Bastard Out of Carolina

Great book. The movie is different, but that is not unnusual. A learn more about the character Bone and the rest of the family.

I loved this book. It's definitely not a “light” read. Dorothy really captures the feelings and thoughts of her characters.

A visceral, raw, and deeply honest look into the lives of low-class southern Americans living in a dark 1950s South Carolina, Allison paints a reality that what seems like a conventional, tightly knit family has trudged through for countless generations. I have many mixed feelings about the writing of Allison and her intensely detailed depictions of Bone's experiences. It is incredibly important that often avoided issues such as sexual assault, domestic oppression, and classism are discussed more openly and without inaccuracy or misrepresentation. Efforts to censor or block such content are directly harming already narrow perceptions of what are very prominent, widely-affecting issues.

However, countless scenes in the novel deserve a strong content warning, and not every reader is in the right place to read Bastard out of Carolina. I believe that there definitely is also harm posed in reading sensitive content unaware. In this aspect, Allison unintentionally alienates a portion of her audience and also antagonizes her own self through their lens. In the environment of a university-level literature class, I observed varying degrees of discomfort among my peers regarding the content of this novel. Contrary to Allison's noble intentions, I felt as if many students may further disregard issues like sexual assault and connect them with feelings of uneasiness and embarrassment due to this.

In the end, Bastard out of Carolina is absolutely a literary milestone for not only the American social landscape but on a global scale as well. The censorship in schools which it faced upon its release only serves as a testament to that. As Allison explains herself, “that was what my book was about; telling a story that made sense of what did not make sense...[for] anyone who wanted to point to it and say “that's my story” (314). Bastard out of Carolina's ability to bring people out of the shadows and express their traumas and past experiences with beautiful rawness is in itself profoundly beautiful.

Allison explains the reasoning of ending the novel the sort of angry way she did in her afterword. “I can change so much; how people think about rape and child abuse, and working-class families and the nature of resilience, and even perhaps something about how love can both save us and not save us...” (319) I love this!!

“I am not an angel,” I asserted; “and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.” ― Brontë, Jane Eyre
“Are not all [things] strange to those who stand outside of them?”

One sentence synopsis... A harrowing semi-autobiographical story of Ruth Anne, ‘Bone' Boatwright, a young girl growing up entrenched in poverty, family dysfunction, and sexual abuse in the south.

Read it if you like... although it's now popular to put a poor, ‘white trash', female character as the center of a story (a la, ‘Winter's Bone' or ‘My Absolute Darling') this book was one of the earlier ones to accomplish it and the only one of those it's compared to written by a woman. Also a good read for people who liked the heartbreak of ‘A Little Life'. Very different but Bone is another character who will stick with me like Jude.

Dream casting... planning on checking out the 1996 movie version with a young Jenna Malone as Bone.

3.5

Very late to the party with this modern classic. At first, I was annoyed by the “white trash” angle–a term I really hate, but seems to apply here–which is just drilled into the reader. The extended family is a bunch of drunkards and ruffians who have a hard time holding down a job and they all behave badly. But eventually the emotional intensity of the story and the first person narration are overwhelming and too strong to categorize. What happens isn't because this is a poor southern family but instead happens because of the circumstances this particular family finds itself in, and that could happen anywhere.

This novel was a tough read and left me feeling angry and hurt afterwards. “Cold as death, mean as a snake, and twice as twisty.” When Glenn Said this about Bone, I could have swore he was talking about himself. Nobody in this story was likeable except for poor Bone who was unfortunate to be born into this family. Everybody in her family were too blind by false love and drunkenness to see what was going on. Great read but I won't pick up this book again.