When you've hit rock bottom, where do you turn? Drugs? Meditation? God? For Lynn Melnick, the correct answer was Dolly Parton.
Melnick had been through a lot of trauma in her life, and when she'd had enough, she took off for Dollywood, the amusement park in Dolly's native Tennessee. Melnick tells the story of what brought her to that moment in a book with chapters named for Parton songs, I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton.
We get a condensed version of the book and the experiences that led to it, in a chat with the author.