Fans—that’s another subject Dolly knows something about, or used to. Most of the Texans who seek Dolly out for nature training or advice have no idea whom they’re talking to. They know her by her real name, not as “Dolly Freed,” author of Possum Living: How to Live Well Without a Job and with (Almost) No Money, a book that in the late 1970s made Dolly one of the most famous teenagers in America.
She wrote the book at age eighteen, drawing her ideas about self-sustenance and thrift from the semi-rural life she and her father, Frank, lived outside of Philadelphia. The economy was as dismal as the one we’re in now, but Dolly and Frank were quite happy to have no jobs—they rejected the “money economy,” choosing instead to make their own way and avoid the “gracious living” and acquisition-based one-upmanship that seemed to make so many other Americans miserable. “We have and get the good things of life so easily it seems silly to go to some boring, meaningless, frustrating job to get the money to buy them,” Dolly wrote, “yet almost everyone does. ‘Earning their way in life,’ they call it. ‘Slavery,’ I call it.” She and Frank referred to their existence as “possum living” because “possums can live anywhere.”
Possum Living contains twenty chapters with titles such as “We Quit the Rat Race,” “Health and Medicine,” and “Meat.” It includes instructions for mending clothes, pickling vegetables, and buying bargain homes in what Dolly called “sheriff sales” and everyone now calls foreclosure, plus recipes for the kind of food she and her father cooked and ate, like creamed catfish, rocket pickle, and dandelion wine. “We aren’t living this way for ideological reasons, as people sometimes suppose,” she wrote of the home she called Snug Harbor. “We aren’t a couple of Thoreaus mooning about on Walden Pond here. … We live this way for a very simple reason: It’s easier to learn to do without some of the things that money can buy than to earn the money to buy them.”
The lessons aren’t for everyone, since most people aren’t planning to shoot a turtle in the head and turn it into soup. The larger charm of Possum Living is its timeless sensibility and voice—on the page (and in person, for that matter) Dolly Freed is like a cross between E.B. White and Dorothy Parker, but bearing rabbit sausage and homemade gin. “There’s an abandoned orchard in our neighborhood and we get peaches, pears, cherries, and apples there, free,” she wrote. “None of the neighbors bother with them—they apparently don’t consider food to be food unless it’s bought and paid for in a licensed grocery store.” 1
It isn’t often that readers encounter a recipe for fishballs in the same book that mentions Diogenes, Napoleon, Darwin, Wagner, Demosthenes, sixth-century Constantinople, and Ecclesiastes, but Dolly wrote as economically as she dressed rabbits for braising, wasting nothing. She dropped in the occasional Dollyism: “Quality candles practically sell themselves,” and “Math is a pretty good opiate to dull the pain of a Northeast winter.”
