Part One: New Romantics

“I don’t care about anything that happened to me when I was 19,” Taylor Swift
announced. She was standing in the center of the U.S. Bank Stadium, smiling and
chill, guitar at the ready. It was June 2023, the first stretch of Swift’s Eras Tour, and
she was about to perform an old song for the first time in over a decade. She was also
about to release a new recording of it as part of her project of rerecording her early
albums. Her other new-old albums had driven internet mobs to fixate on the old
flames who’d inspired those songs. She did not want fans to think that releasing the
newest-old album was an act of vengeance that needed backup. And so:

I’m 33 years old. I don’t care about anything that happened to me when
I was 19, except the songs I wrote. So, what I’m trying to tell you is that
I’m not putting this album out so that you should go and feel the need to
defend me on the internet against someone you think I might have written
the song about 14 million years ago.

A shockwave went through my phone. “Should I not care about anything that
happened to me when I was 19?” texted one friend, also 33. “NOW she tells us,”
another joked but also meant. We knew Swift was asking us to focus on her music,

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 not her personal life. But her music’s thesis might be that hanging onto something Hi Tavi,

that happened 14 million years ago is no choice. Her narrator is typically either I hope you’re doing okay.
haunted or haunting. While her ex moves on, she unfurls a scroll of grievances. What
I am fine for you to publish the book. I only require that you take my edits and
her crush never knew, she’s here to confess. Hopeless before the past, she turns over include our email exchange. It just works better for me if I’m clearly in on it.
her memories, drawing on them as sources of beauty and truth. Carefully arranged,
Also. I want you to know that I remember the night in my apartment somewhat
they form each song’s story, each album’s arc. Once the music is released, the fans’ differently. The moment that told me it was time to go to sleep.
own memories are unleashed from their own vaults; her voice dislodges our furies’
You talked about your connection to the album, yes. But then you told an
silent screams. When Swift’s public conflicts resolve in her favor, such fixations are anecdote from your own life to illustrate it. It had just happened to you.
doubly affirmed. A popular tweet I can no longer find but never forgot said, “I relate “Anecdote” makes it sound harmless, but it wasn’t, it was horrible, which took
me a second to realize, because you told it like an anecdote.
to Taylor Swift because I too have never gotten over anything that’s ever happened to
me.” For Swift to even utter the words “I don’t care” felt like a betrayal. When you were done, I didn’t know how to respond. In the silence, you said,
“I just thought that was the most amazing story.” I can still see you, perched at
the island, staring into the marble as though it were the cosmos.
Another shock to the fandom: the Swifties are forgetting. That same summer, a brief
I admit I was unsettled by your enthusiasm. It was an odd way to describe your
news cycle seized on a pattern of fans claiming that they were unable to remember own pain, almost fetishistic. And yet, you were right. It was an amazing story.
anything from the night they attended the Eras Tour. All that anticipation, the Romantic, devastating, human.

suspense, the Kafka-esque Ticketmaster waiting rooms, finally three perfect hours Once I became aware that I was observing your sense of remove, I understood
of 17 years of songs, at last an odyssey of memories and catharsis, presumably a heart this meant that I was removed, too. I saw us for an instant as two satellites,
floating very far apart.
full of new memories to hold dear—but then, somehow, nothing.
Satellites, maybe you know, don’t communicate with each other directly. They
can only send signals down to Earth. Then, a ground station relays the data to
Theories abound—overstimulation, emotional blackout. Mine is that forgetting the receiving satellite, above.
concerts is normal but that Swifties are more likely to notice forgetting than any-
At the time, this image made me sad. But the satellites do communicate. They
one. We are so trained in the act of holding on. Not just to the slights, the conflicts, just need a third thing to deliver the message.
the Easter eggs. But to the moment. “I love writing songs because I love preserving
Love,
memories,” Swift once wrote, “like putting a picture frame around a memory you
once had.” Taylor

In his essay about Joseph Cornell’s dreamy, diorama-like boxes, Michael Chabon
observed that their true content is never the objects inside. “The important thing, in a
Cornell box, is the box.” And the important thing in a Taylor Swift song is the frame;
that is, the moment of writing; the words: I remember.

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 Well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well. *

Look who wants to DELETE LETTERS AND SCARVES now!

Swift’s early music did not just reflect my feelings; it scripted them. She laminated
And simply because, for once, you do not wield the pen? I’ll say it, Taylor:
my high school hallways with marks to hit, gazes to hold, pauses to read into. Did
coward. COWARD! Practice what you preach, goddammit—support another
woman’s autobiographical art—protect the sanctity of the mystery of the impulses a glance linger a hair too long? Did a backpack brush my shoulder on purpose?
of the written word—LET GO FOR ONCE—not just for me, but yourself!
Obviously there was no way to know; the point was to wonder. I journaled about such
You know that this is literature, right? That it will get a tasteful cover, chic encounters with a level of detail so precise that it was almost clinical, even when the
blurbs, a classy rollout, a humane selection of press outlets, a distinguished
sense of potential was infinite. This was the best part, being suspended in mid-air;
tour—maybe you can even be my onstage guest sometime! :-D Then after
completing whatever tour stop/IG Live/Vanity Fair video where we answer I wanted any crush to last as long as possible before much interaction could take
questions about each other, we can go out for dinner, exhale, and finally be
place; life was not allowed to happen faster than I could write it down.
ourselves. The masks will be off, the defenses lowered. If not a rekindled
friendship, we could at least foster some mutual admiration—fellow travelers,
“Strangers” by the Kinks playing. Gingerly sipping a Manhattan, I’ll transform
In Swift’s narrator, I saw a fellow obsessive. She throws rocks at boys’ windows
before your eyes. It will dawn on you: This woman has a whole life. You’ll ask
me questions. You’ll want my takes. You’ll keep consulting me in your day-to- and waits by their back doors. She is awakened by nightmares and possessed by day-
day, slowly bringing me back into the fold—only closer this time! Perhaps you’ll
dreams. She refers to “forever” as a plausible duration of time. She collects souvenirs
tell people, “Yes, she’s difficult, but she’s brilliant,” or, “Of course she’s insane,
but do we really want our geniuses to be realistic?” Maybe you’ll even write a from relationships and immortalizes them in song, creating souvenirs of the
song about the whole experience. About me. Then you’ll be the one needing my
souvenirs. She hoards them in a prepper basement strewn with conspiracy theories
approval. While we’re in the midst of a notes session, you’ll interrupt—“Wait, say
that last part again”—and suddenly, a line of mine will complete a work of yours! about emotional subtext.
Yes, yes, I can see it now!

Run away with me, Taylor—escape the inscrutable self-inflicted gaze, half-male, She embodies the adolescent as defined by psychologist G. Stanley Hall, back in 1904.
half-“Danie,” also fans and haters—let me publish my uncut masterpiece! Give
The first to identify adolescence as a developmental stage, he described it as a state
up the power struggle, surrender, submit, and just let your nation-sized fanbase
come for me later! I CAN HANDLE IT! I’ve handled enough before! And what caught between the realms of childhood and adulthood, always looking either back
was it all for if not to make exactly what I want? Why would anyone tolerate the
or forward, “haunted by automatic presentations that take the reins from the will and
coldness, the audience, the too-much-change-too-fast?
lead us far away in a rapt state, now reminiscent, now anticipatory, into a world of
Artistic freedom. Uninhibited impulses. The chance to return to a childlike state.
dreams or ghosts.” Or, as Swift sang on her debut, I’m takin’ pictures in my mind so I
Do it, Taylor. Release your grasp. I’ve built you such a gorgeous sky for falling. can save ‘em for a rainy day.

Your so-called friend [who’ll] write books about [you] if [you] ever make it,
Her nostalgia is not just personal, but cultural, for things she didn’t experience in eras
Tavi
she did not live through. She has said her early albums were based on ideas of love
from movies and novels, as she had not yet been in a “real relationship.” Her music
inherited not only these forms’ fantasies of love, but their narrative devices. Starting

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 out in country music also taught her how to spin a yarn. When I say “Swift’s even more with every draft, letting the story define my life? I guess you were
there the first time I told it, the night I confessed what “Wildest Dreams” meant
narrator,” I mean to reflect this gap between her life and her performance of it; to to me, bolted upright, eyes ablaze—was that what you were reacting to, Taylor,
suggest not that the performance is false, but that she has long known, as Roland when it was suddenly time to go to sleep? Not my sycophantic need, but your
excruciating recognition of a writer reaching, falsifying her life, parroting wisdom
Barthes wrote, that “the one who speaks (in the narrative) is not the one who writes about endings and “nothing lasts forever” while her future…fifth draft hovered just
(in real life) and the one who writes is not the one who is.” behind her, clutching a scythe? Could you already see it? How the endings would
prove endless? How I’d circle them forever? The gulf between my intellectualized
sense of acceptance and my actual desperate need for life to stop happening,
A handful of songs start with Once Upon a Time and end with The End. Others have for time to stop moving, so I could stay an ingenue, or go back to being a kid, too
much changed too fast, and—the people all just—went away—
flashbacks, fast-forwards, montages, and scenes that fade into view. There are Polaroids
and film reels and it hardly matters if they’re literal or imagined. NEW THEORY!

