Dolly Parton keeps surprising us with things she completed before she passed away. So far she’s posthumously accepted an award, released a commercial for her Cup of Ambition coffee, and recorded a duet in June with Bono that’s going to come out in two weeks on the new U2 album. Now Page Six is reporting that she has a whole ass secret memoir she completed before she passed. I love this story so much. There was a secret bidding war for Dolly’s memoir and it ended up selling for $13 million!
A secret posthumous memoir by Dolly Parton has sold for $13 million in a wild, heated bidding war, sources exclusively tell Page Six Hollywood.
The book by the music icon and Hollywood star who passed away at 80 in August has been snapped up by Grand Central Publishing, multiple sources tell us. It’s unclear when the tome was penned, or what it covers, but any posthumous book by beloved Parton would no doubt be a blockbuster.
Sources say the book was sold by lit agency Folio, which previously repped Parton’s 2023 tome, “Songteller: My Life in Lyrics.”
Sources say that when the agency told publishers it had a $12 million offer: “No one believed them, so they all stopped bidding [and] Folio went back to editors.”
One top book source says of the bidding: “They were all like, ‘WTF? You have $12 million, and we aren’t beating that.’” But then, “Grand Central did improve” the offer and “won the book.”
Multiple sources tell us the final number in the deal hit $13 million.
Another source said the Grand Central deal was made for a lower amount — but involved a bigger cut of the royalties than usual with a 50/50 split.
Page Six goes on to say that Britney Spears’s memoir sold for $15 million and that Bruce Springsteen’s went for $10 million. With that background, I would put Dolly’s memoir at $20 million but times are tough. I will read the hell out of this. Dolly seemed like an open book in some ways, but we don’t know much about her home life with Carl Dean. I also want to hear dirt about the people who wronged Dolly. She undoubtedly dealt with so much sexism in her industry.
Dolly’s sister Stella is openly liberal and she has not revealed Dolly’s political opinions, but you know Dolly was a Democrat. She embraced the LGBTQ community, donated to the Moderna vaccine and gave more books to children than anyone in history. Will Dolly finally reveal her political affiliation in this memoir? Is that why Stella has been so tight-lipped about it?
We know Dolly as a sunny sweet person who always turned the other rouged cheek. Imagine if Dolly set up a book to be published after her death that absolutely laid bare how she felt about everything. That’s probably not going to happen, but what a gift she left us. I will scream if she recorded the audio book too!
Photos credit: Avalon.red, Cover Images, and Netflix
Something interesting is coming across. More than any public figure in recent memory, Dolly was planning to not die. She named her LLC She’s Alive, she got all these posthumous projects coming out that she planned on marketing after her death. It’s both staggeringly sad and miraculous defying of a boundary we all assume.