined; it would do the other injustice if not told together. What is ugly in a woman is because of the ugliness of what the world did to her, whether that is the men who turned their backs or stole their innocence or the women who ignored their pleas or simply slipped away in the cracks of death. There is nothing ugly in love. The scars that are on the inside seep through to the outside, and it is a tragedy how it is not fair. “Beauty is a hard thing. Beauty is a mean story…We were not beautiful.” (pg 37) It is not fair because everyone is originally beautiful and for those that do experience love experience beauty. Allison reclaims her beauty; she regains love in this story. When the world stripped her of her beauty and neglected her of love, she gained it back. She says it is “hard to be innocent, believing yourself evil.” (pg 49) just as it is hard to feel beautiful when you believe that you are not loved. This is a story of her regaining her beauty by mending the scars that the world slashed. She does this by falling in love with karate (“All I gained was a sense of what I might do, could do if I worked at it, a sense of my body as my own. And that was miracle enough.”), with her lovers, and with her sister at the end. She gives love and becomes in my opinion more beautiful each day. She says of the two or three things she knows: that loving yourself takes a long time and that she needed it now. She heals as she tells her stepfather to never touch her again, she knows that she “would rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me” (pg 71) and most importantly she knows to look lovely is to feel lovely and that “if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form” (pg 86).
Here's Alexis's comment:
ReplyDeleteDorothy Allison illustrates a tale portraying the adversities of life in which a stubborn and undying determination to survive physical and emotional traumas develop to ultimately accept herself in her short novel Two or Three Things I Know For Sure. Allison begins many stories within her noel with the words, “let me tell you a story.” She explains that she creates fictive stories that enabled her to bear her suffering in her life of disturbing events such as child rape and abuse by her stepfather: “when I began there was only the suspicion that making up the story as you went along was the way to survive. And if I know anything, I know how to survive, how to remake the world in a story” (Allison 4). Allison highlights the power of the mind and imagination to slowly wash away her anguish: “I know. I’m not supposed to talk about how long it took me to wash him out of my body—how many targets I shot, how many women I slept with, how many times I sat up till dawn wondering if it would ever change, if I would ever change” (48). As Allison experiences life she ponders how those experiences affect her. In her quest to understand herself and the world around her, Allison reveals that she grew up in “the country of [her] dreams and the country of [her] nightmares” (7). By creating juxtaposition, Allison conveys the confusion of a balance of wonder and despair in life. In an effort to gain control of herself, Allison reveals that, “Theater is standing up terrified and convincing people you know what you’re doing…” and “…when you don’t know anything for certain what you do know seems to be changing all the time” (27). Life continuously changes and Allison responds and adapts with a stubborn determination to not run or accept despair, but to desire and uphold a feminist lifestyle in which she comes to love herself.
Yes, Dorothy Allison feels the surging power of telling a story. Yes, she refuses to stay silent. Yes, she believes in the act of telling a story- to unveil and unmask the gripping truth. But that is not the point of her writing her story. She sees the significance but does not prescribe it her purpose. She is telling a story about beauty and about love and how the two are so intertwined; it would do the other injustice if not told together. What is ugly in a woman is because of the ugliness of what the world did to her, whether that is the men who turned their backs or stole their innocence or the women who ignored their pleas or simply slipped away in the cracks of death. There is nothing ugly in love. The scars that are on the inside seep through to the outside, and it is a tragedy how it is not fair. “Beauty is a hard thing. Beauty is a mean story…We were not beautiful.” (pg 37) It is not fair because everyone is originally beautiful and for those that do experience love experience beauty. Allison reclaims her beauty; she regains love in this story. When the world stripped her of her beauty and neglected her of love, she gained it back. She says it is “hard to be innocent, believing yourself evil.” (pg 49) just as it is hard to feel beautiful when you believe that you are not loved. This is a story of her regaining her beauty by mending the scars that the world slashed. She does this by falling in love with karate (“All I gained was a sense of what I might do, could do if I worked at it, a sense of my body as my own. And that was miracle enough.”), with her lovers, and with her sister at the end. She gives love and becomes in my opinion more beautiful each day. She says of the two or three things she knows: that loving yourself takes a long time and that she needed it now. She heals as she tells her stepfather to never touch her again, she knows that she “would rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me” (pg 71) and most importantly she knows to look lovely is to feel lovely and that “if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form” (pg 86).
