FICTION

TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW FOR SURE by Dorothy Allison (Dutton: $14.95; 96 pp.) “You can’t break me,” Dorothy Allison told her stepfather on her 16th birthday, the stepfather who had repeatedly molested and beaten her for 11 years. “And you’re never going to touch me again.” This was one of the stories, “the story of a girl who stood up to a monster,” that Allison told herself to survive. And this is a collection of those stories, a book of wisdom, a book of medicines, originally written as a performance piece immediately after Allison finished “Bastard Out of Carolina.” In the author’s note, Allison explains that “Two or Three Things” allowed her to “differentiate between my real family and the fictional family I had created in my novel.” And really, much of this book is about the exhaustion that comes from creating the stories that a child either learns to wear like a heavy coat of protective lies or to use as imaginative stepping stones toward survival. “Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you make.” “Six days out of seven I am a creation,” writes the tired but unbroken adult. “I know. I am supposed to have shrunk down and died. I am supposed to be deeply broken, incapable of love or trust or passion. But I am not. . . .” Hardscrabble portraits of Allison’s female relatives punctuate the book and by the final pages, smiling pictures of this self-made writer and her son Wolf are indeed inspirational. One feels the vicious, devouring cycle of rage and pain defeated.