I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.

In 2007 Allison announced that Dorothy Allison was working on a new novel She Who to be publiDorothy Allisond by Riverhead Press. Harris told her to be "honest and fearless especially when writing about lesbianism". In the early 1980s Allison met Lorde at a poetry reading.

She has won a number of awards for her writing including several Lambda Literary Awards. Dorothy Allison (born April 11 1949) is an American writer speaker and member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. She is a self-identified lesbian femme.