I wrote in the book that our respective insights might be borne more of writerly
Note how often her narrator compares love or her lover to a book, movie, song, story, compulsion (the very act!) than of experience itself but now feel myself winding
further—the surreality of our exchange lights my way—I PROPOSE that not only
poem, or “the radio.” Note how she mimics the wistfulness of analog communica- did the many rules, micro-economies, and superstructures of our overlapping
tion but codifies experience at the speed of an iPhone camera. Note when a gauzy professional worlds (Think about the place where you first met me) (Soho House)
lead us to so thoroughly preserve our “normal” teenage memories; not only did
scene is halted by a thought as plain as a text message. Note where the poet’s ornate an unnatural volume of validation allow us to take our feelings so seriously that
metaphor gives way to the teenager’s run-on sentence. Note how many notes, photos, we could write about them in prodigious detail; but perhaps so much attention
and its accompanying dissociation made us so cold that we came to view other
and phone calls drive the action, creating frames within frames. Note that Swift has people with as much distance as we view ourselves. I don’t know about you, but
described many of her early songs as diary entries and unsent letters. Note that I can write as though from beyond the grave! And so whenever anyone is mad
at me for writing about them, I just think C’est la guerre! or Grow up! or If I could
Janet Malcolm wrote that the author of a love letter falls in love only with her own deal with it at 12, you can deal with it now!, and sometimes I blink around at the
epistolary persona. Note that when I wrote letters to boys in high school, I made state of the world, of the internet, I hear echoes of the old pearl-clutching over
tween-me and my public platform, I look around and I want to scream: All your
copies of them first. kids have iPhones!!!!!!!!!

We are united, I’m saying, in our coldness—and our condition is spreading. So,
Swift’s signature is a self-interrupting lyric that folds time in on itself to cinematic what’s a role model to do? Convince people there is some healthy way to live
effect. “All Too Well” starts with a cute scene, she and a guy came in from the cold, it with the constant presence of an audience? Or pry open our brains and let them
see the human cost of storytelling? How for all we gain in wealth and cultural
felt like home somehow, she left her scarf there—and you’ve still got it in your drawer, currency, we cheapen our very existences, the only ones we’ve got?
even now. Wait, what? What YEAR is it! And WHAT WENT WRONG! This isn’t
But oh, it’s not just money and clout! It’s writing! It’s art! It’s truth that we touch,
just a time jump; it brings you into the moment of her composing the song. Swift is the stuff of eternity. I am not trafficking in gossip, Taylor. I am treating celebrity
performing the act of writing. By pointing to her own authorship, by letting us in on as my medium, exploiting public knowledge of private relationships to create the
illusion of reality, committing to a postmodern performance of the self in the style
it, she fosters a greater intimacy with her listener than with her male subject. of my chief muse. And yet you want to censor me, to pander to the overly literal
readers, the very same people who make “careful or she’ll write a song about
you!”-type jokes. Well, well, well.

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 It’s not cynicism, Taylor, it’s delight. I just now realized that we only met mere Sometimes the interruptions remind her to remember a moment as it is happening.
months after I became obsessed with Speak Now, meaning that I have known
you (or been estranged from you) much longer than I had loved you from a She describes the most ecstatic courtships and kisses, but if you’re stoned enough,
complete remove. Those were a good few months, Taylor. But what followed was you might hear a lonely voice wailing from the center of experience. Consider 2008’s
even better. Because in writing this I’ve realized that thinking about you as both
an institution and a person (as much as I could) has not taken away from my love “Fearless,” which narrates a date in the present tense: In this passenger seat, you put
for your music; it’s enhanced it. The intellectualizing is no less an expression of your eyes on me / In this moment now, capture it, remember it!
enthusiasm than a fan screaming at a concert. Please don’t be offended, Taylor.
Be proud! Be wicked! Use it! Like you always have!
Is our protagonist “in” “this moment” “now”? Let’s rewind: A car. A glance. The
I must object to the idea that I am trying to control the whole thing—I hope there
are surprises in it, wrinkles I’m unaware of, I would be happy to be telling on thrill of being looked at. And then, a split-second dissociation. Unlike a winking
myself, finally, for once, that’s humility to me, that’s the unknown, that’s God. Fleabag who feels nothing, Swift’s narrator turns to the proverbial camera and goes,
There is so little in this highly surveilled world that is truly mysterious, and since
music mystifies me, as you so mercilessly observe, I get my kicks from writing “Okay, HOW COOL is this?”—that everything is going right. That the moment
things and seeing what happens. Now you have intervened—how appropriate!— resembles a real relationship. Barthes might say that in her eagerness to capture,
and I, too, have stirred up a bit of mischief for you and ole Tree. I think you’re
intrigued, Taylor. I think it’s why you’ve indulged me this long. And I think we all the narrator is already mourning. She goes on: ’Cause I don’t know how it gets better
do it—artists, and public figures, and female public figures—repeatedly recreate than this.
the conditions of an early humiliation to see if this time we can “beat it”—control
the response—feel only the good and none of the bad—as though our bodies
won’t act as wounded as they did when we were 12 and 19, as though we won’t In 2010’s “Never Grow Up,” she recalls a series of gleeful scenes from childhood,
hear the same old critics and trolls roaring back, as though (this one always
gets me) there will somehow be no critics or trolls this time! All we can really do then suddenly: I just realized everything I have is someday gonna be gone.
is surrender—to stop seeking power and fame and trying to “maintain” them for
their own sake.
By 2014, Swift’s narrator was embracing endings. In “Wildest Dreams,” she
That part of your email struck me, Taylor. I actually can’t stop thinking about it. implores her lover in a doomed romance: Say you’ll remember me / Standing in a nice
You write as though fame is a good thing other people ruin. Don’t you get it yet?
FAME IS OTHER PEOPLE. We can’t have what we want without them and so we dress / Staring at the sunset, babe / Red lips and rosy cheeks. This is a generic image,
must live with their moods, their changing appetites, however sexist and ageist except that it’s actually a self-portrait. She now takes pictures in the guy’s mind as
and delusional, however conveniently but inconveniently racist and fatphobic and
-ist -ist -ist, their demands, their needs, however cruel and desperate, however the moment unfolds, combining her usual anticipatory nostalgia and camera moves
our nerves might fray, however we might retain their handprints on our skin—did with a male-gazing, body-swapping witchcraft. The ingenue is the writer and the
you know that when I was 15 I interviewed one pop star and one model and
they both said “when I see pictures of myself now, I think that’s her”? Did I ever director, too.
tell you about the dinner party where a series of lingerie models, one by one,
admitted they had never orgasmed? Women whose jobs are to get men off? *
Women with power, wealth, beauty—disembodied, undesiring? We have lost the
plot, Taylor! The Young-Girls have lost the plot! We have lost the plot because we
have worked so hard to find it—to star in our own movies, campaigns, careers, In 1926, Virginia Woolf wanted to understand what made subjects of the cinema feel
but not in our own orgasms!!!!! so novel, writing that onscreen subjects are “not more beautiful, in the sense in which

And what about me? How many times must I write about my heavily plotted move pictures are beautiful, but shall we call it (our vocabulary is miserably insufficient)
to New York? The ingenue wish-fulfillment, the men, the parties? Freezing myself more real, or real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life?”

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 We behold them as they are when we are not there. We see life as it is when Dear Tay-lore >:P
we have no part in it. As we gaze we seem to be removed from the pettiness
Greetings from not one but two strikes—no writing, no acting allowed! Losing it a
of actual existence. […] Watching the boat sail and the wave break, we have little, haha. Well, it goes without saying that the show was amazing, and I hope
time to open our minds wide to beauty and register on top of it the queer you’re having an amazing time doing it, it really felt like you did, I really mean
sensation—this beauty will continue, and this beauty will flourish whether that, and can I just say how cool it was to watch among all the fans for once, way
we behold it or not. better than fronting in the VIP tent, the energy out there was so wholesome and
electric, and all the little lights and screams and palpable tears, it felt like floating
in a sky full of stars!!!!
This kind of omniscience seems almost quaint now that cinema has become a state of
mind, more than a boundaried realm—shorter, internalized, fluid with daily life, not I see we have some conflict. I was not anticipating so many notes nor a
fundamental misreading of my work. There is so much I want to respond to, but
just trying to mimic dream logic but dictating the logic of our waking psyches. Most I’ll get to the heart of it:
photos are now taken through a screen, rather than a viewfinder, with an awareness
“…what feels inauthentic to you feels inauthentic because if it were you…it might
of the image built into its taking, leaving no room for surprise or risk. The subject is be inauthentic.”
more and more often oneself.
Exactly. That’s what’s so amazing. If it were, say, Bob Dylan creating a social
networking app for fans a la The Swift Life, it would feel like he was being
And so, if frames and documents make life real to Swift’s narrator, she can only propped up and operated by some shadowy manager. But with you, these moves
always feel genuine—orchestrated perhaps, but never not an expression of your
know she herself is real by creating self-portraits, too. As John Berger famously put it, own desires. (I mean what would “The Dylan Life” even be? A blank screen that
women are constantly accompanied by their own image. A 2013 study found that says “go away”?)

young girls are more often complimented on how they are (“You’re so smart!”) My point is that we wouldn’t have this remarkable body of work if you were not
while boys get compliments on what they do (“That was a hard math problem you also an entrepreneurial genius. My point is that you can’t separate the art from
the Mastermind and that that’s not a bad thing. So as much as I may have my
solved!”). Apparently, kids who get the more active compliments end up being more cynicism (which is really about capitalism, media, my own baggage based on
resilient, which makes sense, because thinking that much about how you are might childlike notions of a career in entertainment as a Faustian bargain based on
having joined the rat race when I was a tween who saw money and all adults as
make you too afraid to do anything. Except maybe pose. And craft moments evil, etc.), I am not suggesting that you should be any other way. Nor do I mean
worthy of omniscient-seeming approval. And savor any indication that how you are to say that the artifice required to create the effect that we are close to your “real
life” is artless, immoral, or fake. To believe you can connect with more people
is acceptable. than is possible to crowd in your mind’s eye at a given time—that’s star power,
and thank God for those who know how to use it. And also, it’s hard to
disentangle a supernova. Like, recently my neighbor’s daughter defensively said,
Love can be one such indication, if only it would stay one way forever. When Swift “I don’t have a parasocial relationship to Taylor Swift, I just want to be her friend.”
compares a relationship to a “masterpiece” in “All Too Well,” she invokes perfection, If you sing “just between us” to millions of people, they get confused. And look
at me! Trying to act cool and removed when you know my truest self exists in a
not a thing that changes. When I revisit her earlier breakup songs, I hear the shock photo like at the end of The Shining, a black-and-white snapshot with doe-eyed
of people being themselves. The betrayal of a story revolting. A frustrated auteur. I Zooey and cheersing Sheerans, and me, in the front, beaming, just so happy to
be included.
am reminded of a line by Sarah Manguso: “Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a
fixation on moments—an inability to accept life as ongoing.” Won’t you let me frolic in these intellectual pastures, caught between critic, fan,
and friend, the same way you are caught between person, artist, and brand?

