A Novelist and Survivor on the Lasting Effects of Child Abuse

Writer Dorothy Allison. Her bestselling novel "Bastard Out of Carolina," was about a poor South Carolina family's violence and incest, and was largely autobiographical. She says that she doesn't like most abuse literature because it tends to eroticize abuse. Allison has also written a book of short stories called "Trash" and a book of poems called "The Women Who Hate Me." Allison's new novel is "Cavedweller" (A Dutton Book) (Interview by Barbara Bogaev)

In Art and Madness, her memoir of the literary 1950s, writer Anne Roiphe describes going into labor by herself in a snowdrift, unable to waker her sleeping playwright husband. Over the years, she learns her own power, charting her course through feminism and a life in art.

After Hustvedt suffered several unexplainable seizure-like episodes that defied medical diagnoses, she decided to chart her experiences -- and the murky intersection between mind, brain and body -- in a new book, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves.