“All my life I have hated cliches, the cliches applied to people like me and those I love. Every time I pick up a book that purports to be about either poor people or queers or Southern women, I do so with a conscious anxiety, an awareness hat the books about us have often been cruel, small, and false. I have wanted our lives taken seriously and represented fully–with power and honesty and sympathy–to be hated or loved, or to terrify and obsess, but to be real, to have the power of the whole and the complex. I have never wanted politically correct parables made out of my grief, simple-minded rote speeches made from my rage, simplifications that reduce me to cardboard dimensions. But mostly that is what I have found. We are the ones they make fiction of–we queer and disenfranchised and female–and we have the right to demand our full, nasty, complicated lives, if only to justify all the times our reality has been stolen, mismade, and dishonored.”
- Dorthy Allison (reprinted in Writing with Style by Trimble, third edition).
I couldn’t help but think of mental illness while reading this paragraph. Our stories have been either played for laughs as the crazy sidekick, or else have been bogged down in the sad, serious memoirs by those who have “made it to the other side”. I wish we could all tell our own stories in a holistic way: not to be laughed at, but neither detached from the rest of who we are as is so often seen in nonfiction.
-Ashes
