Lucy Dacus – Home Video

Remember adolescence? How so much of what seemed so important then, seems so unimportant now? And how what still resonates hits so very, very hard that it can stop you dead in your tracks, even now? Particularly the friendships, the heartbreaks? Lucy Dacus plumbs her teen years for the almost overwhelmingly powerful Home Video.

Much of Home concerns her friends from then, the tight bond of young adults that we all miss as actual adults. Some of that is through her own queer identity, particularly her love of a straight friend who deserves better than her boyfriend in their conservative town on “Christine”, or her wry take on Vacation Bible School and camp friend in “VBS”. There is the twee haunt on leaving behind childhood friendships with “Cartwheel”, and powerfully sad tale of running away with the friend you were kept from on closer “Triple Dog Dare”. Then there is “Thumbs” (QRO review), her practically already iconic tale of going with her friend at age nineteen to meet that friend’s absent, ruining father, “I would kill him / If you let me.”

Throughout Home Video, the feelings are as raw as when you were young, but instead of the manic energy of puberty, it is somber distance of time – and is just as wrenching. And it connects to all – even as our adolescences differed, we all went through it individually and basically alone.