My grandfather liked to cut his own Christmas tree and did for as long as he could. He would start looking a month or so in advance, scouting the woods for that perfect shape and when the time came would go out with an axe and bring it back to the house still smelling of the December damp and chill. 

It is much easier to imagine Christmas and all the traditions like cutting a tree up north where nature tosses in snow and blustery skies to make everyone’s cheeks rosy like the mythical Santa. In the south, in Florida, it’s a little harder to get that same snowman-winter wonderland feeling going. But we have our ways and if this is how you have always known Christmas then this is how Christmas ought to be.

Some years the temperature drops and it’s downright chilly but that never lasts more than a day or so. The chill itself felt like a gift savored but soon gone like a Popsicle in summer.

The tree was an important part of the ritual, building up to people gathering to eat too much turkey, tearing into presents and just being happy to be together. When the tree arrived Granny got out the boxes of decorations. There were long strands of silver tinsel that we put on the tree strand by strand (and after Christmas took off the same way and carefully laid out flat for the next year). Not like now where you see trees with all their tinsel still in place, on the curb awaiting trash pickup.

There were regular lights the size of the bulbs in today’s nightlights and a cherished string of bubble lights that we nursed along for many years. I don’t remember many individual ornaments but we had a few. It was really the warm glow that the lights threw around the room that I recall best.

We had a set of white reindeer and of course I painted one of their noses red with nail polish. I seem to recall a little sled, too.

Under the tree was a white skirt and before long it was nearly covered by mysterious wrapped gifts. My grandmother, who was the most upright and well behaved person otherwise would creep around the tree when she thought no one was looking and find each of her presents. She would handle them and bounce them up and down to get their weight and find out if they rattled. She would run her fingertips over the contours and try to figure what it was. My mother says that Granny would even unwrap and rewrap if she could get away with it and was not above poking around in the closets for gifts not yet wrapped.

Poppa passed away in 1981 and Granny’s last Christmas in 1983 was spent in a hospital in Gainesville after she had been diagnosed with stomach cancer and would only last two weeks. We all came, her two daughters and their families, and took turns staying with her. For Christmas I had gotten her a new cane with an ornate brass handle bought before I knew she would not walk again. She unwrapped it and turned it over in her tired hands and said how pretty it was. She opened all her gifts lying in her hospital bed and exclaimed over them as if they were treasures but it tired her out and she soon slept.

On New Year’s Eve around 6 in the afternoon while my mother and sister were out to grab a bite to eat she closed her eyes a final time and went home.

The natural tree went away and was replaced by the silver one that my mom later kept in a box in the closet. We still gathered and decorated and plotted how to surprise each other and held hands while saying grace over turkey and dressing. We regained our sense of joy but it will always be tempered by the knowledge of those goodbyes.

Many years after the cottonmouth in the creek incident that happened when I was a kid I had another run in with one. I had been living up north and returned to Florida for the winter and was staying in Gainesville.

I had a leather shop on Cape Cod and decided to open one for a few months in Gainesville figuring I could make some cash with all those college students.  Well, I broke all three rules of “location, location, location,” and rented a space in a little strip mall on out beyond the car places off Main Street.

The place was too big so I put up an 8-foot wall down the middle and rented the other side to an Asian grocery. To get my license I had to be inspected and the town told me I couldn’t build a wall without a building permit but I assured them I had in fact built the wall despite the lack of permit and the Japanese folks were quite happy over on their side. After some head scratching they gave me a permit for a temporary wall with the promise that it would be removed when I left in six months and the Japanese people took over the whole space.

Speaking of permits, because I had leather dye I also had to have a metal fireproof cabinet to keep it in. Since I had already built a wooden cabinet I just went to a local newspaper and got some of their old metal printing  sheets (pages in pre-computer newspaper days were printed from thin metal plates and rollers) and wrapped them around the cabinet. More head scratching and I got my permit for that, too.

I did not make much money, doubt if I covered the rent but I did have fun.

While I was in Gainesville that winter I rented a funky doublewide sitting on a couple of acres north of town about a mile off of 441. There was a creek running through part of the lot and plenty of woods. Apparently the previous renter must have been in the pot business because I found a bunch of old aquariums out in the woods, some with a few small pot plants still growing in them.

