Dolly Parton, Judy Blume, and me

Or, how I fell in love with two of the greatest women in American history

Just to be clear—I have never actually met Dolly Parton. Do I know her, deep in my soul? I sure do. Islands in the Stream was my top-streamed song this year. Her trio with Emmylou Harris and Linda Rondstadt is, for my money, the best supergroup of all time. (Take that, Traveling Wilburys.) Hang on, let’s pause here for a second to appreciate Dolly, Emmylou, and Linda.

She paid for vaccines, for goddsakes! She has her own theme park! She has a commitment to rhinestones that I admire profoundly. But the actual best thing about Dolly Parton (apart from her songwriting talent) may be the Imagination Library, her thirty-year-old organization that gives away millions of books every year. This year, Dolly and her crew chose Gaga Mistake Day, the picture book I wrote with my mother, as one of the books that she is giving away. 800,000 copies. That is not a typo. Dolly Parton is giving away 800,000 copies of our book. That is more copies than I have sold of any single title before. (The Vacationers is my current top seller, cruising in at about 425,000 copies sold.) The program gives away a book a month to a child for an entire year. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever had the fortune to be a part of, and yes, Dolly, I will always love you.

The other delight of my life at the moment is that last week, I got to hang out with Judy Blume. THE Judy Blume. We’d met once before, via a Zoom plagued with wifi trouble, when All Adults Here came out in 2020. She was so nice to me then, and I wasn’t surprised that when I wrote her a few weeks ago to say that my family was going to be in the Keys, and that we’d love to say hello, she wrote back and gave me a time to show up at her bookstore. Do you all know that Judy Blume and her husband George opened their branch of Books + Books in Key West the same year and my husband and I opened Books Are Magic? It’s true. We are the same, pretty much identical. The day we visited, it was pouring rain, not like a regular passing Florida storm, but a true blue rainy day. Her bookstore was busy, like bookstores often are in the rain, but Judy took time to talk to me and my husband and my kids. It would have been enough! But then she invited us to lunch, where we sat for probably two more hours, still getting wet in the restaurant’s mostly-semi-barely-covered patio. I didn’t care. It could have started to snow and I wouldn’t have moved. She is exactly as generous and quick and funny as you imagine. In this age of rampant book bans, let’s all try to be as good and strong and ferocious as 86 year old Judy blume, okay, everyone?

Look at me clutching for dear life!

Mama Hug is out tomorrow. You can preorder/order here, from Books Are Magic, and if you’re in NYC, come to 122 Montague Street on Saturday at 11am for my story time!