Skin.

This is my other favorite nonfiction book of the year, and I can't recommend it enough.

Allison, the author of the prize-winning novel Bastard Out of Carolina and the prize-winning short-story collection Trash, revisits many of her earlier themes in this startling collection of essays. She writes beautifully, directly, and powerfully about being a "transgressive lesbian," and about growing up poor--and the stigma attached to both.

"I have never been able to make clear the degree of my fear, the extent to which I feel myself denied; not only that I am queer in a world that hates queers, but that I was born poor into a world that despises the poor," she writes.

In her essay, "A Question of Class," she delves into the hidden psychological wounds that poverty inflicts on people in this country. "The inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow deserved has had dominion over me to such an extent that I have spent my life trying to overcome or deny it," she writes. Poverty was not voluntary, as right-wingers claim; nor was it ennobling, as some left-wingers claim. "The poverty I knew was dreary, deadening, shameful," she says.

So, too, was the incest. She recounts that her stepfather sexually abused her for years. In "Shotgun Strategies," she talks about her first consciousness-raising group, and what a transformative experience it was for her. One of the other women in the group revealed her own experience with physical and sexual abuse. "That was my life she was talking about," Allison writes. "What we discovered talking to each other--and eventually there were four or five others discovering this together--is that we were cut from the same cloth. For all of us, the family had been a prison camp--a normal everyday horror, fully known and hidden."

Allison is driven by the need to uncover the hidden. "The world told us that we were being spanked, not beaten, and that violent contempt for girl children was ordinary, nothing to complain about. The world lied, and we lied, and lying becomes a habit," she writes. "I have promised myself to break the habit of lying, to try to make truth everyday in my life, but it is not simple."

She recounts the corrosive "sex wars" within the lesbian and feminist movement in the 1980s--the clash between the antipornography camp and the pro-sex camp. Allison was among the latter, a founding member of the Lesbian Sex Mafia, "an old-fashioned consciousness-raising group whose whole concern would be the subject of sex. To be sure that we would remain focused on our own outrageousness, we chose our deliberately provocative name and concentrated on attracting members whose primary sexual orientation was s/m, butch/femme, fetish specific, or otherwise politically incorrect."

This openness, and Allison's public championing of the cause, quickly got her into trouble with other feminists. Allison recounts in painful detail how the 1982 Barnard College Conference on Sexuality and its aftermath disrupted her life. Erstwhile colleagues called her an antifeminist and worse. Anonymous phone-callers urged her boss to fire her; friends withdrew; she was expelled from the Lesbian Sex Mafia, and she lost her ability to have sex for a year.

But she recovered, and stuck by her guns.

"Our lives were neither a betrayal of our beliefs nor a collusion with all we had fought to change in this society," she writes. "Sexuality is not a distraction but a vital issue in any political organizing. For me, the struggle came down to an inner demand that I again look at sexual fear from my own perspective, without giving in to the impulse to hide, deny, or wall off desire itself."

Allison does not hide, deny, or wall it off in this collection. True to her faith in openness, she writes explicitly about what turns her on. Like Allen Ginsberg, she is not afraid to let it all hang out and to celebrate "the holy act of sex" in great personal detail.

Allison also celebrates literature. "I have always passionately loved good books--good stories, and beautiful writing, and most of all, books that seemed to me to be intrinsically important, books that told the truth, painful truths sometimes, in a voice that made eloquent the need for human justice," she writes in "Believing in Literature."

Allison's essay on her mother's death, weaved in with the death of her first love, is hearbreaking to read. Entitled "Skin, Where She Touches Me," this piece is a treasure.

Here is a book about sex, about class, but above all, about honesty, freedom, defiance, justice, art, and love. It is a must-read.