The Subversive Love Songs of Lucy Dacus
March 20, 2025 at 08:30PMThere are moments in Amanda Petrusich’s patient, generous profile of musician Lucy Dacus for The New Yorker that are reminiscent of some of Ann Beattie’s fiction for the same magazine. The two meander the grounds of a popular New York art museum, and share an appetizer at a steakhouse. Their conversation touches on identity and time, on love’s capacity to deceive and to transform. Here, the “musician profile” feels like a pretext for a short story about change, one in which the narrator is as vital a character as her subject.
We wandered along one cloister, stopping to admire a potted oleander with a sign that read “POISON.” “That was my great-uncle’s last name,” Dacus said, briefly assuming a thick Southern accent. “Ohhhh-lander,” she drawled. (Her father’s family is from Mississippi.) We settled on a stone bench in the chapter house, once a central part of Notre-Dame-de-Pontaut, a Benedictine monastery established in 1115, in Aquitaine. Every morning, the monks gathered there, arranging themselves on the long stone benches, to discuss the matters of the day. Now tourists and school groups inched past, whispering. Though no one approached Dacus directly, I couldn’t help but notice how often passersby—especially twentysomethings with cool haircuts and hand tattoos—silently angled their phones toward her.
Dacus and I eventually left the chapter house, walking around until we found the Unicorn Tapestries, a series of seven pieces, woven from wool, silk, and metallic thread, likely designed in France and produced in Brussels toward the end of the fifteenth century. No one knows exactly who made them, or how to definitively interpret their narrative, but there’s something instantly striking about the iconography: a white unicorn is pursued, retaliates, is lured by a maiden, and then is caught, encircled by a fence, and chained to a tree trunk. Scholars have suggested that the tapestries might be an allegory of Christ, or, more likely, of marriage—all the ways in which love and monogamy require subjugation, submission, capture. I’d told Dacus earlier that I wanted to get a picture of them for my three-year-old daughter, who enjoys unicorns, though the more I looked at the series the less inclined I felt to take a photo.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/20/the-subversive-love-songs-of-lucy-dacus/
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