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 Young-Girl? A walking embodiment of patriarchal, capitalist ideals? Do you know I am reminded also of Frankie Addams, the 12-year-old protagonist of Carson
how condescending that is? How close you are getting to the sexist argument
that any feminized expression is inherently inauthentic, a product only of cultural McCullers’ novel and play The Member of the Wedding. In one day, she meets her
conditioning? Where is my agency here? And why not be glad that a woman’s brother’s new fiancée, misses them both as soon as they leave, and gets rejected by the
inner life means this much to this many people for the first time ever? Because
I’ve monetized it like everyone else on earth? neighborhood girls’ club. Realizing she does not have a “we of me,” Frankie grows
enraptured by her memory of the couple. She becomes determined to join their
My music is more popular than most movie franchises. Should Star Wars not
have merch? Yes, it is often about my personal life. Should I stop writing about fast-approaching wedding, and their life forever after. She will marry them both, she
what inspires me, because I’m irreversibly famous? Yes I have played into some says, and then, the throuple will marry the world. “And we will meet them. Every-
rumors and left clues, but people were going to write about who I was dating and
all that anyway. Yes I have referenced paparazzi photos in my songs, but they body,” Frankie screams, circling the kitchen table:
were already taken. Stolen, really.
We will just walk up to people and know them right away. We will be
It’s fair for me to try and control the narrative the best that I can. To claim my walking down a dark road and see a lighted house and knock on the door
experience and repurpose such attacks and turn them into something positive. I
and strangers will rush to meet us and say: ‘Come in! Come in!’ We will
have dealt with so many backlashes by now—very few people know what this is
like—and other than short attention spans, sexism, and ageism, I don’t know how know decorated aviators and New York people and movie stars. We will have
exactly I can be on top of the world one moment and universally loathed the next. thousands and thousands of friends. And we will belong to so many clubs
It’s easy to gain power and hard to keep it. It’s easy to gain fame and it’s hard to that we can’t even keep track of all of them. We will be members of the
keep it. I just do what I can so I can keep entertaining people in the long run. whole world.

Maybe the cynicism is your need for control? Your way of knowing how you come
across in the writing. Dictating the moment, the scene, as you might say. Even in the songs when she is not interrupting a wedding (“Speak Now”), Swift’s
narrator is using love to be a member of the whole world. Her performance is
I also find it interesting that you wrote nothing about the music, only lyrics. It’s like
that part of my process hasn’t even occurred to you. A glaring omission if you’re feminized—obsessive, attached, “emotional”—but the approval she seeks does not
talking about giving oneself over to something bigger. feel male, not really. She is after a sense of acceptance from an idea of real life, more

Mostly I am shocked. I had no idea you harbored so many judgments toward me. than the love of one other person, though he will be made to represent all of the
What I find especially heartbreaking and lonely is that we could’ve found each above—to deliver a happy ending, if life could just end right there.
other again, could’ve had a real friendship. Instead, you have chosen the story.

This pursuit is one possible reason why the men in her songs are often the least
detailed part. The narrator describes them as “beautiful” and “flawless,” like they’re
works of art, or models. She marvels at how one of them “shines.” Another is her
“muse.” I don’t think she’s just leaving room for the listener to picture their own
lives (as dutiful pop stars do), because she also makes you aware, if you’re interested,
of who exactly she’s singing about. While Swift once refused to explicitly confirm
the identities of her subjects, she used to leave clues in her liner notes by capitalizing
key letters in each song’s lyrics to spell out names or known biographical details of

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 famous men. Listening with this added quality of reality made me feel like I could - That leaves just a few scenes, which I can be okay with if you
exaggerate them simply so they are not just directly lifting from our
hear her experience crying out from behind the music. Not a secret message like Paul actual lives. You can amplify the emotional essence but change the
is dead. Just the truth: Taylor is alive. specifics.

- I love including the kid at the 1989 Tour who was dressed as the
Such hints nourished listeners’ fantasies of romance, yes, but also fame. Another Statue of Liberty. But I don’t get why you have to call him “pimply and
bespectacled” and juxtapose him so viciously with the friends I brought
songwriter could tell you what it’s like to be picked up by a guy in a fast car in the onstage. I honestly think you are projecting your own shame onto the
middle of the night, but only Taylor Swift could tell you what it’s like to be picked situation. Who are you to say that he was pained that we were all ‘so
close, yet so far’? That we didn’t hear him scream ‘you’re so beautiful’?
up by Harry Styles in a fast car in the middle of the night. Her memory becomes our And why in any case is it somehow tragic for a sweet kid to be happy to
big-budget fanfiction. It is, Harry Styles might say, “like a movie.” see people he admires up close?

That kind of gets at my issue with the whole thing. You say you are trying to
And here is where Swift’s movie becomes our lives. We don’t need to be able to retrieve a pure love of my music but your perspective remains cynical throughout.

picture ourselves in the song, because we can just picture what we are sure is her This stuff is not that deep. I try to make music that I think people will love. Just
reality—which is so much realer than ours—and sublimate our own desire and because this book is “ultimately about you” or you keep saying “Swift’s narrator”
doesn’t mean you aren’t pushing this idea of me as immature, scheming, even
frustration into the narrative of this ultimate, ideal protagonist. diagnosing me with PTSD and insinuating everything I do is about trying to
maintain control and film some kind of void.

I have many friends who find this exchange distracting from the music, even alienat- The irony also gets a bit tired. You can just like music. It’s fine.
ing. This mode of listening, this deep awareness of celebrity, is not for everyone. But it
I understand that my life is extraordinary. Sometimes I feel I’ve inherited it from
sure is for a lot of people. Millions and millions of friends. No one wanted to play with my younger self and wish that I’d used different methods to achieve my success.
me as a little kid / So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since / To make them love But what feels inauthentic to you feels inauthentic to you because if it were you
telling 80,000 people that you love them, it might be inauthentic. Maybe there are
me and make it seem effortless. things you do as a writer and actor that another person would find too vulnerable
to be believed, but that doesn’t mean you’re being fake.
*
I have had a long time to get used to these conditions and to learn how to
function within them. To have meaningful relationships and protect my creative
This brings us to the other hallmark of adolescence: the belief that how you feel now spark and autonomy and yes, even make choices that are not about what’s best
is how you’ll always feel. In 2013, a New York magazine story called “Why You Truly for my image. I am sure this all sounds improbable, even impossible, to you, but
then, my life is kind of a miracle.
Never Leave High School” argued such permanence from a physiological perspective.
Jennifer Senior explains that as a teen, your brain is buzzing with more dopamine I also think my entrepreneurial instincts have struck people as deceptive because
for a long time I had to pretend I was not pulling the strings of my own career.
than at any other point, which intensifies feeling. Neural connections have yet to People don’t want young women to have agency, they want them to be victims of
consolidate, meaning that the brain’s emotional regions have more influence. The a giant system (Britney) or else somehow pure and removed from it (indie). Now
there is a pop titan who doesn’t have a Svengali—who is her own boss—who
researcher Laurence Steinberg says, “During times when your identity is in transition, isn’t pressured into doing anything she doesn’t want because a conference room
it’s possible you store memories better than you do in times of stability.” (In 2023, of men told her to—and instead of celebrating this for the achievement it is, I’m a

12 65
 - Delete paparazzi scene. You did not look like an owl :) another researcher who surveyed people on what age they feel inside found that many

- Delete “matchmaking” phone call. said the same age at which they experienced a trauma.)

- Delete Nora Ephron convo.

Teens are also chemically primed to develop a lifelong commitment to a fandom.
- Delete “You’re So Vain” story. The prefrontal cortex is newly able to fold stimuli into a sense of “self” or identity,

- Delete ride upstate. meaning the cultural stimuli one is exposed to makes more of an impression. Such
fierce self-definition also serves the developmental need to separate from one’s parents.
- Delete motel bar.

- Delete dive bar. But you still need parents, or role models. Enter the idol.

- Delete cafe.
But the idol cannot be a parent. The idol is herself a teen.
- Delete Coney Island.

- Delete takeout coffee. In the 2019 documentary Miss Americana, Swift repeats the cliché that famous

- Delete note I left you. people “freeze” at the age that they become famous. She wonders aloud how her
public gains and losses may have defined her, to herself.
- Delete letter you sent me.

