People who miss the point of my work will say, Boy, the women in your family must have been, like, dumb. Audiences have been largely positive and tearful. I get people who are just devastated, especially when I do the sections that are about sexual abuse and the women in my family. People reeeally want to talk after I've done a performance. Every writer builds a cosmology.
Every writer peoples a universe.
My example has always been James Baldwin. I think, yes, he was telling some of the same stories over and over again, but he came at them from a different place every time. At this place along her continuum, Allison still struggles to understand her mother's tacit sanction of her stepfather's abuse. Her sense was that she had committed an enormous crime against her girls. To this day, I don't believe it was her crime or that she needed to be forgiven.