Stevie Nicks, Fairy Godmother

My own trip to see Stevie in Los Angeles had begun in a pretty fragile state. I’d just broken off a yearlong thing with an unavailable man, my 35th birthday was a month away, my period had started that morning, and I couldn’t shake the words of my mother, another blonde adventuress and former Haight-Ashbury–ite who also turns 65 this year, when I told her about meeting this New Age oracle and rock feminist whose name she struggled to place. “She sounds like a very brave lady,” my mother said, confessing that, for all her youthful rebellion, not getting married had never occurred to her as an option and that she didn’t know who Stevie Nicks was because she’d tuned out most of pop culture around the time that Rumors came out. “I was busy,” she said, “having a baby.”

And here I was, 35 years later, in a closet with a 65-year-old rock star who was disobeying orders for vocal rest from her band and talking to me like we were 23 and high on romantic ambition; a woman who represented to me, in that moment, the uncompromised life my artist mother might have had, and a future, of unapologetic loves and losses past my still-fresh heartbreak, I might look forward to, too.

The great Jada Yuan profiled the great Stevie Nicks for New York. (We should also note that all three features in the magazine this week are written by women, including Jessica Pressler on the cat-bird civil war and Lisa Miller on Yankees pitcher Mariano Rivera. That is nice.)

Further reading: Amy Mulvihill at The Awl last month.