Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

Two or Three Things I Know for Sure spans several decades and occurs in several locales, so the historical period is important context for the story. The earliest events in the memoir occur during Allison’s childhood in Greenville, South Carolina. By the late 1960s, Allison is in Florida—and later, California—and is deeply engaged with the feminist movement.

During the 1960s, feminism emerged as a potent political and cultural force that demanded women be recognized as political agents. Another part of the work of the feminist movement was for women themselves to unlearn internalized misogyny. The power of that movement finds expression in many moments in the memoir, including protests like the one Allison and Flo engage in when they attend the karate class. The feminist movement is also evident in self-help and in women-only spaces like the feminist collective where Allison lives when she’s in her early twenties, as well as in Allison’s unabashed celebration of the body and in her understanding of her identity as a lesbian woman as in part a centering of love of women as a political act.

Allison’s relationship with feminism is complicated, however, and reflects what happened to feminism in the 1970s through the 1990s—the memoir was published in 1995. Feminism faced—and continues to face—criticism about failing to make space for women of color, working-class people, and LGBQTIA+ identities. At the time of the memoir’s writing (1995), Allison was wary of allowing an overarching feminist narrative to erase her story and those of the women in her family.

In one scene, Allison ridicules a therapist who questions the wisdom of Allison’s talking about being a child sexual abuse survivor because the woman fears people will assume that this abuse is what “makes” Allison and others like her lesbian. Allison’s retort and subsequent analysis of why the conversation enraged her points out a certain amount of naivete that early feminism had about sexual desire and violence. Allison owns that she finds violence and power arousing, but that notion doesn’t sit well with the therapist, a woman with an “oddly traditional life and commonplace desires” (45). The therapist is privileged, and her belief that she can police Allison’s stories reminds Allison of how people looked at the women in her family as never “quite right.”

This conflict with the therapist reflects how the feminism of the 1960s-80s was particularly inattentive to the differences between the lives of privileged and working-class women. Allison’s refusal to let her story be erased—or to allow working-class white women to be erased—occurs elsewhere as “a story I will not tell” (71)—but that she thereby emphasizes—and as a refusal to wear a coat “recut to that feminist pattern” (71). While this strong rejection of the pressure to tell a certain story asserts her autonomy as a writer, it’s also a critique of feminism’s blindness (at that time, at least) to class and gender identity issues.