- Delete ring you gave me. Remember: “I relate to Taylor Swift because I too have never gotten over anything

- Delete voicemail I left you. that’s ever happened to me.”

- Delete secret language.

The follow-up tweet: “I don’t write songs tho I just have PTSD.”
- Delete polaroid.

- Delete film reel. Swift was maybe saying, in Miss Americana, “The songs didn’t necessarily take care
of everything!”
- Delete postcard.

- Delete locket. And so we are stuck in a slow dance at ghost prom: Swift, myself, and all the other

- Delete cardigan. heartbroken teens.

- Delete dress.
No artist has represented this dynamic as aptly as Swift with her rerecords. In
- Delete key. 2021, she began releasing rerecorded versions of her first six albums to devalue the

- Delete scarf. originals—she doesn’t own them and was reportedly unable to buy them, the

64 13
 result of a shady deal with her first label. With fans incentivized to stream only those - This is more of a copyediting thing, but sometimes you use the
first- and second-person interchangeably, even over the course of a
tracks she owns, the authorship trope has evolved from lyrical motif to political cause. sentence.
These albums’ titles are framed by the parenthetical (Taylor’s Version), and their pro-
- Also thought of Joni’s line “love is a story told to a friend / it’s second
duction attempts to replicate the first recordings entirely. These are not reinventions, hand” if you feel like finding a place for that.
reinterpretations, or an 80-year-old Bob Dylan changing the time signatures of his
- I don’t get why you’re making it seem like we only ever talked about
greatest hits. Taylor’s Versions say, “Do look back.” guys. I remember us talking about work a lot, whether you should go to
college, friendships, our families, movies, books, music…we definitely
passed the Bechdel Test.
There is some gender poetry to the idea that Swift is trying to perfectly replicate the
songs of her relative youth rather than deconstructing and reimagining them. Also, - As for the impact my work has had on you, I wonder about the more
positive aspects of this. What about the way you documented your
that this backward-looking comes much sooner than most career retrospectives, as life on Rookie, inspiring other girls in turn? Was writing only ever a
did the Eras Tour. You see, all the wisest women had to do it this way / ‘Cause we were cannibalizing act for you?

born to be the pawn in every lover’s game. But the recordings have another resonance - So much condescension around what teens are capable of,
for me, too. It’s quite the non-sensation to press “play” on a new album, quaking intellectually and emotionally. Fascinating since you talk about being
underestimated when you were that age. Could be interesting to
with excitement, and hear…songs I have heard one zillion times, to a T. Still, I listen explore, like is this just what happens in adulthood.
closely. Not for artistic choices, but for time. Mystical time, wondrous time…bottled
- While I understand keeping me blurry and out of focus to show that
time. Not a time that moves forward. It’s the sonic analog to conjuring a memory to you’re projecting, I am kind of flat as a result. Maybe there are small
see if you can really send yourself back, re-feel, testing the limits of your mortality, ways to show I may have also been trying to connect, needed someone
to talk to, etc.
and of the present.
- In that same vein, I don’t experience a change of any kind. Is there a
way to hint that more was going on with me? Reading this also
As many have noted, the irreconcilable difference is Taylor’s voice. It cannot be as reminded me how one thing I found disorienting about becoming famous
high as it was. It’s hard to recreate emotions, illusions, to un-know years of experi- was how often I changed (like any teen) and how slow any publicity or
marketing was to reflect these changes, if at all. Maybe you can relate?
ence. On the rerecords, I do not hear the smiles and heartache from back when the Meaning there could even be a way to zoom out and be like, btw, our
words were urgent. Sometimes the perspective is a relief. Sometimes the inability to “selves” are ultimately incoherent, our identities are unstable, our
experiences are fleeting, our memories are malleable, our words and
go back is depressing. (I don’t know about you / But I’m feeling 22!) Sometimes I hear photos can obscure as much as they can clarify—so like, who knows
newfound wisdom in her detachment. what really happened?

- Delete my first text to you. Too close to the bone.

Each song offers a different take on whether it’s better to process life through art
- Delete NY lunch scene. This is basically all gossip.
with more hindsight, or when the experience is fresh; to document when you’re in it,
or when you’ve had time to reflect. Swift’s revisiting can feel hopeful and expansive - Delete bday scene. We don’t talk anymore.

(time heals or at least changes all wounds) as well as damning (trauma is never healed; - Delete Grammys party. Not quite relatable.

14 63
 Hi Tavi, long live adolescence). Either way, she’s doubling down on the long-standing critique

Per your talk with Tree… that she just can’t let things go, reframing her capacity for obsession as her greatest
asset. She is also showing us a way forward through our own nostalgia, zooming out
First of all, you’re an amazing writer, duh.
from individual heartbreaks to the real arc.
You have identified some facets of my songwriting that I’m really proud of and
which sometimes get overlooked. Thank you. *

Then here are the changes:

“Are you ready to go back to high school?” Swift asked the crowd at MetLife
- Add that I have songs that are meta and self-aware about the Stadium.
controlling/obsessive quality—Mastermind, Blank Space, mad woman,
Picture To Burn, a lot of reputation, etc.
The eight-year-old next to me screamed.
- Also songs that champion privacy like Dress, Sweet Nothing, etc.

- And songs that are about me getting in my own way, not playing the “You Belong With Me” kicked in with its optimistic banjo and I briefly felt 16, like I’d
victim—The Archer, a lot of 1989 and reputation, Back To December, I’m
sure you know all these. unrung some bells. I thought about high school, yes, and boys, of course, but I also
became a character in Swift’s story, reminiscing about the early days of our courtship.
- Some of my songs are about how love isn’t a movie, e.g. White Horse.
When she sang You belong with me, she gestured to the crowd. When she sang, Who
- I think your interpretation of All Too Well is incomplete. Of course the could ever leave me, darling? But who could stay? You could stay, she gestured to the
narrator is naive and hopelessly romantic compared to her ex—
the song is about an age gap, a power imbalance, made explicit in the crowd. Unburdened from the plotlines that used to structure each album cycle, she
long version but hinted at in the short one via the scarf which “reminds could finally just sing to her narrator’s one true love: the listener.
[him] of innocence.” Her unrealistic expectations should only emphasize
the gulf between their experiences. Her capacity for remembering,
compared to his, is a symptom of youth. And her need for control, to She pranced through her catalog, her old selves, reviving such dance moves as
tell the story, might also be seen as a trauma response. The line “The
idea you had of me—who was she?” indicates that he was the first to strumming-while-strutting and forming-a-heart-with-her-hands. She did not over-
dehumanize-by-idealizing. It should be unsettling to relisten to the 2012 commit to emotional performances as though still distraught over a guy she dated at
version with the understanding that they had been living in his fantasy.
19. Rather, she beheld her younger self, with all that talent and insight, and pointed:
- No one’s ever noted that “wind in my hair,” “down the stairs,” “running Okay, HOW COOL is this? Anticipatory nostalgia, I thought, can also entail
scared”—these are all in-motion, creating a time-traveling effect once
they all come back in a sequence. Something to add maybe. anticipatory wisdom.

- I don’t know if Invisible String is the right title for the section about
our relationship. If it has to be a song title then maybe Blank Space, I’d never cared much for “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From
Labyrinth, or Mirrorball. The Vault),” the 2021 rendition which includes verses that had been left on the

- On the title of the whole book: I’m not confident in its nuances and cutting room floor back in 2012. The shorter one is so perfect, a superior work of art.
think it will just read as instantly infantilizing. Pitch me a few alts? But experiencing the 10-minute version live, repetitive and trancelike, I finally heard

62 15
 the line, It was rare. The narrator is referring, of course, to the short-lived relationship *Tavi, sorry! Autocorrect!

that she is burdened with remembering, pleading for her ex to confirm that it marred Sent from my iPhone
him, too. Sung over and over, the lyric broke my heart. It sounded like denial. The
more you hear the word rare, the less special it becomes. When 80,000 people are
also crying, you become less special, too. The Swift of the Eras Tour seemed to accept
what the masterpiece-maker couldn’t: the relationship was not unique. Other people
could relate to its story. Find solace in it.

“I don’t care about anything that happened to me when I was 19, except the songs I
wrote.”

This framing was once viewed as sociopathic—“She dates guys just to write about
them!”—and now it holds a simpler truth: meaning outlives experience. And
meaning grows when it is shared, when it’s a connecting force, as with music, as
with fandom. We were characters in her story, yes, but chiefly so it could support
our own, the need to make narrative sense, to track our growings-up, to hold on till
it was safe to let go, to remain frozen till we were ready to thaw. With each Era, she
gave us the chance to relive our own. By dressing up as different Eras, we also played
our younger selves. When we sang along, we imitated the voice we know so well from
the recordings, and the people we were when we first heard it sing our prayers. And
this of course was the story all along: not life as a movie, not relationships as a story,
but the story as a new relationship—with the fans, for the fans, the “longest and best
relationship [she has] ever had.”

Here’s another way of looking at Swiftie amnesia: they lost themselves. They do not
remember the tour because they were too present to collect and capture as Swift
had once encouraged. Maybe this was not a loss, but a bracing act of surrender to
oblivion—the ultimate sacrifice a Swiftie can make. Maybe this oblivion is true love,
real experience. Maybe it is more lasting, more rewarding, than the image, the movie,
the memory. You know the greatest films of all time were never made.

16 61
 Taco what’s your number?

