January 20, 2023, 11:01am
It’s not hugely surprising, given their songwriting styles, but everyone’s favorite millennial supergroup—Boygenius, aka Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker—is really into reading. According to this Rolling Stone cover profile, the first bonding moment between Dacus and Baker was…
…when they played a show together in Washington, D.C. “I came into the dressing room and Luce was in there, reading The Portrait of a Lady,” Baker recalls. “I was like, ‘We’re gonna be friends.’” […]
But the band’s taste goes well beyond Henry James:
A majority of our lunch is spent discussing literary fiction, where they ping-pong across the table with their recent reads. Rachel Yoder’s
Nightbitch. C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. Jenny Offill’s Weather. Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. And Rebecca Rukeyser’s The Seaplane on Final Approach, which Bridgers gives me a copy of the following day.
The boygenius book club can get weird, especially when a sex scene in Elif Batuman’s Either/Or comes up. “I had an almost completely closed hymen,” Bridgers says, as Baker and Dacus laugh hysterically. “That should be the headline,” Dacus says.
Reader, that was not the headline.