Key Details
- Voice: Julie McKay is the single credited reader for twenty-three first-person essays, a casting call worth sampling before you commit.
- Big ideas: Class and poverty, lesbian identity and feminist politics, the professional cost of speaking plainly about sex.
- Atmosphere: Blunt, argumentative, unsentimental.
- Worth it?: Take it for the arguments rather than the story, from a writer with no interest in being liked.
Class is the subject Dorothy Allison never lets go of, and the twenty-three essays gathered in this audiobook keep circling back to it from different angles: a childhood in a poor South Carolina family, an adult life as a lesbian in the suburbs of New York, and the distance between those two facts that a more careful writer would have smoothed over. Nine hours and twenty-six minutes across twenty-three pieces works out to roughly twenty-five minutes each, which is close to the natural length of one sitting.
Julie McKay Holds the Only Reading Credit
Allison arrives with a Lambda Award and the American Library Association's Stonewall Book Award behind her, and the description leans on both. What it does not prepare you for is how unlike each other the essays are. Some are arguments, some are closer to reported memory. 'Gun Crazy' works through what guns meant to the men and women around her growing up; 'Talking to Straight People' takes on the professional cost of speaking plainly about sex; 'Public Silence, Private Terror' is about the danger women feel in naming their own desires, feminist rooms included. A five-star filed August 18, 2003 calls the result 'two dozen bits of astute rambling across a crazy quilt of subjects', and rambling is fair, though the count on the page is twenty-three.
Julie McKay holds the only reading credit, which carries more weight here than it would on reported nonfiction. First-person essays come with a voice the reader has usually already built from the page, and Allison's page voice is a specific instrument: profane, funny, and willing to turn on its own side mid-paragraph. The listing attaches no sample note and no chapter list, and says nothing about where the new preface falls in the file, so anyone who owns the print collection is buying an interpretation unheard. Playing a few minutes before committing settles it faster than any review can.
Andrea Dworkin and an Uncompromising Revolutionary Act
Andrea Dworkin's Woman Hating turns up in the oldest entry on the listing, a five-star from October 16, 1998 written by someone who first read Dworkin in 1978 and had not been shaken the same way since. That response pulls out the idea of writing as an 'uncompromising revolutionary act' and the claim that the literary mainstream, the avant-garde and a 'burgeoning feminist critical aristocracy' alike will have no use for a lesbian writer who 'refuses to obey the rules.' Whatever you make of the framing, it tells you the register: this collection was written to be inconvenient.
Essays also happen to be the form that survives interruption best. Each piece stands alone and restarts, so the file rewards twenty-five minutes in the kitchen as much as a long evening, and nothing is lost by stopping between them. The trade is momentum. The January 20, 2014 four-star, written by someone who places Allison inside decades of women's rights and gay rights organizing, describes the collection as 'an interesting history of out times', and that is the honest pitch. Anyone arriving for narrative will meet argument instead.
Range is the other argument for spending the time. The description sets the span from a South Carolina childhood to an adult life in the New York suburbs, and the three essays it names cover firearms, professional speech and private fear, which is a wider spread than most single-author collections attempt in one volume. The file has room for that spread to read as deliberate rather than scattered. A listener who knows only the fiction meets the same preoccupations here, stated as position rather than plot, and that shift is the whole reason to pick up a critic's essays instead of another novel.
Every Review Predates This Recording by Years
Dates deserve a look before the star average persuades anyone. The five written responses were filed in 1998, 2003, 2013, 2014 and 2018; this recording was published in March 2021. Every one of them predates the file by at least three years, and the oldest by more than two decades. A 4.5 average built from forty-one votes is drawing on readers of a printed book, which does not make the opinions less useful, only differently aimed. They tell you about Allison. They cannot tell you about this reading.
Content guidance is the second gap. A three-star from March 9, 2018 puts it in nine words: 'Didn't realize the content. Not objectionable, just not for my taste.' The description does say Allison is fearless about social and political taboos, and the three named essay titles telegraph a fair amount, but no note on the page tells a buyer what the frank material actually covers. For a collection whose stated subjects include guns, sex and the politics of speaking about both, that omission is worth pricing in.
Preface deserves a second look before you buy. The copy sells this as the collection 'now with a new preface', which is a real reason to choose this edition over one already on a shelf, and the page then declines to say whether that preface opens the recording or who voices it. If the new material is your reason for buying, confirm it with the seller first.
An Honesty Blunt Enough to Hurt
Anyone who needs a memoirist to be likable should look elsewhere. The November 27, 2013 response describes an honesty blunt enough to hurt and locates the appeal exactly there, in writing that was not shaped to please anyone. Read as a warning it is just as accurate as it is as a recommendation. Allison spends these pages arguing with her own background, her own politics and the movements she belongs to, and the pitch holds at that level for most of the nine and a half hours.
Newcomers are served better than the format usually manages, since no essay assumes you have read the fiction and each one begins again. What the file cannot hand over is the page itself, and a book people underline heavily loses something as one continuous voice. Take the audio for the argument, and keep a printed copy within reach for the sentences you will want to mark.