Sent from my iPhone

60 17
 Hi Tree,

Hope you’re doing well. We met a long time ago, when I interviewed Taylor for
OK, that was my smug little “culture critic” attempt at talking
g ELLE in 2015.
about some aspects of Taylor’s music that I think get over-
I’m not sure if she told you, but she and I had been emailing about a novel I
looked, as if one of the most famous people in the world isn’t
wrote, based on her music. I would imagine she doesn’t have much time right
talked about enough, or more like I just need to plant a flag
now to read weird fiction or answer emails, so I wonder if you have any sense of
in whatever unique (God willing) contributions I can make to her preferred next steps with this. She is aware we’re on a deadline though we
a subject that I, as a Swiftie, feel competitive about, which is can continue to push it if need be. Kindly let me know if I should pick this up with
ironic because if I am really being possessive, if I really feel a you or her or what. Thanks so much!
desperate need to insert myself into the Conversation, then
All the best,
what I should lead with is that I know Taylor, I knew Taylor,
we were friends, maybe we are still friends, if you can be
Tavi
friends with someone without ever talking to them, I mean if
there is maybe a distant mutual respect or even—eek—wist-
fulness; I mean if she ever wonders what became of the drunk
“multi-hyphenate” with the incoherent career who spun like
a top (really dreidel) through her homes and parties and one
time insisted I didn’t need a ride home before being spotted by
Taylor on the street—here, here was her text to me: “We drove
around yelling TAVI for 15 minutes till we found you clinging
to a light post, like a chic Dickensian orphan. You curled up on
the floor of the car and said ‘I just need to be a cat right now’
and that you were afraid of the seat. We parked and I told you
stories till sunrise, when you looked up and asked to be taken
home. Then we drove you to your address, which turned out to
be the diner from Seinfeld.”

I sorely hope she still remembers that chic Dickensian

orphan—standing in a nice dress, clinging to a streetlamp—
but as a scholar of Taylor Swift, I also know that remembering
means The End, and so I must now retain what I can, put a
frame around it, write our song—I just realized everything I
have is someday gonna be gone.

18 59
 Hi Taylor,

Thought I’d check in one last time before proceeding. If I don’t hear from you I’ll
assume I’m good to go. Please let me know if you feel otherwise. I am using the genre of fiction as insurance—Swifties are
among the most well-organized grassroots movements of our
Thanks, time; I don’t need their wrath—and I am told (I’ve never writ-
ten as not-me before) that the plausible deniability of “fiction”
Tavi
makes it that much easier to be truthful, as I can free myself of
protecting both her and me—not that I want to denigrate her,
at all—nor find and tell the truth of who she is (impossible)—
but so I can more honestly document how it all felt, with her
as my blank space, my mirrorball, my guy in a Taylor Swift
song. Like, erudite Swifties understand that when Taylor said
folklore and evermore were written from the points-of-view of
characters, she was really just describing what she was doing
all along but now explicitly, liberating her from the demands
of autobiography, from having to fold every goddamn lyric into
p
some public narrative or worry how the virgins who annotate
migh be projecting this time. Like, when 1989 came
Genius might
out, Taylor said she wrote some of it by pausing John Hughes
t
movies and trying to guess what the characters were thinking,
and then some
s tabloid ran a headline that said she “Wasn’t
Eno
Sad Enough to Write 1989, Borrowed Fictional Emotions,” as
though 1) emotions have any rational, linear relationship to
exp
experience, or as though 2) this is not what Dylan and
S
Springsteen did, draw on the culture’s armchair nostalgia and
let it seem lived-in some of the time. Like, is the expression
itself not true enough? Must we limit artistic process with some
literal, 1:1, trauma-plotted idea of the muse? If I say that our
friendship is no more, you might be led to think that we had
some kind of conflict, when really all that occurred was the fis-
sure between her spirit and her physical form, between reality
and my teenage heart, leading me to now ask, as her narrator
so often does: Was it all in my head? Leaving me ashamed,
estranged from the music I once held dear, desperately needing
to retrieve the purity of my earlier fandom, my imagination, my

58 19
 Hey Taylor,

Just checking in on the below. I want to make sure there’s time to address
youth; forcing me to look back, and back, and back, past the anything that raises flags for you as we’ll be sending out advance copies in the
memories, beyond the events, before even her music’s capture coming weeks.
of my soul, to the precise suite of psychological issues which
Thank you again. I can’t know how exactly this feels for you, but appreciate you
would prime me to hear the God in it.
being supportive of my work.

My narrator :-) started a fashion blog as a kid at a time when And I will be at Eras! My friend is getting us tickets through her manager. My
it was still novel for children to use the internet and got a lot of Shabbos goy. Can’t wait!
attention for it, from magazines, news stations, and, less chicly,
Best,
news sites. Fun/sad: some people thought I did not exist. That
the blog was a hoax written by my parents or by a grown
Tavi
wo
w
woman who just looked very small, like the movie Orphan, but
f r a blog. This brazen lot of lazy skeptics included not only
fo
for
ano
anonymous gray avatars but alleged journalists, and while I
was told to take it as a compliment that my writing passed for
a-ho
a-hoax-by-adults, I heard only hoax. Fraud. Impostor. Nobody
ever doubted the existence of someone who clearly belonged.

In the face of such doubt, a new pattern was formed: feel like a
loser, go away, write something vulnerable and thorough that
proves some people wrong about something, post it, receive
praise, and ambivalently return to “the work” while waiting
for the other shoe to drop. (In my head, the sky is full of many
pairs of shoes.) For my inaugural edition of proving-people-
wrong writing, I dissected the adult impulse to underestimate
children and took photos of myself in front of a wall I’d lined
with newspaper (a spiritual predecessor to the artwork for Tay-
lor’s reputation). I also could not help but include evidence as
to my existence: other bloggers had met me, my parents hated
fashion, I used a tripod and a self-timer so no there was not
some grown-up behind the camera.

Starting at age 13, I was flown all over the world for my writing
but
b also my image-double; I reviewed fashion shows and

20 57
 Hey Taylor,

Hope you’re having a good week. Wanted to see if you’ve had time to read what I
sent you, whenever you have a chance to let me know. interviewed designers, and I was photographed a lot, because
of what I represented to people—youth, prodigious skill, enthu-
Thanks so much, siasm, youthful enthusiasm, a period of seeming meritocracy in
the then-youthful internet, authenticity, youth. The world was
Tavi
my oyster, and then it clamped shut while I was inside. You’ll
never be a kid again!, the oyster bubbled. This isn’t wholly
true; it’s just how it felt sometimes. The world I speak of was
not quite or only adults and celebrity, but also a life online,
co
constant documentation and relentless comparing between my
sselves old and new, and sometimes it included the feeling of
wishing that I could delete them all, also known as adolescence.
I actually think the internet has turned all of us into perpetual
teenagers—defined by what we like, very tribalist, irrationally
ascribing morality to taste because IDENTITY!!!!!! But—
another time.

I’m skipping over a bunch of stuff, but between taking photos

of myself and my outfits several times a week (including many
intended to look like film stills from made-up movies), and
eventually starting an online magazine for teenagers, Rookie,
and also using Instagram since its inception, and keeping a list
of “Moments of Strange Magic” which could be either from life
or movies or a movie in my head while listening to music,
I became very practiced in writing about and photographing
myself and my life, and also orchestrating them. Yes: my
attachment style did not justt go backward, clinging to the past,
w moments should present as
but forward, anticipating how
ened. (Remember the Eras Elegy
though they’d already happened.
Tour: “Are you ready to go back
ack to high school?” An eight-year-
old: “YAAAAAAA!!!!!”)

ouple years ago a writer from Teen

Rookie is dead now, but a couple
Vogue called it “a harbinger for the main character energy that

56 21
 Hi Taylor!

Haha yes! Finally a member of the 27 club :-)

has taken over
o TikTok today,” for how it encouraged a mode
of aestheticizing your life that made some readers feel like And totally—this is something I’ve struggled with before, people’s eagerness
to take art literally. It’s part of why I’m so grateful for the philosophy of
not-enough (like their lives were boring or they were uncool)
subjectivity-in-art-and-memory modeled by your work, which I try to use in the
and made others feel like more enough than they’d realized,
book to set the reader’s expectation.
like every day was a creative outlet, like just getting dressed
and making playlists were ways to live in your own movie. Now For example, I loved in the reputation liner notes when you decried the impulse
AI automates this process. The Spotify CEO says they’re “not to try and unbox a song’s spark “as if the inspiration for music is as simple and
in the music space—we’re in the moment space.” A feature basic as a paternity test.” I have long been curious about the reference to
fatherhood there, if you care to expand. Like maybe this linear conception of
of theirs called GetReadyWithMusic (gesundheit!) asks what
life event → art is patriarchal. And maybe people most crave such simplicity
you’re wearing (perverts…) and generates a playlist to match
when the inspiration might have been one evil famous man they can then
(ugh). It’s enough to make me romanticize my teen self’s more obsess over (and thereby reify) in an extremely online, True Crime-ish way.
analog (though often digital) modes of curation, but I have to
remember these habits were also predetermined by cultural I also find that writing by women across genres is basically judged by Do I like
memory, inherited fantasies. Notably, the photos most her? rather than What is she saying? (See also: presidential elections,
defamation trials around allegations of domestic violence…) I even hesitate to
associated with Rookie’s aesthetic were taken by Petra Collins,
publish this book because I don’t want people to think I am complaining by trying
who has since written that, having dropped out of high school,
to depict the neuroses of fame, or that I feel them at a consistent pitch.
she used these photos to live vicariously through me and her Thankfully, you have made audiences smarter by mainstreaming the idea that
other subjects, to forge her own “normal teenage experience.” any work of art—a song, a sentence—might just be an expression of a single
Even though I was often the one in the photo, I also lived feeling on a single day. An expression sometimes of nothing other than itself.
vicariously through them, for while I did go to school and enjoy
I hope that even if the book is taken as completely true, you only look thoughtful,
my “normalcy,” I also had like, a job, and worked closely with
generous, and supportive of me.
adults, and whatnot. Recently, a journalist for the Harvard
Crimson wrote a lovely piece about the combined pleasures Thanks,
and alienation of striving to make Rookie-like content of her
own life. I offer a line from an email Jeffrey Eugenides wrote Tavi
Sofia Coppola about adapting The Virgin Suicides, one of
teen-me’s most-cited touchstones: “Remember: the girls do
not exist.”

