Stevie Nicks built something in the public imagination that goes beyond fame, beyond influence, and beyond even the extraordinary catalogue of music she produced across five decades with Fleetwood Mac and a solo career that would have been the envy of any artist alive — she built a mythology, a shawl-draped, tambourine-spinning, moonlit mythology so completely and so genuinely her own that millions of people across multiple generations have felt not merely that they admired her but that they personally knew her, that the woman spinning at the edge of the stage was somehow singing directly and specifically to them and their particular heartbreak.

What that mythology so beautifully and so completely concealed was the reality of what Stevie Nicks was living through during the years that produced the songs everyone knows by heart — the consuming, impossible love affair with Lindsey Buckingham that turned every recording session into an emotional battlefield, the cocaine dependency so severe that doctors told her it had eaten a hole in her nose and come within a margin of taking everything, the years lost to a prescribed medication that she has described as stealing an entire decade of her creativity and her selfhood more completely than any illegal drug ever had, the pregnancies that ended in ways she has spoken about with a grief that has never fully left her voice, and the particular loneliness of being the most magical woman in any room while feeling, in the most private hours, completely and utterly lost inside a life that looked from the outside like everything anyone could ever want.