Suzanne Vega’s most recent album, released last October, is entitled Lover, Beloved: Songs from an Evening with Carson McCullers. I say it is her newest album but in a strange way it is also her oldest –– the work has been simmering, in some form or another, since the moment she saw McCullers’ face on a library book and felt that first flash of kinship. I say it is an album, but what it actually is, I guess, is an original cast recording –– the songs, cowritten with Duncan Sheik of Spring Awakening fame, come from a one-woman play called Carson McCullers Talks About Love, which starred Vega and ran off-Broadway for a brief spell back in 2011. It is strange to think that, at newly 58, she is now nearly a full decade older than Carson McCullers ever lived to be, and stranger still to think that she has spent the better part of half a century negotiating her relationship with this person only to end up physically portraying her onstage. I could take another half-century easily working to untangle the snare of performance and personhood, reality and fiction, underpinning the whole work, so I won’t. Instead I point you to Hilton Als’ beautiful 2001 essay “Unhappy Endings” and to the music video for “We of Me” and I ask: what does it mean to literally embody your adolescent hero?