WHAT WOULD DOLLY DO?: HOW TO BE A DIAMOND IN A RHINESTONE WORLD

Q&A WITH AUTHOR LAUREN MARINO

By Kathy Murphy, founder of The Pulpwood Queens

What inspired you to write about Dolly Parton? Why did you choose her to write a book about?

Where do I start? I grew up in Cincinnati and we would travel through Kentucky and Tennessee, staying in Gatlinburg, on our way to visit family in Virginia and I listened to a lot of country music. I remember obsessively running off to the Ohio State Fair to see her play when I was a kid. Then, cut to a few decades later when I was writing my very first book I found myself in her former New York City apartment that she shared with her long time manager, Sandy Gallin. It was a stunning all white penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue with a panoramic view of Central Park and a white lacquered baby grand piano in the front room and I thought to myself, there is a lot more to this woman than she lets on. Then several years later, I was going through a difficult divorce, raising two little kids and a risky career pivot and Dolly started showing up everywhere I went –in the form of her music or her spirit or in her interviews. I felt compelled to dive deeper into her life and found there was a lot more there than I ever realized and, I think, than most people realize. She became a role model to me, she helped me get through a rough time. There’s so much to say about how inspiring she is –it’s all in the book.

What type of research did you do in order to write it?

I read every imaginable thing I could find about her, including her two autobiographies, a scrapbook she did in the 1970s, biographies by other people and read tons of interviews that she did over the course of her career –there are a couple from Rolling Stone that are amazing. I read the books by her siblings, her family cookbooks, and watched countless TV interviews with her from the past five decades–in the Barbara Walters interview from 1977 she is almost prophetic in the vision she had for her career. I watched her movies, like A Coat of Many Colors, which is based on her own life. I visited her home town of Pigeon Forge and went to Dollywood and the Chasing Rainbows museum and talked to a lot of the locals about her and gained a lot of insight into what she has done for the economy of her home state. I went down the rabbit hole of watching her performance videos over the years, from her early days on the Porter Waggoner show to duets with Kenny Rogers, to getting a crowd of 100,000 singing along with her at Gatlinburg.

What are your favorite DP songs?

There are so many and it’s tough to pin down just a few. “Little Sparrow” for certain. The lyrics are so simple but the feeling it invokes never gets old for me. Of course, “Jolene”, which so many people have covered from the White Stripes to Pentatonix, “My Tennessee Mountain Home”, “Love is Like a Butterfly” and “Joshua” always get me singing along. And I love her fun, sexy songs like “Two Doors Down” and “Why’d You Come in Here Lookin Like That.”

What are some interesting things about Dolly that the reader may not know about her?

She was the fourth of twelve children and grew up in a two room cabin with no electricity or running water and by the time she was a teenager she was making enough money singing on the radio to support her entire family.

She was bullied in high school and stuck it out, becoming the first member of her family to graduate. She then started a scholarship fund that included a buddy system to keep kids in school and to help them through hardships, like bullying, that might make them drop out.

She is a self taught musician who doesn’t read music and plays eight instruments.

She has a catalogue of over 3000 (some say up to 6000) songs that she wrote. Many people just know her from 9-5 but don’t realize the depth and breadth of her songwriting.

She has been married to the same man for over 50 years and she met him outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat her first day in Nashville at age 18.

That she is a very successful television producer and was on of the original producers of the wildly popular Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

What was the most surprising thing you found out about her?

That she is one of the biggest literacy advocates in the world and what she is most proud of is being known by children as “The Book Lady.” She founded the Imagination Library in 1995 in her hometown and has now given away well over 100 million books to children. I’m going to say that again: She Has Given Away. Over 100 Million. Free Books. To children.

Parton’s father never learned to read or write, but she says he was the smartest man she ever knew. She created the organization as a way to honor him.

And she is a huge reader herself. She knows that reading can change your life and that it's a way to educate and enrich yourself.

She has a great line, “reading a great book is like a new lover. You can’t wait to get back to it.

What advice or words of wisdom do you have for fellow writers?

That’s a tough one! Keep your head in the clouds but your nose to the grindstone. Be honest and accept that it's a vulnerable endeavor and allow yourself to be vulnerable –otherwise your writing will sound contrived or inauthentic.

Figure out your process –which usually means sitting down every day for a few hours and not getting discouraged. Some days you will produce a lot and be in a state of flow and other days nothing good is going to come out. But you have to do the work. Figure out your own process and sit down every day and just put words on paper. I always start with research, jotting down notes and ideas and then I come up with a master outline which I look at as a sort of road map and from there I know where to go.

Plan down time with yourself to read other books and to experience life and keep notes. Realize that if you want to make money from your writing you’re going to have to hustle and go out there and sell it. As they say in the music biz, you have to work the record. In the book biz you have to go out there and work the book.

What challenges did you have in writing your book?

Writing is a solitary endeavor and there are moments of self-doubt, even after the book has been edited and accepted by the publisher. There is always that insecurity that what you have to say isn’t important or won’t be appreciated by people. In those moments I would re-read Dolly’s stories of overcoming adversity or words of wisdom, like “let your determination be stronger than your fear”.

Lastly, will you have more projects in the future?  

After taking a few years to dedicate my time to writing I have gone back to being a book editor and am working with other writers to help them get their books out into the world. I also have a new book coming out this September called Bookish Broads: Women Who Wrote Themselves into History about female writers and the obstacles they’ve had to overcome. I profile around 65 women starting with Lady Murasaki who wrote Tale of the Genji in 10th Century Japan and invented the novel and go all the way up to the present day. Reading about these women is like reading a history of the female experience.