Dorothy Allison was born to a lower working class family of Greenville, South Carolina in April of 1949. Her mother, Ruth, was a fifteen year old single mother to both Allison and her sister. When Allison was five, her mother remarried a man who, soon after the marriage, began sexually abusing her. Unlike Bone in Allison’s popular novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, Allison was able to tell her cousin of the abuse when she was eleven; however, like Anney, Bone’s mother, Ruth only took Allison away from her abusive stepfather for a few weeks (“Dorothy Allison,” Horsley). The assaults continued for another two years when the family picked up and moved, in the middle of the night, to escape an enormous debt, to Florida when her stepfather lost his job (St. John). Luckily, this move allowed Allison’s teachers to notice her intelligence despite her unfortunate living circumstances. She achieved a National Merit scholarship and attended Florida Presbyterian College for her bachelor’s degree. It was after graduating from college when Allison allowed herself to embrace her sexuality and expand her interest in feminist literature (Horsley). She later moved to New York where she worked as an editor for feminist, lesbian, and gay journals. In 1983, she published her first work, The Women Who Hate Me, which was a book of poetry. It was critiqued for its promiscuity, sadomasochism, and butch-femme roles (Horsley).  In 1992, her most popular publication, Bastard Out of Carolina, became a bestseller and was a finalist for the National Book Award. In an interview with KPBS in 2011, Allison said that the Boatwright family was largely based off her own family. The book is partially autobiographical, but Allison says, “[she] took it into fiction, and that gave [her] more room” (St. John). Today Allison, 66, lives with her partner of eighteen years, Alix Layman, and her son, Wolf, in San Francisco (Horsley).