One day when I was out walking I saw a really big cottonmouth down in the creek trying to eat a good-sized dead catfish. The catfish was stiff and its side fins with nasty spines in them were sticking straight out. The snake would start with the tail of the fish and work his way up to those spines but he could not get them in his mouth. So he’d work back down off the fish and then angle around and start from the head. No luck.

That’s where I left him, chewing on the dead catfish, but I got to thinking he was pretty big and close to the trailer and my dog liked to explore. So I called Fish and Wildlife and they sent a very nice guy out who caught the snake and was going to turn him loose further away from people. The guy warned me that moccasins are very territorial when they have babies and are likely to be aggressive in ways other snakes are not.

Shortly after he left I went back to the creek and unbelievably there was another one, even bigger than the first. I called the Fish and Wildlife guy back and he came over for the second snake. He took his pole with a looped rope on the end and went down in the creek bed and nabbed this one too. The snake was a good five feet, maybe a little more and fat, as big around as his forearm.

“This is one hellacious cottonmouth,” the guy said as he dropped the moccasin into a container in the back of his official pick up. “Call me if you find anymore,” he said as he bounced down my heavily rutted sand driveway.

Luckily I saw no more cottonmouths and before long the winter ended and I headed back north missing Gainesville and sand roads and shadowy lives lived on the edge of town even before the city limit sign disappeared in my rearview mirror.

I love Christmas. I like getting and giving presents in equal measure and remember how I would save pennies from my allowance in the ‘50s for months so I could go shopping for Christmas presents.

My mom always gave me a few bucks, maybe as much as five, so I was pretty well set those days. The dime store was always the first choice since it had so many inexpensive things to pick from. Granny got a scarf and she would wear it to church or prayer meeting. Poppa got a pipe, some snuff or some tobacco in a can. Momma got classy rhinestone jewelry and poor Daddy got stuck with socks or on very good years, a new shirt.

There was the occasional bottle of Evening in Paris or Jergens Lotion for the gals and Old Spice or Aqua Velva for the guys stuck under the tree and little delicate figurines that took their place on shelves on Christmas morning. 

As I got older I got better about shopping in odd places for gifts. I would go to the Tackle Box and look for fishing things for Daddy and Poppa and would venture into those nice jewelry stores downtown where one could still get something small but special just a few bucks. Those clerks were very nice to me, a young skinny girl clutching a couple of dollars and looking for the perfect present and they never failed to treat me nicely and let me look at all kinds of things I could not afford.

As a teen I discovered the stationary store and gifts expanded into little notebooks, boxes of writing paper and thank you cards and fancy pens that no one really had any use for or wanted except maybe me.

And one year when I was very young I took one of Poppa’s snuff cans, washed it out and painted it Chinese Red. I can still remember going over to the Commissary in Gulf Hammock and into the far corner where paint and hardware were stocked and picking out that tiny can of Chinese Red enamel paint. I slaved over the can so there was not one brush stroke on it. On Christmas morning you would have thought I’d given him a new car the way he fussed over that red can.

I don’t know what he finally did with it but it was around for years.

Under the tree for me were guns and holsters and sets of plastic cowboys and Indians. One year, the year I had polio and still managed to pass the second grade, I got a real bicycle. And amazingly Santa found us no matter where we went, once even tracking us down in a little trailer in the desert as we trekked from Florida to California for a brief try at life on the other coast.

But the most important thing I got from all that giving and receiving was the lesson about how good it is to show appreciation for what people do for you not because of the thing they give you or its value but because they cared enough to try to make you happy. 

That’s what we all did as a family, over and over, year after year, try to make each other happy. And mostly, we did. 

The creek, where I shot the moccasin and fished on long hot afternoons, had a few surprises. One was finding tiny flounders. They were anywhere from half an inch to an inch and a half long and really hard to catch. They changed color from pale yellow like the sand seen through the tannin-shaded water to dark brown over by the leaves in the edge. Or, they burrowed under the sand and just disappeared.

Recently I was doing some research trying to find out if being in freshwater is a phase of the saltwater flounder’s life cycle like salmon going up the rivers to spawn but it doesn’t seem to be. They are Trinectes maculates but commonly called hogchokers in the online chat rooms about freshwater fish and no one seems to know much about them. Apparently they are not really flounder but are in the sole family and live their lives in brackish water as far north as the Hudson River in New York. They can also be found many miles up the Mississippi and in most of the Florida rivers leading to the sea.

