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THE FIRST TIME I REMEMBER hearing a Dolly Parton song start to finish was in the triage room of a hospital, as I waited to be admitted to a drug rehabilitation program in West Los Angeles. I was fourteen. It
What is the first Dolly Parton song you remember hearing?
My husband, Timothy, who is by nature a problem solver, rescued my mood, quickly darkening in Dolly’s Closet (I had to buy something), by finding a black lace cover-up that I could imagine wearing quite a lot between seasons, with late-night drafts or summer in the city and its overachieving air-conditioning.
When I was first writing the book, I showed my husband Timothy (also a writer) this chapter and he said, I think there needs to be some connecting phrase between "My husband, Timothy," and "rescued my mood." and he thought for a bit, and then added "who is by nature a problem solver" -- which isn't wrong! I kept it in and every time I see it it makes me laugh because he added his own compliment!
Sad bangers, Levesley goes on to say, capture “a very important human sensation: catharsis, the feeling of triumph in the face of adversity.”
Do you have a favorite "sad banger"?
The latter single reached number one on the Christian charts in 2020, making Dolly—at seventy-four—the first artist to have topped the adult contemporary, Christian adult contemporary, Christian airplay, country airplay, dance or mix-show airplay, and Hot 100 charts.
Dolly, now 77, is going to release a rock album in the fall of 2023 -- maybe she'll top yet another chart soon!
Melinda had ties to Alaska and to Bakersfield, California.
I highly recommend Melinda's novel, Homestead. She began writing it when we were at NYPL together.
On the same day (or thereabouts).
I have seen so many articles asserting that Dolly wrote the two songs in the same day, and Dolly herself doesn't dispel this, but elsewhere she admits she can't know for sure. However, they are on the same demo cassette back-to-back, so they were definitely written in a short time frame.
I saw Dolly perform “The Grass Is Blue” live in Forest Hills, Queens, in 2016 and I cried through the whole thing (though, full disclosure, I cried through that whole concert).
This concert was a religious experience for me! Have you been to a concert that you felt changed by? I definitely felt changed after this experience.
In the years since, the program has expanded both nationally and internationally, and in 2018 Dolly was honored at the Library of Congress for having given away one hundred million books.
As of June 2023, this number has doubled to two hundred million books!
I will take this opportunity, however, to say yes to anyone who would like to be the Kenny to my Dolly.
No one has asked me yet, btw.
Linda Ronstadt, who in the 1970s was filling arenas as the biggest female act in rock, remembers that “Emmy called me up and said, ‘Dolly Parton’s at my house [and] you have to come over.’” The three sang the classic country song—first recorded in 1927 by the Carter Family—“Bury Me Beneath the Willow.”
I highly recomment the 2019 documentary, Linda Ronstadt: the Sound of My Voice. Here's the preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDMYAsu5PvI
My grandmother Evelyn Melnick, née Rosenberg, born and raised in the Bronx and living in Queens from 1966 until almost the end of her life, idealized her urban landscape, which would come to be my urban landscape, New York City, which I sure love fiercely.
One of the most special parts of writing and publishing this book is that I got to make my grandmother a character. She would have LOVED being a character in a book!! (My aunt Barbara agrees!)
In 2020, a so-called heartbeat bill, intended to ban abortion once a “fetal heartbeat” can be detected—which is most likely before a woman even knows she’s pregnant—made its way through the Tennessee General Assembly and to the governor’s desk. As I type this, its implementation has been held up in legal challenges by the Center for Reproductive Rights, Planned Parenthood, and the American Civil Liberties Union.
I turned in my final draft of this book in early April of 2022, just weeks before the Supreme Court would overrule and strike down Roe v Wade, so as of writing this note, things are even worse for pregnant people's bodily autonomy than they were when I wrote the book. Hopefully there will come a time soon when the book is out-of-date for positive reasons.
I love those boys so much, there are cat-shaped spaces in my heart now, which, pre-August 2018, I would have never believed.
One thing I wanted to mention (but ultimately edited out for length) was that we adopted our cats only months after Lucie died. She was a huge cat lover, and I have always felt like the universe called for us to honor her by adopting cats of our own. We inherited a few of Lucie's beautiful rugs after she died and every time one of our cats barfs on a rug I think of her and expect that somewhere she is laughing.
That’s the power of the song.
If you want to hear all the versions of this song--and of every song mentioned in the book--I made a playlist called "every song mentioned in my book." Here's the link: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7k1oTqrfspshq6xQfMhiDa?si=31283479bcc24f5b
Now, of course, the song tends to represent all kinds of loves and goodbyes—Elvis Presley apparently sang it to Lisa Marie on the courthouse steps after their divorce was finalized; it’s played at funerals; it’s the song Dolly has long used to close out her television and live shows as a message to her fans—but at the time it seems to have been a weapon in the fight against control and emotional abuse.
Elvis Presley wanted to record "I Will Always Love You" -- and he would have been great; can't you imagine it in his voice? Unfortunately, his manager wanted Dolly to sign over 50% of any future royalties to the song, and Dolly, ever the savvy businesswoman, wasn't about to do that!
I listened and listened to that spell of Stuart Duncan’s fiddle and I thought, maybe art and beauty do get us through.
Last fall I saw Alison Krauss and Robert Plant perform at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens (where I saw Dolly in 2016!) and when they introduced the band I discovered it was Stuart Duncan on fiddle (we were too far back to see faces) and I SCREAMED I was so excited. Icon!
But then, at age seventy-four . . . she didn’t.
I had been thisclose to muting that part of the interview because I was so sure she was gonna do her same old shtick. That was a good lesson for me in how people can surprise you!
In a 2018 essay, poet Samantha Zighelboim writes, “The language of self-denial is the first I ever learned . . . the foundations of my identity.
Samantha Zighelboim wrote an amazing book of poems called The Fat Sonnets, which you should check out!
She’s older now, taller than I am, and doesn’t want to tell me what her favorite Dolly song is these days, though my hunch is that it’s 1977’s “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” a Dolly-penned song about hope and
She's 14 now, and the other day I overheard her listening to "Here You Come Again" on her earbuds!
We’d been trying to collect—since earlier that year back in Brooklyn—sightings of plates from all fifty states.
Five years later and we have yet to spot Hawaii and North Dakota.
The 1982 movie musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, adapted from the 1978 stage musical, is based on the true-life story of sensationalist investigative journalist Marvin Zindler’s 1973 takedown of the Chicken Ranch, a brothel that had operated somewhat openly and without incident since the mid-nineteenth century near La Grange, Texas—located kind of in the center of a Houston–San Antonio–Austin triangle.
One anecdote I love, but which didn't make it into the book, is about how the true-life character of Marvin Zindler is portrayed in the movie. The real life Zindler was Jewish, but the movie never mentions his Jewishness -- it merely tells us that he's from New Jersey and he uses the word "schmuck" a lot, which I guess is close enough...
Find people who see your survival before you can see it yourself.
I just want to take this opportunity to double down on this. Do you have such people in your life? You deserve that.