ReplyDeleteThe central theme of Dorothy Allison's "Two or Three Things I Know For Sure" is the cathartic power of story telling. This memoir vividly expresses her working-class, or impoverished, background and how that influenced her family's lives. This narrative is intricately woven together with vague details and photographs of family members that seem to frame the text. Allison also has a unique voice in that she draws attention to the fact that she is telling a story, which allows the reader to "listen" to her instead of just read her book. One of the passages I found the most encompassing of her voice was the passage where Allison talks about finding her voice, "Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear. Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence."(p.39) I found this passage so intriguing as it is essentially the turning point where Allison begins to speak about the harsh realities of her childhood. This is the point where she begins to learn she needs to love herself. Another line from the book, my favorite line, is where this love has been realized and is now insisted upon by Allison. "Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you have ever wanted." (p.66).
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ReplyDeleteDorothy Allison’s, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, is an engrossing memoir about the power of having confidence in one’s voice and expressing it through story telling. Allison’s stories have a reoccurring theme of love, sex, and violence. All of these aspects influence the when, how, and if she tells her story. Allison communicates love, sex, and violence through stories of her family, lesbian lovers, friends, and step-father. There are many passages in which capture these themes but the following are what I believe the most riveting.
ReplyDeleteThe theme of sex is key in Allison’s story telling. She states, “Let me tell you about what I have never been allowed to be: beautiful and female, sexed and sexual.” (38) Throughout her life, she has primarily been surrounded by women who were not valued by the community and largely by the men in their lives. She finds herself trapped in this web formed by society on what role she is supposed to fulfill in society. While examining her mother’s life, she wonders how a beautiful woman can be trapped by a detestable man like her step-father. Furthermore, as a young girl, Allison admired her sisters’ beauty and accredited that beauty to her sister being treated better by the family. Though, she finds out later in her life that her sister was no better off than she was. Notwithstanding, the men in Allison’s life treat the women poorly, however, this disrespect is further insinuated by the calm reactions by the women. In particular, when Allison is speaking to her aunt about boys, her aunt states, “Men and boys, they all the same. Talk about us like we dogs, bitches, sprung, full-grown on the world.” (52) Her aunts few words on the matter represent the complacency of some of the women on matters of disrespect from men. Ultimately, Allison struggles to gain confidence in her sexuality in all areas of mind, body, and soul. She is ashamed of her body from early childhood when sexually abused by her step-father and wants to love her body, herself, once again. When she watches the sensei’s wife perform she states, “Watching, I fell in love – not with her but with the body itself, the hope of movement, the power of jumping and thrusting and being the creature that is not afraid to fall down but somehow doesn’t anyway.” (48) This is a turning point in Allison’s life, as it is a time of she sees the light at the end of the tunnel. His wife represents what women are capable of doing and ultimately, is Allison’s role model.
Moreover, this following passage is an example of the theme of sex, violence, and love combined with reconciliation. “Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Men eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made. Children go crazy.” (51) In this passage, I believe, that Allison is consoled by a simple fact that humans, regardless of gender, are bi-products of their society. This particular statement also sends a message of hope and understanding from Allison as it shows that regardless of her violent past with men, she is able to understand that not all men are like that. Nevertheless, she is not excusing the actions of the men she has met but simply coming to understand the complexities of humans, which show that one cannot apply a generalization to one gender in terms of sexual violence that applies to all of that gender.
Here's Daniel's comment:
ReplyDeleteFor me Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know For Sure embodied the universal quest for balance both in life and in self. The memoir began by exploring family in a great disharmony with expectation and reality. As Allison claimed she knew something, the exact opposite of the supplied knowledge was supplied as her hard reality. Her aunt did not know all of her family. Rather than being a harmonious organism, we see a family as a root system unable to identify its leaves—an un-functional, disunited family framework. Oddly this dissonance between expectation and reality aligned when rape and gender violence was introduced into her story. Readers expect rape to break, and indeed it did. The work’s underlying direction shifted, and in fact expectation and reality were no longer juxtaposed but instead intertwined. From this rhetorical, emotional shift came new life. She was embraced by her sensei, though she was imperfect. This new concept—being embraced though unable—brought Allison to find her self. Soon after for the first time Allison found love in women. Though many brought them to her bed expecting to be fixed, this newness Allison had never been able to understand brought her into a fuller context not only of herself but of others. Soon came Allison’s sister. From this point, there was again a bit of fragmentation as the two explored their childhoods; however, it was not degrading but instead uplifting. The two are able to come to terms with their childhood, see her sister’s daughter, and see themselves as their mother. This enlightenment soon shown through as the work ended in a dream of going forward and embracing a new technology to complete Allison’s masterpiece and encapsulate her life’s meaning. That though much is broken if we seek out what is true, we can truly be as we ought to.