Back then I didn’t think too much about it, I just liked to catch all kinds of little fish with a dipper or a small scoop net. Sometimes I caught them with my hands. I caught minnows and I caught baby fish that would grow up to be catfish, trout or bass. And naturally I caught the little flounders too.

My grandmother let me take her big blue enameled turkey pan and make an aquarium that I kept on the back porch. I got creek sand and washed it until it was clean and then got a couple of water plants and some rocks from the railroad bed so the little fish would have places to hide. I hauled water from the creek and set it up. Then I caught the fish and put them in.

Now of course I did not have a fancy aerator so I had to add fresh water every day or they would have nothing to breathe. And the water went bad and got to growing algae and stinky things in a couple of days so twice a week I had to catch the fish and put them in a glass while I took everything out and washed it. That meant washing the sand, the rocks, the pan and even the plants. Then it all had to be put back in and the fish carefully added back.

They did hide in the little cave I made for them out of rocks and I could watch them for hours swimming around and coming to the surface where they made little gulping moves.

I don’t remember for sure what I fed them. Maybe crumbs or maybe I actually got some fish food at the store.

At any rate they lived and when summer vacation was over I took them back to the creek and turned them loose. Years later I may have caught them as grown fish and even eaten them, who knows.

Sometimes in the morning, before the sun is up, it’s nice to walk outside and see whose lights are on. Nobody’s music is playing. Those who are up are the early risers not the late go-to-bedders. Maybe a quietly playing TV sheds blue light across the bottom of a curtain but mostly what you see in windows is that warm incandescent yellow. It’s the color campfires throw on faces as you walk back up the darkened trail from the lake and approach it through the trees.

The air outside is blue until the sun steps out and a few clouds begin to shift from inky to pale gray and then are suddenly doused in an almost hot pink glow. Trees are silhouettes and slowly reveal their leaves as the light picks up.

One by one, in no particular order, the streetlights click off and each glows like an ember for about a minute before winking out for the day.

On my quiet side street not far from Sunrise Blvd. people are walking dogs. One guy has an old dog and a young dog. The old dog, a wiry haired golden tan mutt, trails behind and the young dog, a black pit bull mix, pulls ahead, ready for what’s around the next corner. The guy stumbles along in the middle caught between weariness and anticipation.

Another guy has a young dog with one of those fancy new leashes that runs around the dog’s nose. The man seems intent on keeping the dog in the proper dog walking position and he does. The dog would like to wander but he doesn’t.

Bridget, who lives across the street, has had over the years a continual supply of identical (to me) dachshunds and the occasional terrier. The doxies are generally mean natured and will nip you given the chance. They always bark. When she walks the current batch of dogs the terrier, a female Jack, tags along off leash and one of Bridget’s cats has decided to do the morning dog walk and follows about 15 feet behind.

Then there are the two girls with the three chihuahuas. They take turns walking the dogs that are always perky and bouncy and as happy to see this well-trod block as if it were a paradise just revealed for the first time.

Down the way is a woman with a big Doberman and a little lap dog. The woman lives in the new fancy townhouses. The dogs are well-behaved.

Sometimes I sit on the steps with coffee and watch the changing light and dog parade. Sometimes I go out to the street and lean on the car and look off toward the sunrise.

Everyday is a new beginning.

Riding the Woods with Poppa

One of my special treats when I would visit my grandparents in Gulf Hammock back in the ‘50s is that my grandfather would take me to work with him once in the while. He worked for Pat & Mac (Patterson McInnis Lumber Company) out in the woods. He had a company jeep, probably a WWII surplus vehicle with a canvas top and hard seats.

Some days he would drive the firebreaks and make sure they didn’t need to get plowed again. Other days he’d drive through the piney woods and mark trees to be slashed for turpentine. He was always watching out for fire and keeping an eye on men who were camping so they could hunt or fish in the woods.

He took lunch in one of those domed-top metal lunchboxes with a thermos in the top and a sandwich and a sweet in the bottom. He always kept a fishing rod and tackle box in the back of the jeep because you just never know when the perfect little fishing hole will appear.

The woods were honeycombed with little creeks, all trying to find their way to the Waccasassa River or the Gulf of Mexico like hungry dogs scrambling to get scraps thrown out the back door. Mostly they were shallow and clear as glass, fed by springs out in the swamp. But there were places where they deepened up into tannic-brown pools with plenty of lily pads where a fish could hide on a hot day.

