Content Warning: This Themes section includes references to the sexual assault of children and abuse.

Allison explicitly frames her work as a response to negative representations of white, working-class Southerners, especially women. American fiction as celebrated as To Kill a Mockingbird has written white, working-class Southerners into American culture as passive, ugly people who are stuck in the past. Allison’s rich representation of the women in her family offers an alternative vision. The first part of her memoir does much of the work of framing Two or Three Things I Know for Sure as a working-class, feminist critique of Southern myths.

An important part of the memoir’s rhetorical context is the representation of white, Southern womanhood. Within American literature, the notion of the pure, white, delicate Southern woman is central to the myth of the plantation South. In fact, the protection of white women’s purity was a pretext for the use of violence in maintaining the racial and economic order of the South, even after the Civil War.

In contrast to this “moonlight and magnolias” South, the South as it appears in the memoir is a grim one where people like Allison’s mother, sister, and aunt aren’t protected just because they’re white women.