Nonfiction

May 9, 2012 Loretta Lynn’s rise to fame epitomizes the quintessential American dream, but with a uniquely Appalachian slant. A coal miner’s daughter who was, as her number-one hit explains, “born in a cabin on a hill in Butcher Hollow,” Lynn married at thirteen and had four children by eighteen. Despite this far-from-glamorous beginning, she has recorded sixteen number-one hits and sent seventy songs up the country charts. And at age seventy-seven, she continues to write and record crafted, heartfelt songs. It’s only fitting that Loretta Lynn’s newest memoir tells the story of her life through the medium that made her famous: her songs. In Honky Tonk Girl: My Life in Lyrics, Lynn collects 300 of her lyrics, glossing many of them with anecdotes that explain their genesis. Loretta Lynn will appear at the Ryman Auditorium on May 10 at as part of Opry Country Classics.

May 8, 2012 Sissy Spacek may be a Hollywood legend—she’s best known for her Academy Award-winning portrayal of Loretta Lynn in the 1980 film Coal Miner’s Daughter—but her stories are refreshingly devoid of unwanted pregnancies, drug and alcohol addiction, marital abuse, family dysfunction, or devastating divorce. Spacek’s new memoir contains no shocking bombshells, no reprisals, not even the faintest hint of relationship retaliation. The book is quite simply the account of a charmed and happy life, of family love and loyalty, of cherished children and pets, of gardens watered in pajamas. On May 13, as part of the Salon@615 series, Spacek will discuss My Extraordinary Ordinary Life at the Nashville Public Library at 3 p.m.

April 23, 2012 If any singer/songwriter nailed the deep pain and loneliness in the American heart, it’s Hank Williams. He also personified another American artistic tradition: live hard and die young. In Hank Hung the Moon … and Warmed Our Cold, Cold Hearts, former Memphis writer Rheta Grimsley Johnson pays tribute to the artist who wrote the soundtrack of her life.

April 16, 2012 For most readers, a title like A Titanic Love Story will immediately bring to mind the image of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet embracing to a sound track by Celine Dion. These fictional characters may embody doomed shipboard love today, but at the time of the Titanic’s actual sinking, the public was gripped by a real-life love story that is now mostly forgotten: Ida Straus refused to leave Isidor, her husband of more than forty years, to take her place in a lifeboat, while he refused to leave the ship until all the women and children on board were safe. In A Titanic Love Story, Murfreesboro’s June Hall McCash writes their joint biography.

April 11, 2012 In his new memoir, Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball (written with New York Daily News sportswriter Wayne Coffey), R.A. Dickey recounts his struggles to make it in the major leagues, achieving real success only after he transformed himself from a conventional pitcher into a knuckleballer. Dickey parallels that story with his real subject: how finally confronting the trauma of being sexually molested as a child freed him from self-centeredness and shame. For Dickey, mastering the knuckleball went hand-in-hand with mastering his own demons. Dickey will discuss the book on April 12 at Franklin’s LifeWay Christian Store at 4 p.m. and at Nashville’s Books-A-Million at 7:30 p.m.

April 4, 2012 R.J. Smith can’t be accused of objectivity—his abject adoration of James Brown seeps onto nearly every page—but his acclaimed new bio of the Hardest Working Man in Show Business is exhaustively researched and makes a square accounting of Brown’s triumphs, humiliations, and criminal excesses. R.J. Smith will discuss The One: The Life and Music of James Brown in Nashville at Parnassus Books on April 5 at 6:30 p.m., and at Vanderbilt University’s First Amendment Center on April 6 at 9 a.m. Both events are free and open to the public, but the Vanderbilt event requires a reservation. Email heather.lefkowitz@vanderbilt.edu for admission.