Mostly he drove and looked and paid attention to everything he saw in nature. He could track and recognize all kinds of signs that most people would never see.

So, a day in the woods with him was special. It meant getting up well before dawn. Granny was up before either of us, getting the woodstove hot, making coffee and cooking grits and eggs for our breakfast. She would have packed our lunch too, usually sandwiches or maybe a piece of fried chicken left over from supper the night before.

By the time we got in the jeep there were tinges of red in the sky lining the bottom of clouds or on cloudless mornings, just making a smudge across the horizon.

We started out with headlights on and bumped our way out of town and eased onto a sand road you could have missed if you didn’t know it was there. By the time the sun was up good we were deep in the woods.

Sometimes he’d sing a bit, usually church hymns or old time favorites. He liked to tell old-fashioned jokes that were usually plays on words. They were the kind you told when you were a kid and then hit the other kid in the ribs with your elbow and asked, “Get it? Did you get it?”

One of my favorite jokes was old wood eye. There was this boy and he had lost an eye down at the mill. Someone carved him a nice wooden eye and he wore it all the time but he was very sensitive and hated when anyone made notice of it. There was a gal in town who had lost most of her hair through some unfortunate way that no one was very clear about. She had a wig that she wore but it was not very good and tended to slide to one side if she bounced around much. Everyone knew about her wig. They both turned up at the Friday dance and he watched her a long time before he got up the nerve to ask her to dance. He took a deep breath, crossed the floor and asked, “Would you like to dance?” She enthusiastically replied, “Would I?” Shocked, he immediately replied, “Baldy, baldy, baldy!” and never went to another dance again.

Poppa seemed simple in his ways and yet he knew so many things. He could plant anything and get it to grow. He built two houses that I know of from scratch and there may have been others. He could get home from work and walk down to the creek with his fishing rod and be home in less than an hour with enough fish to feed everybody. He could hunt with precision. He probably enjoyed it but I don’t believe he ever hunted just for the fun of killing something alone, he hunted to put meat on the table.

I remember you always had to be careful when eating squirrel. He hunted those with buckshot and no matter how well you cleaned them there was likely to be a couple of shot in there somewhere waiting to surprise you when you bit down hard.

He gave his work its full due and at the end of his workday he gave his family and his home all his attention. He was never too tired to take a walk with you and he did not miss church on Sunday. 

But the arrival of those malls was a turning point and most of America has gone through it. First a town is tired of being old-fashioned and gives up its center to become modern and at the same time everybody wants to move to a new concrete block house in a new subdivision far away from the tired wood frame houses closer to downtown. Then later you realize you feel lost and disconnected and you hope Disney or someone will build one of those old-fashioned town replicas near you so you can move in and feel at home again. Or maybe you stayed put and got lucky and are still living in one of those downtown homes near the Duck Pond that have all been redone by now.

In the years since I grew up Gainesville has embraced its historic buildings and many are restored and back in use including old houses and businesses. There’s been a lot of repurposing — car dealer to dance club, post office to theater, movie house to concert hall, restaurant to offices — and some of it has been pretty good. People love Gainesville and compared to some Florida towns it remains a really good place to live. 

Newnan’s Lake still beckons from right outside of town though it has a fancy parking lot and boat ramp where you are not likely to get stuck in the mud trying to put your boat in. Cross Creek and the memory of Miz Rawlings is still just down the road and so is antique-laden Micanopy out between Gaineville and Ocala. The Devil’s Millhopper is still there but now it’s a state park and you can’t scramble down the side of that deep sinkhole and explore the little creek on the bottom or pull your car in late at night for some closed-eyed heavy breathing and kissing. Now there’s a raised walkway that you must not leave it. 

Maybe it’s for the best that the juke joints are gone along with the late night café down the street from my first apartment that sold chicken sandwiches that had whole pieces of fried chicken, bones and all covered with a slather of mayo and some lettuce and tomato. I don’t think the BBQ place just off 13th is still there with its challenge that if you could eat its hottest sauce, you could eat for free. 

Oh but sometimes at night there are ghosts in the trees along the dark narrow roads leading in and out of town. Roll down your car window and you can almost hear singing in the distance or the sound of laughter soft and far away mixed in with the other night sounds.

