I read Lucky Girl, Allie Tagle-Dokus’s debut novel, in the same way I follow messy celebrity stories—through my fingers, yet unable to look away. Even if it’s fiction, watching a famous person’s rise and inevitable fall is addicting. I knew the crash was coming, so I kept reading.
Lucky Girl chronicles Lucy Gardiner’s trajectory into fame and, eventually, notoriety. At age twelve, Lucy is cast in a reality TV kid’s dancing competition, lifting her from her messy Massachusetts upbringing and launching her into the spotlight. One of the show’s judges, a popstar named Bruise, takes an interest in Lucy and pulls her into her Hollywood orbit as her muse. Bruise is a possessive and obsessive vortex, pulling Lucy away from her home and family and into the toxic, manipulative world of Bruise’s inner circle. From here, Lucy’s life is split into fragments—competing realities and parallel lives—that highlight the constant dissonance of fame.
The opening chapter establishes these parallel lives with Lucy’s childhood friend Kimberly, who becomes her “marker for what life would have looked like had I not gone down this path.” The end of their friendship is told in simultaneous scenes in columns on the page. On one side is Los Angeles where Lucy is about to compete in a dance competition, and on the other side, Boston, where Kimberly waits for Lucy at a birthday dinner Lucy couldn’t bring herself to RSVP “no” to. Through the scenes’ simultaneity, the two realities pull against each other on the page and visually represent the first great fracture in Lucy’s pursuit of dance.
The novel uses parallel scenes again when Lucy is on the set of her first music video with Bruise. As she dances on one side of the page, details of her older brother’s overdose plays out on the other. The scenes connect only when Lucy’s Mom, phone in hand, interrupts the take: “Mom said, ‘Lucy, I need you.’ / And I said, ‘But I have to dance.’”
Her mom leaves, and Bruise tells Lucy “Use this, Lucy girl. That’s how we make something real.” Lucy does another take. In this moment, a chasm opens between the home she used to return to after dance competitions and this new life. She visits home on occasion, but with a new emotional distance between Hollywood and Massachusetts, between herself and her family, between her old self and the new one.
In addition to these simultaneous scenes, Tagle-Dokus also uses familiar Hollywood forms to convey Lucy’s fragmentation and the tension it brings. As narrator, Lucy breaks down the reality dance competition scenes into “Diet Reality,” “Confessional,” and “Reality.” Diet Reality documents what the audience sees on TV, with the transcripts of performed-to-camera confessionals from moms and kids complementing it. “Reality” is Lucy’s record of what was really happening, which had been manipulated into a television storyline. Diet Reality begins the curation of Lucy’s public-facing persona and relegates the rest of reality to the other side of the curtain.
Elsewhere, Tagle-Dokus uses movie and television scripts to create tension between art and reality. In one instance, an explosive conflict with Lucy’s mother takes place entirely in script form as they run lines together. As they veer away from the script and into their own problems, Lucy’s name replaces her character’s name in the line headers and stage directions narrate the scene in italics: “A half beat. You can’t hear it, but something glass inside Lucy shatters.” Here, Lucy, briefly no longer an “I,” becomes a character, detached from herself.
The tension and fragmentation created by the formal variation reinforces the overarching divide that defines the story, the narrative distance between Character-Lucy, caught up in the whirlwind, and Narrator-Lucy, who has the luxury of retrospect. In this way, it reads more like a memoir, where distance between character and the narrator builds tension. The distance imparts an impending doom. Early in the novel, when Lucy refers to Bruise’s song as “the song that even to this day I listen to all the way through, because despite how twisted and ruined my life would become after this song, it’s still my favorite song.”
The story, like many of the best celebrity memoirs, isn’t about if she crashes. Lucy tells us from the beginning that she will. It’s about how. The narrator and the reader know the crash is coming and yet we cannot look away. So, we keep reading to see how exactly Lucy’s life falls apart. The discomfort and tension arises, because Character-Lucy doesn’t know yet. She has to live it first. As we read, we are trying to bridge the divide between the life of Character-Lucy and the retrospect Narrator-Lucy has earned as she begins to put the pieces of herself back together.
FICTION
by Allie Tagle-Dokus
Tin House Books
Published on November 11, 2025