As for me, post-Rookie,

post Roo I continued to write about my life in
semi-viral personal essays, and I also used to do sponsored
posts on Instagram and go to events and panels and screen-
ings, etc., which unl
unless they were paid had little practical

55
 Cool, thanks so much! I’ll let you know when I’ve read it.

I am worried also that even if it’s fiction, people will assume it’s true—that’s kind
of how these things go. But I’ll read it first. Thanks Tavi. Also isn’t it your application beyond a vague “putting yourself out there,” but
ap
birthday?! HBD friend! w
which I guess made me an influencer. I have also been acting
since I was a teen, which has sometimes meant wishing I was
better at things like “likability” and “being a vessel” which are
sadly a nightmare for a writer who wants to write anything
autobiographical and most of all challenging—but do I? Now,
yes, hoping that “fiction” is one way out of the Taylor Swift
Problem, where everything you write is also branding, which is
also the Life Right Now Problem, and though there are degrees
at different scales, it is not so perfectly embodied by any of
the less autobiographical, less savvy, and less good at writing
artists among our culture’s current constellation of stars. I tried
so hard in Part One to write about her music as just music,
just art, as though she were just plunking away in a goddamn
coffee shop all this time; as though her songs act merely as
songs and not also public statements; this was disingenuous
of me, fanciful, to vacuum-seal the message away from its
medium; you can hear in the writing that I’m looking over my
shoulder—but at you or her? I am desperate to tell the Tavi’s
Version of my relationship to this cultural empire which is also
a human being, but disregarding her humanity would be cruel,
plus feed the audience’s more prurient appetites, whereas
being withholding and coy makes me feel like a class traitor,
the class being fans, Swifties, people who grew up on the
internet; this may sound phony coming from someone whom
cultural gatekeepers have long allowed inside the world-oyster,
but that’s the thing about “freezing” when you were a teen/
became famous/were maybe a bit traumatized by the sheer
volume of harassment that seemed somehow objective rather
than manmade: you might be very self-conscious, but not quite
self-aware—reasons to sympathize with Taylor (’s narrator),
but also to write honestly and with a populist spirit about the
t, then I won’t
horror of fame; of course, if this is honest, won
o ’tt be
be

54
 Hey Taylor,

First of all—that photo!

likable, but that becomes another way of being liked, via quality
work. I call these contradictions the Taylor Swift Problem but Thanks for getting back to me and for being so open. Take your time, of course. I
want to make sure you’re comfortable, or at least tolerably uncomfortable.
she seems to be doing just fine; it is I who casts a cynical pall
over a cultural phenomenon quite worthy of celebration, who
Also, omg, it’s fiction!!!! Should’ve said that right away, jeez. The reader should
sees a vacuum into which is drawn [my] own gift for deceit feel as though everything they’re reading may have been a non-event. Was
(Philip Roth, not Taylor)—and now, snake that I am, I come thinking a lot about the Neruda line you quoted in the Red liner notes (“love is so
to find my tail staring me in the face, forcing itself down my short, forgetting is so long”) and also Henry James via Graham Greene: “a young
throat. It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem. It’s me. woman with sufficient talent need only pass the messroom windows of a Guards
barracks and look inside in order to write a novel about the Brigade.” (Have you
ever read The End of the Affair? It’s very us.)
*
Re: extrapolating, I actually did try writing it as just cultural criticism at first, but it
Taylor Swift was once a simple subject for me. My first song felt disingenuous given that our relationship is publicly documented. I also think
was “Our Song,” from her first album, released in 2006. My I was overlooking a much more interesting phenomenon, which is that you as
sister showed me the video when I was in sixth grade, pre-blog, a figure and as a person I knew/know are inextricable from the songs—which
sort of echoes the music’s autobiographical element, its references to your
on the computer in our basement. I tried to place Taylor on
persona, and the trappings of fandom. Few artists play with that tension with as
my matrix of female celebrities in which I could see myself. I
much success. Really, there is no artist of any kind whose work has captured my
thought I was too edgy for her, as I had recently started imagination enough for me to move with such dexterity through their discography,
wearing a H&M hoodie printed with neon cassette tapes, but lyrics, motifs, poses, etc.; nor who has created a mythology so resonant that it is
she wrote songs and played guitar, which meant she was smart even possible for more than a few readers to pick up on minor references—who
and artsy. Most of all, the song made me feel so happy. My has come to own so much of the collective consciousness. I’m not trying to blow
smoke, though I do think it’s a compliment.
friend and I uploaded a video of ourselves singing it to
YouTube under the inexplicably asymmetrical name KAG (Kate
If I do a good job, it would be impossible to like this book without also deepening
And Gevinson), which I then deleted without comment one an appreciation for your music and even sympathy for the challenges of being a
time when I was mad at her. young female artist, particularly at a mass scale.

When Taylor’s second album came out, I was in 8th grade, had But again—let me know what you think.
blue hair, and fell asleep every night to Hole’s Live Through
Yrs,
This. I made feminist zines and read old issues of Sassy, and
g to imagine
had begun g its online descendant in Rookie. I didn’t
Tavi
se
eek out Fearle
seek l ss, although
Fearless, alt
l hough its
it hits were ubiquitous. I guess I
did play that
that part from “You Belong With Me” over and over: I
know
w you bet
e ta THAN that. Hey watcha doin’ with a girl LIKE
betta
that
th
hat
at.. So
that. So sunny, so tempting. I could be the kind of person who

53
 Hey Tavi,

It’s so nice to hear from you. I hope you’re continuing to kill it in your work and
are thriving in all other ways. could like this music, my brain said, while my heart burst open,
full of longing and joy—they somehow went together! Explic-
Your book sounds exciting, though I admit it makes me a bit nervous. If you
itly, however, she still felt too normie, boy-obsessed, vaguely
are extrapolating as much as it sounds, maybe you don’t need me in there as
Republican.
a person? Maybe it could just be about my music.

Just my initial reaction. Will for sure read it when I have a bit of time. I have Then, the summer after my sophomore year, I was sitting at my
always appreciated your perspective on my work and I’m glad to hear it’s inspired family’s kitchen table alone, poring over pdfs of all 350 pages of
a longer project. the first Rookie Yearbook, which was indeed an anthology that
resembled a high school yearbook (I’m not in my actual high
Xo
school yearbook from that year—missed picture day—working).
Taylor I was cramming to meet a publisher deadline before flying to
New York to start a national tour of Rookie reader meetups
P.S. I just found this photo (attached) from…the night we met? Were we ever so that would last three weeks. Something prompted me to torrent
young! Taylor’s third album, and it carried me away to a teen movie of
the mind.

I spent hours catching up on years of music and interviews,

including a New Yorker profile by the same journalist who’d
written one of me, trying to compare the generosity of her gaze
o
on Taylor versus my 14-year-old self; suddenly, we were kids
u
united against “Danie,” who was actually fine, but whose name
g
goes in quotes out of…a delayed act of aggression toward adults
who observed me when I was young? A need to show that I
know it was absurd, that I’m “grounded” now? An impulse to
distance myself, as I can barely touch how isolating it felt to be
so singled out at an age when the vastness of the world has just
begun to register, even though stockpiling such prestigious
coverage also made my unique career possible? Anyway, I
became familiar with Swift’s detractors’ arguments: She doesn’t
REALLY write her own songs. She only dated that guy for six
ostalgia. I
months. No one this young could have this much nostalgia.
n work:
heard echoes of comments, nay, op-eds!, on my own
An adult is doing all this for her. A tween writing about life is

52
 Hi Taylor,

I hope you and yours are all doing well. I know it’s been a long time since we’ve
a form of emotional ventriloquism. No one this young could been in touch, but I’m always happy to learn what you’re up to and excited by
have this much nostalgia. the work you’ve been putting out.

