A happier ending?

'Cavedweller' offers return of a prodigal daughter

By CNN Interactive Writer
K.C. Wildmoon

ATLANTA (CNN) -- In the middle of a tour that will eventually take her to almost three dozen cities, author Dorothy Allison reads from her latest novel, "Cavedweller". When she finishes -- a vibrant chapter about the character Cissy's first trip into a cave and the visual and emotional delight she finds there -- Allison sets her eyeglasses aside and scans her audience.

"How many of you are writers?" she asks, her soft southern twang right at home in an Atlanta bookstore. The hands go up. "Not enough," she says. "If somebody gave you several thousand dollars and nothin' to do but write, would you be a writer then? Would you tell your stories, your family's stories, then?" More hands, and Allison laughs. Someone in the back mumbles, "nice work if you can get it."

Allison struggled years to get this kind of work. She wrote the critically acclaimed "Bastard out of Carolina" over a ten-year period. "Cavedweller" took less time thanks in part to the success of "Bastard," a harsh novel about child abuse and violence in a southern family.

Signing books after her reading, Allison explains that she deliberately gave "Cavedweller" a happier ending than her first novel.

"I wanted to make it different. If you write a book that's as powerful and successful as 'Bastard,' there's a strong desire to prove there's something else."

"Bastard out of Carolina" is a powerful novel, graphic in its portrayal of family violence. That too, says Allison, was deliberate.

"Writing is the only way I know to demand justice from an uncaring universe," she says.

But it was too brutal for some -- including Ted Turner, who originally paid for the movie version, directed by Anjelica Huston, but refused to allow the film to be shown on his networks. Allison said she found it amazing that "anyone would spend $4 million to make a movie without having read the book."

But the film was made, and aired on Showtime. Allison says it's a good film, "but a movie is core samples of a book ... I miss some of the book. I call it Anjelica Huston's 'Bastard.' It's not mine."

"It's really effective on child abuse," she says.

Allison, born in Greenville, South Carolina, put her first words on paper after seeing the Disney film "The Fighting Prince of Donegal" when she was about 8 or 9 years old.

"A 60-page play in verse for my mom," she recalls. "She was really sweet and appreciative, and it was really awful."

Her latest novel, which hit "The New York Times" best seller list last week, chronicles the return of a prodigal daughter to her Georgia hometown -- and to the daughters she left behind when she ran off with a rock band to escape her abusive husband. Delia Byrd drives into town in a beat-up Datsun with a third daughter, determined to build a family with all three.

The story -- like any other, she says -- has autobiographical elements.

"My sisters," Allison says, "we didn't like each other as kids. We were scared of each other, I think, but we've grown to love each other. It was fun to write about these sisters who were supposed to hate each other but really don't."

Allison finishes signing the books and smiles again, a particular smile seen rarely outside the South, and then usually only on transplanted southerners. It is a smile that says its wearer knows more than she's telling, and tells more than she knows. She smiles that smile, glancing at a brown-haired woman waiting nearby, and then heads out the door to have dinner with the woman, who is one of those sisters.

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