Bastard Testimony

This chapter explores the boundaries between fiction and autobiography. It explains that Bastard Out of Carolina, written by Dorothy Allison, demonstrates how incest represents a critical dissonance in psychoanalysis and law. The limit between autobiography and fiction that Bastard straddles revolves around the notion of realness and the evidentiary and narrative limits that stake out the border around the query of what happened. Moreover, veracity remains an issue regardless of the narrative in autobiography or trauma studies due to its inescapable element of fiction in self-representation. If the truth of fiction is preferred to the fact, the authority of both trauma and autobiography that derives from the eyewitness's credibility is thrown into a crisis of legitimacy.