Advance copies of Allie Tagle-Dokus’s debut novel, Lucky Girl, include a letter from the author about how the novel grew from her love of Dance Moms, a show I’d frankly never heard of, much less watched. I’m not a reality show person and don’t care about celebrity culture. And I have no experience with fame, so I didn’t expect to relate to the protagonist, Lucy, who is catapulted to fame at the awkward age of twelve. After starring in a dance reality show, Lucy goes on to dance in pop icon Bruise’s music videos, and later, acts in movies and a television show.
The novel sounds like a fun read—and it is—but it’s more than a tale of a rising star’s fall from the public’s good graces, looking at cancel culture through the eyes of a literal child. Lucky Girl also examines the cost of ambition, and while the situations Lucy finds herself in tend toward being over the top, there is also a tenderness and relatability to this character that make this novel, even in its excessiveness, hard to shake.
The relatability started for me in the very first sentence, one that offered a hint of what would come to feel personally damning: “Things you give up being a dancer: toenails, weekends, childhood, growth plates, prom, friendships.” The chapter relays the story of how Lucy lost her best friend due to prioritizing dance above all things, including the people in her life. At the end of the chapter, her now-former friend tells her she’s not a good friend, something she already knew.
I too tend not to be a good friend due to my writing ambitions. I choose not to attend parties or other social events (including things I say I will) because the pull of work is stronger than my desire to show up. My commitment to my art is often more important, I hate to say, than friendships. And like Lucy, my ambition has cost me friends.
It’s embarrassing to admit that to myself, (much less publicly in a review), but the lens through which I read Lucky Girl was very much colored by my empathy for young Lucy. Her youth makes the awful things she does appear different than the choices I, a forty-something, continue to make in my quest to put my art into the world. But while the focus of the plot revolves around childhood fame, its core deals with what ambition can cost an artist. Fame is fickle, and positive reception is often ephemeral. And what remains when the public loses interest? Where are the people sacrificed during one’s quest for artistic greatness?
But Lucky Girl isn’t only about fame, ambition, and the way these things impact relationships; it’s also about privilege, addiction, appropriation, and imagination. It explores the responsibility artists have to reckon with social problems in the world—and to use our platforms and privilege to speak out against injustice. Bruise chooses silence during the 2016 election season, eschewing her platform as a celebrity to endorse Hillary Clinton because it’s “uncomfortable to have that much sway in what people think.” After the election, Bruise says on a talk show that she featured Lucy in her music video because little girls need hope in the wake of Trump’s presidency. Lucy comes of age amid a changing political and social landscape, one she’s old enough to be aware of, yet too young to quite grasp: “The only thing I felt about Trump being elected was enormous guilt for not feeling enough. We watch the world go into COVID lockdown, and in the wake of George Floyd’s murder The New Yorker publishes an article titled “Bruise’s Black Friend.” Bruise falls in love with a space billionaire with obvious Elon Musk vibes. Some of this seems over the top, almost kitschy, and yet in a novel dealing with the vulgar cheapness of fame, it actually works.
Despite being an often funny romp, Lucky Girl is nuanced and layered. Some of that is achieved through narrative distance. Lucy is telling this story as a twenty-two-year-old who has gained perspective and insight through time and social media. The vantage point allows her to feel shame and regret for her past actions And so the novel reads as a cautionary tale, or at least that’s how I read it: as a reminder of the importance of maintaining loving relationships so we have people in our life if our art flops. It may even help readers (okay, this reader) examine how artistic ambitions can corrode relationships when ambition is prioritized. Because while we create in a silo, sharing our work changes our relationship to it—and that process can impact the people around us.