I’m reaching out because I wrote a book inspired by your music that is coming
I watched the Fearless tour documentary, still at our kitchen
out with FSG this winter. I wanted to share with you now so you know what’ll be
table, getting chair sores, and leaned in during the performance out there. And while we’re already in copyedits, there is time to make changes
of “You Belong With Me.” Taylor was on a stadium stage and if anything feels seriously problematic to you. The narrator is a heightened,
behind her was a large screen showing a backdrop of a set unreliable version of me, and while I draw on time we’ve spent together, you’re
of lockers. With the camera this close, I could see the image really there as a mirror for my thoughts about fame, fandom, and writing.
crudely broken up into dots like a Lichtenstein. Taylor was
I’ve attached it here. The title, Portrait of the Artist as a Young-Girl, is a
wearing a marching band uniform, singing about her unrequit-
reference to the book Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl
ed love for her best guy friend, and, I assumed, drawing on the by an anonymous (must be nice, lol) philosophy collective. It puts forth a theory
one year of high school that she attended before becoming a of an archetype who has learned to commodify every aspect of her life and
full-time country music star. A classmate had recently view everything in terms of currency and her personal brand. Patriarchy and
messaged me on Facebook to say that he had seen me smoking capitalism have shaped her values and her notions of real experience. Their
aims have been sublimated into her desires. I have some issues with the book,
in the alley north of the school and that I was “really trying to
but it works best when you think of the Young-Girl as a mode of being rather
force the whole ‘teenager’ thing.” I defended myself by say-
than a type of person. I don’t think any human being really is a Young-Girl,
ing that was “physiologically impossible”—you can hear my but I do think the world wants us to be.
panic—but after seeing Taylor’s jumbotron lockers, I felt my
performance was validated. I decided that posing was the most The reader might first think the title refers to you, but the piece ends up being
teenage thing you can do. When I got time to catch up in my a self-portrait. My character is such a Young-Girl (sad) (beautiful, tragic) that I
can’t stop thinking about the “Story Of Us” till I’m lost in the memory.
diary, I wrote:

Sorry. See? If you found that joke intolerable, this might be a hard read. But, it’s
TAYLOR…Some point before leaving I’d been working
here.
nonstop all week (before I got to NY I hadn’t slept in
36 hours, yaaaay) and decided to download all her
Thank you for humoring me, and I hope this doesn’t feel too much like
albums and listened to Speak Now over and over and
discovering I have several dead bodies in my basement. Please reach out if you
over and fell in love…and watched a ton of videos
want to talk about it. I know this must be strange for you, but I don’t want it to be
and fell in love more...part of it was wanting to feel
a source of stress. My number is still 708.xxx.xxxx.
normal—not weird; part of demented girl culture; not
someone who consistently isolates herself, but just
Warmly,
like a normal girl whose world is less complex and
exhausting (I really hate my brain a lot these days), Tavi
but someone whose life is not work + responsibility
the way mine is...obviously I love what I do but my
God…it’s not the fantasy fairytale stuff that sticks out

51
 to me in her songs, that I’m so charmed by, as much
as the normal, clichéd high school stuff. And when I
listen, I’m not even imagining all this stuff happening
to me, it’s just her, and I just like, want good things
to happen for her. Her music must be similar for
her, no? She started homeschooling at 15…her NYer
profile has you imagine this delicate angel who could
fall apart from stress at any moment…and besides the
desire for normalcy, and liking things without having
to just PICK THEM APART TO BITS to JUSTIFY it, I
just really love her music…

The beginning of “Love Story” sounds like footsteps in

the woods…I like when I can hear her smiling as she’s
singing. When I first really listened to her, when I was
tired & working, I cried, but it wasn’t just because of
my state at the time, she still makes me cry because
she gets emotions so accurately…her music just
makes me feel hopeful…the fairytale stuff makes new
Part Three: Mine teenage feelings feel like a safer transition, and I don’t
think that in itself makes her or her music BAD and
ANTI-FEMINIST, or even the other stuff people take
issue with…I have a lot of thoughts on that but would
rather write & organize it on my computer…man, I
really wish I’d written in here when I first realized
how much I love her because
ause it was so overwhelm-
ing and emotional…theree was no time though…and
because her music is made de for daydreaming, it wasn’t
sad to me that I wasn’t living
ving these scenarios, it felt
instead like I was exactly where I’m supposed to be,
like there was something to be said for being a
dreamer, too…

I started following Taylor’s career as a higher-stakes, more

famous, more mainstream version
n of my own. I related to her
need to magnify limited experiencee so that it could catch up
with writerly compulsion. I challenged
nged anyone who insinuat-
ed that she didn’t write her own work.
ork. I defended her ability

27
 tto blow
bl up brief
b i f chats
h t into
i t epic
i ballads
b ll d as the
th mark
k off a true
t
writer, and a true teen. Sure, she was a mega-famous pop star,
but wasn’t it, like, very adolescent that she would use writing
to temporarily turn away from her career and be just some girl
trying to figure out the meaning of love? And if it is adolescent
to believe so much in your own subjectivity that you think
everything happening to you has never happened to anyone
before, wouldn’t this belief only be exacerbated by the unique
circumstances of fame and/or uncharted professional territory,
so that even if her sense of scale ever seemed off, her work was
at least an authentic display of delusion? And if this delusion
resonated with millions of “normal” teens, what did it mat-
ter if her teendom was “forced,” her emotions “fictional,” her
concerns “myopic,” her worldview “naïve”? If your worldview
is affirmed by the world, maybe it just is the world? If your
worldview is affirmed by the world, maybe…you are the world?
Like “We Are the World,” but you, alone, in a recording booth,
singing out your negative emotions and bad experiences, for
a cause!, knowing they will not just resonate with “normal”
teens but pique the curiosity of the New Yorker set, perhaps so
successfully and vulnerably (making you even more invulner-
able to critique—“so brave”), that you might never again know
the sting of being trolled or criticized or feeling like a loser; as
my boyfriend recently said of much trauma art: “not so much
processing the event as killing it and mounting it on a wall”?
That’s right, “boyfriend”…the ugly duckling has become kind
of a swan…!

Yes: there was the compulsive need to save the good memories,
the need to prove authorship, and the use of writing as a
vehicle for revenge and control and finally mass approval,
a
achieving the kind of success that would prove those strangers
w
wrong and show that my life had worked out; that whatever

28
self. And in that way, “Nothing New” carries more wisdom than ““normalcy”
l ”h had
dbbeen sacrifi
ificed
d had
h d been,
b in
i fact,
f t worth
th it.
it
those songs of hers that turn losing into winning. It doesn’t
have an enemy or story. It conquers nothing. It is just about a Sometimes I think ambition is not drive so much as an
feeling. intolerance for unhappy endings.

* I wasn’t too in touch with my anger as a teen. Compassion

was closer to the surface. When I saw hateful comments about
When I was 22, I played Frankie in a production of The Mem- me, I imagined the kind of pain one must be in to feel burning
ber of the Wedding. She is typically played by a woman in her hatred for a stranger. I promised myself I would never become
twenties; my mom says it’s the role I’ve played that is most like the kind of person who felt hatred for people I did not know.
me. During the run, I read my diary from age 12, in which I had In fact, I would be so good at what I did, and so friendly and
written, “I would like to start a club. I don’t know who will be in generous to anyone who ever wanted anything from me, that
it or what it will be about but it will be very good and good for that would show those fucking assholes who hated me, that
me.” When not consumed with the show, I was exploring the would show them that they were wrong and I was good, fuck
grim options for Rookie’s financial future. It would fold a few those assholes, fuck them, god I hate them, ow, ow ow, owow
months later. ow oww wowow oq wqowow owwwwWWWWWWWHHHHH-
HLLLLLLLL!!!!! PAIN! PAIN! I’M IN PAIN!!!!!!!!!!!
One matinee, I did the “members of the whole world” mono-
logue, running around the kitchen table, and when the other What, you thought parasocial relationships went just one way?
actor stopped me and put me on her lap, I noticed I was crying, That millions (Taylor) or thousands (me) of readers could offer
jjust streams of tears,, no jags,
j g , for pages,
p g , through my last line in up terms of endearment or hatred and the two of us would not
the scene: also become convinced that it is possible to form a genuine
relationship with more people than you can crowd in the mind’s
I wonder if you have
h ve ever
ha eve
v r thought
though about this? Here eye at a given time? Whose humanity you can process as real?
we are—right now. This very minute.
mi Now. But while
As not a reflection of you? That we would not out of some
we’re talking right now, this minute
min is passing. And it
will never come again. Never in all the world. When primal instinct give way more weight to the haters than the
it is gone, it is gone. No power on
o earth could bring it fans, and so come to see people in general, the world, and
back again. finally life itself as our adversaries, entities to win over, to
conquer, one big scalable mass of Not Me? We will be members
of the whole world!

It’s interesting—everything about Rookie was more wholesome

than my previous experiences with the internet. If my middle

29
 school bullies were internet trolls and fashion editors, then Fans give love, fall in love, are completely overtaken by the
Fan
my high school friend group was a global community of sweet fee
feeling of love. None of these is the same as loving.
nerds who revered me. Our meetups were full of tearful teens
attending in such good faith that they practically glowed. And I co
could not love Taylor. I was too much of a fan.
yet, I was still “on,” still responsible for making the events
life-affirming, for making content the rest of the time, too, even *
in the van—my Easy Rider but with wifi hotspots paid for by
Urban Outfitters—and so when I made it back to a hotel room, The
There is one facet of the (Taylor’s Versions) I neglected to
or even just the farthest backseat, I listened to Speak Now and exa
examine before. Not the rerecords, but the “(From The Vault)”
wept. tra
tracks—brand-new songs that she wrote or recorded at the time
of the
t original albums but never released.
Within months, my obsession manifested a meeting. By the
time the Rookie Road Trip made its way to Los Angeles, I’d He
Hearing new songs from the old Taylor is like watching alter-
posted enough about my love of Taylor Swift that a friend’s nat
nate timelines in her cinematic universe. Also, deleted scenes.
friend urged Zooey Deschanel to introduce us. I say “friend’s No
Nostalgia, and novelty, and the intimacy of the artist’s process.
friend” like this is all so casual; the first friend was a screen-
writer I knew because she had been hired to write a movie My favorite is “Nothing New (feat. Phoebe Bridgers) (Taylor’s
based on my life when I was 14 (another time), the second Ver
Version) (From The Vault),” written when she was 22 about
worked with Zooey on the now-defunct website for millennial agi
aging as a pop star.
women, Hello Giggles, and had spent hours talking my dad and
me through the business side of Rookie. It was so generous of I’ve had too much to drink tonight
them all. Now that I am an adult, I can confidently say that I And I know it’s sad, but this is what I think about
And I wake up in the middle of the night
would never spend social capital to make a near-stranger feel
It’s like I can feel time moving
good for no reason. Or did Zooey think I was a Make a Wish
How can a person know everything at 18,
kid? But my illness was fandom, and she was feeding my condi- but nothing at 22?
tion. What a bizarre wish for the Foundation to approve. And will you still want me when I’m nothing new?

