Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 45



“It’s All Wrong, but It’s All Right”

Howard Johnson

Gatlinburg, Tennessee

I love country music autobiographies. Maybe this is obvious by now.

Loretta’s famous Coal Miner’s Daughter, and her awesomely titled follow-up, Still Woman Enough. Dolly’s My Life and Other Unfinished Business. Tammy’s Stand by Your Man.

They all sit next to my bed at home, and I’ve read them in repeated rotation.

They help put me to sleep. Not because they’re boring—they’re not. But because I find them oddly comforting—with the possible exception of Tammy’s, which has fallen out of the rotation and stays on the bottom of the pile. That one makes me sad—but that’s a different essay.

I’ve just finished with Dollywood today in Pigeon Forge, but decided to stay in this area for a night longer. Tomorrow I’m taking a break from the country ladies to stop by Ripley’s Believe It or Not, one of Gatlinburg’s many tourist traps. Supposedly they’ve got Old Sparky there, and that’s a can’t-miss for me. But for tonight, I’m exhausted from the hot sun and manufactured fun of Dollywood. Instead of walking up and down the streets of Gatlinburg with all of the other tourists, I’m holed up in my motel. Huddled in a blanket and eating a couple of éclairs from a brilliant place in town called the Donut Friar, I’m rereading my favorite parts of Still Woman Enough.

Loretta’s books tell some pretty hard stories. The first, Coal Miner’s Daughter, is a rags-to-riches story about her hardscrabble life growing up in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, her marriage at fourteen, her life as a young mother, and her road to stardom. As tough as some of those stories are, her second book tells all of the harsher stories that she kept out of the first—stories that detail the extent of her husband’s alcoholism and violence early in their marriage. And further, this book has much more in it about loss—loss of her son by drowning, loss of her husband, loss of music friends like Conway Twitty and Tammy Wynette.

Maybe comforting will seem an odd word for this material. There is something reassuring, however, about knowing someone is being completely honest with you about her life. There’s no attempt to sound clever or PC, or to play it one way or another, or even a suggestion that the reader should learn something from Loretta’s stories. And it goes without saying that marriages like hers were not unusual in the time and place in which she grew up. But that’s really not the point, from Loretta’s perspective. For Loretta, it’s not history or sociology or sexual politics.

This is what my husband was like. He drank a lot. He cheated on me. He hit me and I hit him back. And I loved him.

It’s disconcerting. But it’s her life. Is she supposed to put it in more palatable terms for the comfort of her readers?

Loretta doesn’t advocate that women enter or endure marriages as she did. She simply explains how it was for her, and doesn’t try to frame it with a lesson or a message. And somewhat disarmingly (to this reader, at least), she never says she wishes it had gone any other way. I don’t fully understand why I find this comforting. Maybe it’s because her autobiographies read like an admission that life is painful and complicated, and that relationships require complex thought and, usually, a fair amount of suffering. Of course I was aware of this before I cracked Loretta’s books. Perhaps this message still feels novel to me, as a child of the eighties. I grew up on health-class role plays and sanitized sitcoms, everything After-School-Specialized, categorized as healthy or unhealthy, easily identifiable as one or the other. The generation that came before us learned all of that for us, so we didn’t need to figure it out for ourselves.

Which is, of course, ridiculous. Some of us will have desires or relationships that fall slightly out of others’ comfort zones. You ultimately decide for yourself what is Okay and Not Okay.

Though less stark and less grim, Dolly’s bubbly memoir carries a similar message for me. Although she does not go into great detail, she implies that she and her husband might have sometimes turned to the affections of others while she was on the road—that they had an open marriage. That was fine by both of them, she explains, as long as it didn’t get in the way of their relationship when she was around, and they respected each other by keeping their dalliances private. She’s so coy about it I suspect there weren’t really any dalliances, but she’s not willing to say one way or another—or apologize one way or another, for that matter. That’s as much as she’s willing to say, and the details are nobody else’s business.

When talking about her weight issues, she says offhand that while she doesn’t advocate making yourself throw up, chewing up your food and spitting it out might not be a bad idea. In her own words:

“ ‘That’s disgusting,’ you say. That may be, but what’s more disgusting? Spitting out food or being a lardass?”

I love it. Where I come from, chewing and spitting out your food as a weight-loss technique would definitely be considered a gateway behavior to disordered eating, a sign of poor body image, and definitely Not Okay.

Dear reader, at this point, you probably think I don’t get out much—at least, much outside my sterile little liberal bubble. And this isn’t the case at all. I get out a fair amount. It’s that I admire these women for the relative purity of their voices. Perhaps they occasionally filter their experiences. But I doubt that either of them, Dolly or Loretta, ever finds herself, before fully settling into an opinion about something, pausing for an almost instinctual second to wonder, But do we agree with this? Is this Okay?

I admire these women for deciding what their own boundaries are, and for being willing to detail them without apology. I’m not about to spit out this delicious éclair or arrange an open marriage or live with a volatile alcoholic. My boundaries will be different from theirs. Still, unless I define them myself, Okay and Not Okay is bullshit.



—Tammyland