How Dolly Parton's music, and a trip to Dollywood, helped one writer survive trauma

To the list of reasons we love Dolly Parton — her singing, her songwriting, her acting, her financial contribution to the COVID-19 vaccine, her wisecracks, her status as the country's No. 1 advocate for literacy — we can add, "She helps people heal."

Anyway, she helped New York-based poet Lynn Melnick, whose "I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive" takes its title from a lyric in Parton's song "The Grass Is Blue." "Way to Survive" also spells out the theme of the memoir/essay collection/mash note, in which each of 21 chapters takes as its title a Parton song, including "I Will Always Love You" and "Here You Come Again" as well as deep cuts such as "Blue Smoke."

It's an ingenious way into the story of a woman who, despite being an award-winning poet, is unfamiliar to most readers. Melnick is an engaging, frequently hilarious main character in her own life, which has included more than its share of the sort of tragedy Parton often chronicled in the darker, early years of her songwriting: Melnick was raped when she was a child, sent to rehab as an adolescent and assaulted by an adult boyfriend she repeatedly refers to as "the man who threw a bookcase on me."

That she has survived — and thrived — is the story. Melnick doesn't pretend to know how to make it through trauma, and writes with naked pain about watching her adolescent daughter struggle with identity and bullying. But she knows one thing: The woman who hit No. 1 with "9 to 5" was always there for her, even though they've never met (the closest Melnick came was a family trip to Parton's Dollywood amusement park).

Melnick weaves in Parton's story, quoting from her autobiography and thousands of interviews, as well as analyzing her lyrics. This stuff is a treasure for Parton fans, who may find themselves — like me — going down rabbit holes to find, for instance, a video Melnick cites in which Parton, on vacation in Ireland, is thrust on stage to sing her tear-jerking "Coat of Many Colors" or another from a television show in which Jane Fonda cries as she describes how beloved her friend is.

Melnick acknowledges being disappointed in Parton — because it wasn't until very recently that she acknowledged she is a feminist, because she's so critical of her own body, because she avoids politics — but Melnick interrogates each of those disappointments, often ending up at a place where she must accept that Parton is a complicated person who has made herself almost universally beloved.

On almost every page of "Way to Survive," Melnick cites something inspiring or hilarious about Parton, often both at the same time. Melnick is less successful when she tries to draw parallels between her own life and Parton's — there are some, but the same goes for any two humans. Nonetheless, her book is a testament to the power of storytelling and to the help we sometimes get from people who don't even know we needed them.

I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive

By: Lynn Melnick.

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau, 269 pages, $18.