Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

Allison closes out her memoir by returning to the theme Storytelling as Testimony. Through the use of dreams, symbols, and motifs, Allison makes the case for storytelling as an important tool for self-fashioning.

Allison puts together two seemingly disparate narrative moments to open this last section—a story about her sister visiting her after Allison becomes a mother and a story about two insistent young people who want her to transform her stories into hypertext, then a cutting-edge part of what eventually became the public worldwide web. What both stories have in common is that they forced Allison to think about connections between past and present.

Wanda’s visit compelled Allison to see the connections between her story and that of her mother, despite their significantly different lives and geography. (Allison is an established writer living in California by this time.) Earlier in life, Allison defined herself as not being one of the Gibson women who had to “lose their lives or their children’s lives, to be trapped by those hard compromises and ground down until they no longer knew who they were” (5). Allison, however, has managed to both be a mother and range freely instead of being stuck in place like many women in her family. She has meaningful and satisfying work—storytelling that takes her to “strange places.” The disjunction between her life and the lives of those women allows her to recast what it means to be a white, Southern woman with working-class roots.

In the hypertext story, Allison was bewildered by what a young audience wanted to make of her work. Earlier in the memoir, Allison expresses some anxiety about her audience misusing her words and work to erase her identity and the identities of women like her. Her ownership of her story was a defining feature of how she thought of herself as an author. By the time the intense couple accosts her after the reading, she no longer thinks of standing and delivering her stories as “an act of war” (90). She’s skeptical of their proposal—“‘Yeah, right’” is her response—but seems at peace with the idea that other people may radically transform her story into a shape that exceeds her intention—and that they might do so using other forms of storytelling. She’s fine with the uncertainty.

The dream at the end of the memoir is set in a museum—a place one generally associates with old, static works taken out of their original context so that they can be seen as art. This museum displays the photographs Allison has been carrying around with her since her mother died. Both the museum and the photographs reflect Allison’s settled notions of her history and that of her family. In this dream, Allison dismantles the museum. She incorporates the idea of hypertext—one thing leading to the next—in how she describes what her touch does to these memories. Each time Allison touches a brick of memory, a “window open[s]” onto the choices Ruth made, until the last brick—“the brick of [Ruth’s] flesh” (93) crumbles, leaving Allison standing in rubble. This last vision of Allison is of a mother and a woman whose bedrock identity is as a storyteller, not a wounded child. The memoir, which comprises disparate pieces and fragments woven together into a contradictory, unsettling whole, is what Allison produces now that she has mastered her own story.