The Genius of Both/And
What Dolly Parton taught us about being too complex to fit into one box
Last week, Tony and I were in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge with my sister and brother-in-law. Dolly Parton’s welcoming face looked out at us from billboards advertising various Dollywood attractions and events. We did not actually go to Dollywood. Theme parks are a bit much for me, even when they are presided over by someone I greatly admire.
Still, it is nearly impossible to spend time in Pigeon Forge without thinking about Dolly. She came up in our conversation as we drove through the area, and we talked about her illustrious career, her philanthropy, and the remarkable fact that none of us could think of anyone who did not respect her. That is quite an accomplishment these days. We are capable of arguing about almost anything. Given enough time, I suspect we could turn a discussion about apple or cherry pie into a bitter ideological dispute.
I don’t generally care for country music, although I liked Dolly’s earlier songs, which were more deeply rooted in Appalachian mountain music and often sounded closer to bluegrass. I do love folk and bluegrass. But my affection for Dolly went far beyond her music. I loved her in movies. Steel Magnolias and 9 to 5 are two of her best, in my opinion. I admired her Imagination Library, her generous support of medical research and other charitable causes, her humor, and the way she could be poking fun at herself while remaining entirely in command of the room.
A week later, she was gone.
Dolly Parton died on August 25 at the age of eighty after a brief battle with cancer according to the news services. Since then, people from nearly every corner of the cultural and political landscape have been remembering her. Perhaps what made her so widely loved was that she never asked us to decide which version of her was the real one. All of them were.
She was sweet and sexy, plainspoken and bedazzled, deeply feminine and strong as a steel trap. She could be self-deprecating without making herself small. She grew up in profound poverty and built a remarkably successful business empire. She made a great deal of money and gave a great deal of it away. She looked completely artificial and somehow felt more authentic than most people we encounter.
Dolly was a both/and person in a world that likes either/or.
We like categories. They give us the comforting illusion that we understand people. A woman can be intelligent or frivolous, feminine or powerful, sexy or respectable, ambitious or kind. Once we have put her into the appropriate box, we become a little testy when she refuses to remain there.
Dolly apparently regarded boxes as useful places to store more glittery stuff.
Her appearance was deliberately exaggerated: enormous hair, long nails, a tiny waist, high heels, sequins, and famously abundant cleavage. She never tried to convince anyone that this was how she naturally emerged from bed in the morning. “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap,” she famously said.
She knew exactly what she was doing.
Dolly’s particular version of femininity was flamboyant, sexy, playful, and wonderfully excessive. Yet I never had the sense that the wigs and rhinestones concealed her. If anything, they revealed something essential about her imagination. This was not a woman who had accidentally wandered into a vat of sequins. She created the image, enjoyed the image, and owned the image.
We often talk about authenticity as though it requires us to be completely natural and unconstructed. But we all create ourselves to some degree. We decide what to wear, what work matters to us, which parts of our stories we will tell, and what we want our lives to stand for. Most of us are simply less sparkly about it. Maybe we would like some more sparkle but are hesitant to try it out.
Her appearance also made it easy to underestimate her. I suspect she noticed this and occasionally found it useful.
She did not have an elite education, but she was brilliant. She wrote thousands of songs, moved successfully from music into film and business, and retained control of her work in an industry not known for protecting young women. When Elvis Presley wanted to record “I Will Always Love You,” his manager demanded a substantial share of the publishing rights. Dolly refused.
She later said she cried because having Elvis sing her song would have been an enormous opportunity. Still, she would not surrender ownership of what she had created. Years later, Whitney Houston’s recording became one of the most successful singles in music history.
Dolly could be gracious without being gullible, generous without making herself available for exploitation, and sweet without being anybody’s fool. Many women spend a good portion of their lives trying to learn that these qualities can coexist.
Her philanthropy had the same combination of heart and practicality. Dolly’s father could not read or write, and in 1995 she established the Imagination Library for children in her home county in East Tennessee. What began locally now sends more than three million free books each month to children from birth to age five in five countries.
I love this about her. She did not simply speak about the importance of literacy in an inspirational video and consider the matter handled. She created an enormous system that places real books, addressed to individual children, directly into their homes every month.
She also donated to medical research, disaster relief, education, and families affected by the East Tennessee wildfires. Her kindness was not decorative. It accomplished things.
Dolly remained deeply rooted in the culture that formed her without allowing herself to be confined by it. She spoke openly about her Christian faith, her family, and her love for her Appalachian home. At the same time, she welcomed people whose lives and identities did not fit comfortably within the more conservative parts of that world. Apparently, she did not believe she had to withhold kindness from one group of people to prove her loyalty to another.
One of the ideas I appreciate in dialectical thinking is that two seemingly opposing things can be true at the same time. I can love someone and be furious with them. I can be grateful for my life and still grieve what I did not receive. I can be strong and need help. I can accept myself and also want to change.
Dolly Parton may have been a walking dialectic.
Either/or thinking is much tidier. It tells us which side is right, which side is wrong, and which parts of ourselves we must eliminate before we can make any sense. Both/and thinking requires us to tolerate complexity, ambiguity, and the inconvenient truth that human beings rarely fit into our carefully labeled containers.
Dolly never became less feminine to prove that she was powerful. She did not hide her intelligence to preserve her sweetness or become hard to protect herself from being underestimated. She made a fortune and gave generously, laughed at herself and commanded respect, remained rooted in the Smoky Mountains and belonged to the world.
Perhaps that is what I admired most. She did not ask permission to contain apparent contradictions. She simply lived them so fully that we began to understand they were never contradictions in the first place.
A woman can be soft and formidable, sensual and respectable, bedazzled and brilliant, ambitious and generous. She can appear artificial and be profoundly real.
Dolly Parton was never one thing. Neither are we.
I was never a Dolly Parton superfan. I did not follow every chapter of her career or know every song. Still, I will miss her presence in the world—her wit, generosity, and the inspiring energy with which she inhabited every part of who she was.
The world feels a little less authentically bedazzled without her in it.
Janet Nash, MSW, LISW-S, Yoga Therapist, CCTP, is a psychotherapist, writer, and founder of Interiority Wellness. Her work explores mental health, generational healing, creativity, nature, and the quiet ways we find our way back to ourselves.
