Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

Allison’s mother, Ruth, was born in the 1930s during the Great Depression. In many ways, the memoir is Allison’s attempt to come to terms with her mother’s influence on her identity. Allison includes some key facts about her mother’s life. Ruth was single and extremely young—just 15—when she had Allison; a great deal of stigma surrounded being a mother in such circumstances, but Ruth stuck it out and supported her children by working for years waiting tables at a restaurant. The other significant events of Ruth’s life include her marriage to Allison’s stepfather and her subsequent inability or refusal to remove the stepfather from her daughters’ lives permanently, even after he abused them.

Allison notes near the beginning of the memoir that Ruth was one of the women who “did not run away” (4) from the difficulties that came with being working-class, Southern, and a woman. Nevertheless, Allison knew early on that she had no interest in becoming like Ruth and her sisters—“measured, manlike, sexless, bearers of babies, burdens, and contempt” (32-33). Allison found little admirable about such a life, but her perspective on that life was colored by myths about white, working-class Southern women as passive players in their own lives.

Allison began to re-assess Ruth’s life only after Ruth died, leaving Allison to fill in the gaps left by unlabeled photos and family secrets. Ruth reappears in the memoir as a ghostly figure as Allison struggles with the sleep deprivation that comes with caring for a baby. Allison feels haunted by the sense that being a mother makes her more like Ruth. Ruth appears once more at the end of the memoir as the representative of a long line of mothers who struggle to protect their children but also as a voice that tells Allison that it’s for her to “‘make it [her life and stories] up for [her]self” (93)—to be a storyteller. This dream-vision of Ruth’s is a creation of Allison’s imagination. In this last moment of engagement with the idea of Ruth, Allison connects where she came from with how that difficult beginning helped her become a writer.

Allison’s Aunt Dorothy was the source of the title Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, but the complete quote includes the caveat that “‘[o]f course it’s never the same things, and I’m never sure as I’d like to be” (5). Dorothy (or Dot) introduced Allison to the idea of truth as a shifting thing depending on one’s perspective and how one chose to use storytelling to create that truth. Throughout the memoir, Dot’s teachings constantly help Allison reframe her perspective—on being a woman in particular.

Dorothy helped Allison understand that when men and boys smeared girls and women, especially poor ones, with misogynistic names, it said more about the low status afforded to women than about who women really are; Dot spoke with the authority of personal and women’s experience. Like Dot, Allison uses her life’s experiences to understand the truth about herself and her origins. The “two or three things” that she learns from her past appear in the book as italicized statements that sum up and punctuate the pieces of the memoir. Dot’s ability to understand that there’s no such thing as a single truth—and to bring that lived experience of being a woman to bear on how she sees life—profoundly influenced Allison.

Allison’s younger sister, Anne, appears in the memoir as a foil to Allison and a fellow survivor of abuse. As a child, Anne received praise for being pretty. Simultaneously, she dealt with the same abuse as Allison. As she moved into adolescence, her beauty became both a privilege and a burden. She continued to receive praise for—and derive esteem from—being beautiful, but like Allison she became the target of unwanted sexual harassment. Presumably, one turning point in her life was the day that she and Allison turned on their stepfather with knives after he attempted to abuse them. (Allison identifies Anne as “my little sister”[47] but doesn’t comment on how Anne saw their last encounter with the stepfather.) While still in her teens, Anne became a mother, and the misogynist values of her community led many to treat her with disrespect.

Years later, Anne and Allison shared with each other what that time was like for them during their childhood and learned that they each felt belittled by the other. This conversation with Anne was significant because it forced Allison to think in more nuanced ways about the power and burden of physical beauty for the working-class women in her family. Allison told Anne and her daughter an affirming story about the daughter’s birth and pointed out to the daughter the beauty of her mother. This storytelling was certainly an attempt to make amends, but it was also Allison’s effort to recognize the importance of countering myths about Southern, working-class women by identifying them as beautiful.

Allison’s sister Wanda was her most consistent connection to family as Allison moved away to build her own life. At Ruth’s funeral, Wanda was Allison’s caretaker, forcing her to bed and keeping their stepfather away from her. Wanda mothered Allison and Anne as they worked through Ruth’s meager belongings after the funeral.

In addition, Wanda was one of the first family members with whom Allison talked openly about being a lesbian woman. Wanda initiated the conversation, and the careful way she asked questions and responded to Allison illustrated how difficult it is for women to talk explicitly about love and sex. Despite Wanda’s obvious discomfort during this conversation, her effort to put her experience alongside Allison’s was one of the first times that Allison felt any sense of her family accepting her identity.

Wanda appears at the end of the memoir when she visits Allison shortly after Allison’s partner gives birth to Allison’s son. Her insistence on connecting Allison’s new role as mother to Ruth’s experience as a mother helped Allison come to terms with her mother’s influence on her life.

Allison’s stepfather is a powerfully “evil” figure whose impact on Allison was most apparent in the trauma he left in his wake. He first appears as the man whom family members (particularly Wanda) kept away from Allison at Ruth’s funeral. He next appears when Allison states in plain terms that he raped her when she was five. Allison describes him as a “short, mean-eyed truck driver” (53) who early on showed signs of misogyny and anger—especially because as an adolescent, Allison refused to present as traditionally feminine.

Allison’s physically overcoming her stepfather on the day that she and her sister threatened to knife him—after he tried to beat them—represented her first step in reclaiming power over her physical body. She later refused to allow him to spank her on her birthday, a rejection that brought her rebellion against the misogynist order he represented into public view. Allison wasn’t free of her stepfather psychologically until a karate class—and encountering a powerful, beloved female body—helped her heal from the damage he did to her.