But it wasn’t until I was in my 30s that one of Dolly’s stories perfectly matched my own. I had a devastating pregnancy loss, which was, I knew, my last chance to have a baby. One day, I turned on college radio to drown out the silence. Dolly’s 1968 song “The Bridge” was playing. It wasn’t the first time I heard it. It was the first time I understood the young girl in it, pregnant, abandoned, contemplating suicide to end the pain. The juxtaposition of that pain and Dolly’s high, lonesome voice broke me wide open. I cried for the first time for everything I would not have. When I was done crying, I was the person I would be after loss.

For all her sparkle, Dolly was a simple girl. She wrote simple lyrics, simple melodies, told simple stories about simple human experiences. Her lyrics were simple because the living in Appalachia can be so hard. They were often radical for the same reason. Lines like “They just use your mind, and they never give you credit. / It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it,” from her smash hit “9 to 5” are true to the working-class politics of folk music but tell a story through women instead of men. Critics have always struggled to appreciate that kind of poetry. They make exceptions for Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen. Brevity is wit when men do it. When women do it, we’re supposed to think of it as luck. But for Dolly, it wasn’t luck; it was simply the truest expression of the homeland she never, not once, not even after she became a millionaire, spurned.

She knew what I know: Appalachia’s food, its literature and its music are universal. That’s why anywhere in the world where people have been pushed from their homeland or trapped in its cycle of exploitation, you will find a Dolly Parton fan.

I think I knew that the first time I stood too close to the television, at 9 years old, transfixed by the big-haired blonde singing “Two Doors Down.” The song wasn’t about me, wasn’t about my life, about my people. But good writing doesn’t have to imagine everyone. It only has to imagine the truest thing about all of us, that exists in each of us.

That is what made the girl from the holler make sense to me even though the world (and my mother) thought she shouldn’t. Before Dolly was a saint, when she was still just a popular twangy pop star in a wig, I saw something in the way she took up space that called to me, an ambitious girl the world did not expect much from but who knew — just knew — that she was a writer.