Joni Mitchell nailed it, “Don’t it only seem to show that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. Paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

(All photos this page courtesy of Florida Archives.)

Every kid should have a dog. I had Princess.

She was half Chihuahua and half cocker spaniel and was born with a naturally cropped tail and a less than sweet demeanor. Of course that may have been because of how I tortured her believing she enjoyed our play as much as I did.

Princess was short-haired and black with floppy ears and a white diamond on her chest. She must have been fixed or my parents must have kept a good eye on her because she never had puppies. But boy did she want them.

At one point I was given a little mechanical dog for my birthday. It was brown and white and appeared to be lying down. It had two wheels underneath the hind legs and a wire coming out the back of its collar like a leash except it led to a control box. Press the button and the little dog would zip across the floor yipping madly and at a certain point would stop and then stand up on its hind legs, front paws waving in the air for a few seconds before falling back to the floor to begin rolling around again.

I liked the little mechanical dog but Princess evidently liked it even better. One day I couldn’t find it and searched everywhere. My mother eventually located it in the back of a closet. Princess had made a nest out of towels she dragged out of the laundry basket and had taken the toy in with her. She was acting like it was her puppy and licked it until it was completely soaking wet. (It’s fur was never quite the same.) She tried to make it nurse but didn’t have any luck.

After that I had to be sure the mechanical dog was in my toy box or up high or Princess would find it and take it away.

Princess could talk. She said three things though honestly they all sounded fairly similar. She said “hamburger,” “grandmother” and “I love you.” She had a place at dinner where she sat up on her little hindquarters on a chair with her paws on the edge of table. You could put anything down in front of her and until you said okay, she would not go near it.

Sometimes I’d put a tasty bit of chicken or pork chop in front of her and get her to say all her words before I gave her the okay. I don’t think she minded.

What she did mind was being used as a horse or worse, a calf.

I had a lot of plastic cowboys and horses and liked to strap one of the saddles on her. She was too wide in the beam for any of the cowboys to fit but I had a couple of soft dolls (like Jimmy and James, the rock and roll stars I made clothes for) that I could tie on. That was annoying to her but not nearly as annoying as when I pretended to be riding a horse and ran up behind her, threw a lasso over her head, jumped down off my “horse,” and grabbed her front and back leg on the opposite side of me to flip her over on her back. Then I quickly tied three of her legs together and threw both of my hands in the air to signal I was done just like the calf ropers do at the rodeo.

I’m pretty sure that’s why she finally bit me though I have to say at the time I cried because my feelings were hurt, not because of the small amount of blood that was shed.

Princess finally succumbed to a chicken bone that she snuck out of the garbage. 

This morning the rain is falling hard and reminds me of weekends when I was a kid and the skies would seemingly open and stay that way. In Florida the raindrops are big and when they hit you hear them. They sound like a drum when they pelt the thick green leaves of the plants and when I was young, the sound of rain on the metal roof was an unremitting din. In fact you could judge, moment-to-moment, what the skies were doing even from deep inside the house by the rising and falling level of sound. There was an element of speed too as hundreds of falling drops turned into thousands and then tens of thousands pounding down in a few seconds.

And though Florida is a big sand pile on top of porous limestone sometimes the water falls too fast to soak up and instantly every low spot in roads, in ditches, in yards becomes pools, ponds, mini lakes, creeks. If there is somewhere lower to go, the water rushes away in its new streambed. If not, it sits, making an unlikely pond with grass showing through on the bottom.

If the water stands for a few days there are suddenly minnows and tadpoles in every roadside ditch though none are connected to streams or lakes where these little fish could have been before the rains.

If you run outside right after the rain the puddles are cold in stark contrast to the brooding heat of the day. But the ground is so constantly heated by the sun that in minutes the water is warm.

On days with quick thunderstorms popping up, which is exactly what they do — pop up out of clouds that suddenly come building from the horizon, turn black, dump rain and sweep by like a car speeding to an important destination somewhere else, you might wait the rain out. Standing on the porch one foot tucked up behind the other knee, you might look out gauging when it would pass and when it did be okay to run down the stairs into the yard splashing water all the way to the street as you headed for a friends house, or just a romp in the woods.

If the rain settled down, like that speeding car had got a flat and was stuck waiting for the guy at the gas station to get around to showing up, it would be time to hunker down and find some inside worlds to live in.

