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Dolly Parton is the ideal nihilist

Ellsworth Toohey
Feb 24, 2026
∙ Paid

DFree/shutterstock.com

Dolly Parton was stuck in a hotel room on a liquid diet, miserable, listening to her band have fun in the restaurant below. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t just sit there feeling sorry for herself. So she wrote two hit songs instead.

Writer Gemma Parker, in an essay for the Guardian, argues this makes Parton the perfect embodiment of…

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