I liked to take the rocking chairs on the porch at my grandparent's house in Gulf Hammock and lay them on their sides to make a three-sided box and then cover them with sheets that granny let me use for my “fort.” I could play there for hours while the rain droned on outside. Or I might turn the porch into a boat and be making my way slowly down the Amazon. Then, when the rain would stop I’d put on my flippers and mask and walk down the dive ramp (front porch steps) into the river where I would look for treasure while trying to avoid the piranha that were everywhere.

Swimming was a little tricky since the real water was only about two inches deep. But, if I was careful I could walk across the yard wearing the flippers without falling. I’d bend at the waist parallel with the ground and appear to pull myself along with long strokes of my arms while I turned my head side to side looking for the hidden treasure.

I could make a sound exactly like a scuba expelling air and I did. I can still make that sound and sometimes do just for fun.

Of course I had a knife to defend myself with and sometimes a spear gun made from a sharpened palmetto frond. And if I didn’t feel like diving I’d just fish from the deck of the “boat,” casting lures into the yard in hopes of snagging anything that I could pretend was a fish.

I fought some pretty big fish from that porch and in retrospect am surprised my grandfather never minded that I used his rod and nice lures to hook limbs and pieces of wood to drag across the yard.

I guess he believed I might catch a dream and of course, he was right. 

Behind Granny and Poppa’s house in Gulf Hammock was a path that ran between the garden and the edge of the swamp. At its end was a little creek, crystal clear with a sand bottom in the middle and deep muck by the edge. You might step in and feel fine white sand ease up between your toes or you might step in and sink slowly down up to your knees. It was hard to get out of and there was known to be quicksand around so there was always that scary part of wondering if you would stop sinking.

I remember reading comic books about people getting stuck in quicksand and slowly being pulled down until finally all that was left was one hand waving feebly over the surface. I read once that if you acted quickly you could throw yourself prone and very slowly “swim” across the quicksand to firmer ground. Probably not but I was prepared to try it.

Anyway, back to the creek.  Another one of my chores was to take one or two big enamel buckets down to the creek to get washing water. I had to walk to the end of the two-plank boardwalk out to mid creek and dip in the buckets to fill them then totter back to the house. They were heavy.

That was a good place to fish too.  Dig up some worms and rig up a cane pole with a bobber and a little hook. Stand on the end of the boardwalk and lightly swing the line upstream. Let it drift down and around the boardwalk. Try to maneuver it up close to some lily pads. Things waited under the lily pads. Hopefully a fish but could be a snake or even a gator.

One day I was getting water and when I got to the creek there was a huge cottonmouth moccasin. I put the buckets down and backed up a ways and then turned and tore ass for the house. I slammed open the back screen door coming in and started yelling, where’s the shotgun, where’s the shotgun? Granny said in the bedroom and asked why. I ran in there and she followed me wiping her hands on her apron. I grabbed the 410 and ran back out the door.

“There is a big cottonmouth,” I yelled over my shoulder.

When I got back to the creek I started to creep toe to heel just like the Indians did so as not to make a sound. I edged out to the boardwalk and he was still there, fat and dull black in the light dancing off the water. As I came closer he felt something and started to slither off. By then Granny had caught up with me and took the gun. Before he could swim away she threw the gun up to her shoulder and fired, cutting him nearly in half.

The current caught him and took him on down into the darkness of the swamp. Granny lowered the gun. I filled the buckets and we walked back to the house together.

For all of my life the way I have remembered this story is that I shot the moccasin before my grandmother caught up with me. I swear I have a clear physical memory of throwing the gun up to my shoulder and shooting before it was seated properly which caused it to give me quite a big recoil that hurt for days.

My mother said no, it was my grandmother who pulled the trigger but I thought she was wrong. Several months ago I was visiting with a younger cousin who out of the blue said, “Remember when we were visiting Granny and Poppa and you found that moccasin and Granny shot it?”

Just like that, a vivid lifetime memory declared untrue. It sure makes me wonder about the veracity of other things I remember but it does not make me question the emotional truth they have in my heart.

Dorothy Allison who wrote Bastard Out of Carolina once said in an interview with Ellise Fuchs for PopMatters, “People want biography. People want memoir. They want you to tell them that the story you’re telling them is true. The thing I’m telling you is true but it did not always happen to me. It is absolutely true to my experience.”