On a glittering L.A. evening, my dad dropped me off at Zooey’s Multiple friends have compared it to “My Back Pages” by
house. She drove. The landscape was lush and golden-hour 23-year-old Bob Dylan: Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m
green, each tree already gilded with memory’s light. Zooey was younger than that now. Dylan’s narrator, however, sings from
a generous conversationalist and helped to ease my nerves. a place of acceptance. Aging is predictably simpler for him.
I was starstruck, but tonight, Taylor was the star, and Zooey His song is about humility, while Taylor’s is about humiliation.
was reviving her role in Almost Famous as the cool older sister Feeling like a loser. Loss. Of time, her audience, her sense of

30 47
 number of Taylors multiplied. Also: her magazine covers, her ushering
eri the sweaty teen into the world
w of popular music.
album art, her music videos, her interviews and talk show Although, I’ve always thought that the rest of the movie, from
appearances and taped performances and jumbotrons and tour the candle sequence on, could be interpreted as a dream or
buses plastered with her face and all the photos we concert- vision.
goers took and countless photos of her leaving grocery stores
that I had not even sought out but which were just ubiquitous, The restaurant was called “Soho House” but was in an office
much like, of course, this tabloid cover, then the photos on her building. Up on the millionth floor we were led through a gust
walls, then the photos I saw in my head while listening to her of A/C and cologne to a glass room filled with indoor trees
music, then the posts and memes and pull quotes and the way and fairyish lights. Among the murmuring grown-ups at their
everyone I knew had an opinion on her and how my personal own important tables sat Taylor, just a 22-year-old girl on her
relationship to fame and money shaped the dingy magnifying phone. She saw us, smiled, rose to say hello. She was wearing
glass I tried to gather her life into, and—this wasn’t a triangle, a white dress, having come from the Teen Choice Awards. Her
this was the multiverse! hair was in milkmaid braids, like mine—OK, so, twins. She gave
me a hug—OK, so, Mom. She was deeply tall, deeply beautiful—
I was typing my feelings out to a friend when two texts from OK, so, not me. As though she could feel my disappointment in
Taylor appeared: myself, she looked me in the eye and said: “I am so impressed
by you?”
OMG
I can still hear it in her Red Era voice. Of course, Red hadn’t
I just woke up!!!!! come out yet. We were in a pre-Red world. The Swifties were
still most intimate with Taylor’s slightly higher Speak Now Era
* voice with its country twang. This new voice was a bit earthier,
with bangs. The twang had fallen away, leaving just her words,
“Love is the extremely difficult realization that someone other clear and true.
than oneself is real.” Iris Murdoch.
y. Chill. Comical stories of times
The conversation was girly.
And bell hooks advocated for seeing love as something you s. I could not offer such stories of
with friends, or slimy exes.
do, not a thing you attain or a state you achieve: “To begin by inner parties, or ex-boyfriends, or
my own—about hosting dinner
always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one any boyfriend haha—and so searched desperately for ways
way in which anyone using the word in this manner automati- ding like a liar. Then, somehow, the
to chime in without sounding
cally assumes accountability and responsibility.” Manson Family
Fam came up. Time to shine! I knew Dark L.A. and
Hollywood Babylon
B and all that. This was where I could really
sing. I talked about Helterr Skelter, the murders, the creepy

46 31
crawls—when the Family would break into people’s homes and
nd The
Th
h morning after, still walking, I got to a gynecologist
rearrange the furniture
fu just a bit and then leave, imparting appo
appointment. My feet were in the stirrups when an orchestral
to their victims a sense of uncanny, psychological unease—and
nd c verr of “Blank Space” came on over the speakers. I couldn’t
co
cover
then I talked about the girls, how they were all runaway teenss st
stop laughing during my breast exam, first because I was
living with this
t y,
cult leader guy who gave them acid every day, ticklish, and then because the doctor was not reacting to my
the
they were basically brainwashed, “I mean I’m 16 and I can laughter. I asked her to look at something and she—I swear—
ng
easily imagine being taken in by a charismatic figure and doing groaned as though she was my teenage daughter, then peered
whatever they say.” The entire restaurant was silent for five and said, “It’s literally just a vagina.” I felt like I’d failed the
minutes straight. Taylor—such poise, such tact—segued into a appointment. Then I walked to CVS. As I sat in the pharmacy
less disturbing subject. waiting area, still waiting for a text back, Taylor’s face met mine
from a tabloid cover under the counter.
I kept wanting to marvel, but I worried that I would miss
something. What was I trying to wrap my head around, I wanted it to be difficult to square this tabloid version of her
n
anyway? How could you comprehend the fact that the person with the person from the night before, but I sensed that even
gh
whose diaries you’d read and memories you’d traveled through observing such a thing was not the act of someone who saw
was sitting right next to you, eating fish? Maybe you weren’t her as a person. If I saw her as a person, the tabloid wouldn’t
supposed to comprehend. Maybe you were supposed to just be in conversation with our friendship. My fascination gave
talk and listen, and in exchange for your marvel, you might me away, to myself. Even the distress I felt over her not texting
get connection. But I wasn’t ready to trade in my marvel. I me back meant that we were not equals; if we were the same,
wanted Taylor Swift to be my friend and my imaginary friend. the text (or absence of a text) would be a non-event; I would
I couldn’t think this through right then, just follow instincts be thinking about my own life, in that moment, not her. Jesus.
around the proper way to behave, which moments to snapshot, It seemed exhausting to have to absorb so much meaning on
and which to set free. Capture it! Remember it! behalf of those around you. I needed her to be so many things:
down-to-earth, saintly, human. God! One time we were at a
As though she’d read my mind, Taylor suggested we get a store where a woman approached and said her daughter was a
photo before parting ways. From my diary entry written later big fan and could they get a picture and then a toddler waddled
that night: up to me and went, “Are you Taylor Swift?” and I thought,
Yikes! But now I had been that mom, triangulating with some
She said we had to take pictures in the photobooth idea of Taylor, and I had even sort of been the toddler, like
and we joked about how it said ‘Boudoir.’ At one point int conditioned to think differently of someone because she was
she said she + I needed a twin shot so we took onene and
mega-famous while overlooking the person standing right
I got to keep it. There was a small moment thatat I find
before me, and I was also, tragically and still, myself—a bootleg
m
myself in a state of wonder about. When we sat down
sh did that thing girls do where they like, cross
she ross their Taylor for little babies. After the mom took the photo, the

45
 In the morning, I let myself out in the freezing cold, distantly legs all over each other, to me. That thing whichich is
suspecting I deserved punishment of some kind. I texted her part of this larger girl culture that went on in middle
iddle
a coda and waited for a response. Walking against the wind, school about Maggie Schwarz and her friends when en
I was excluded. I’ve always been sure that female
playing back the night before, I recalled a chilling moment
friends like Maggie, Gabby, Jessie never acted like
in which I got too comfortable and stopped the conversation
that with me because I’m just so...repulsive? Nerdy?
to say how much 1989 had meant to me, especially “Wildest I seemed too serious for that? I didn’t smell like Pink
Dreams,” explaining all the correlations to my dramatic new perfume? (Ugh, middle school flashbacks.) Anyway,
love life, the play I’d been in, the act of acting itself—“like being suddenly I felt accepted and liked and included. Not
present, like not trying to constantly find the story, and how that I’m such a victim of not having friends or what-
ever normally, or that we don’t all spoon all the time...
things are more special if they’re not meant to last, because
this was just different. It was fun to sit like that and
then you can actually give yourself over and like, maybe that’s
make OMG faces nonironically.
the essence of life? How nothing lasts forever?” A line from
the song. She was just so nice and funny and smart and sincere.
When we were saying goodbye she said I was “beau-
In my current memory of that hungover memory of that drunk- tiful” and “flawless” and that I “shine” !!!!!!!! and that
we needed to hang out. She put herself in my phone
en moment, Taylor is eager for the moment to pass, because it
as ‘Twin/Mother/Mirror.’ We all hung out for three
puts us on different levels, or asks something of her, or turns
hours! Also I was relieved that I never said anything
her into a cipher, made even worse by the fact that I am talking weird or talked myself into a corner. I even made
as though it’s the opposite; as though by having a personal everyone laugh at times. Zooey is a saint. Taylor was
connection to the song, I am really seeing her. In my current everything I’d hoped for and more. It was the best
memory, there’d been this elephant in the room—her fame, night of my life.
my fandom—and I rode in on it like a circus performer. In my
It was clearly validating and, in hindsight, somewhat erotic to
current memory—which actually no longer exists, I’m working
take BFF-y
B photos with the most popular girl in the high school
from a document I drafted years ago—this is the moment that
of the world. Then there was my admiration for her work,
signals the night must end, and I am already lagging in what
her personality,
pe but also, for sure, her beauty; a kind I longed
should be a joint move out of the kitchen. Then, I am in a guest
for
f r myself,
fo my envied in my peers, knew I shouldn’t value, and
d
room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, all closing in on me.
couldn’t see my proximity to through the miasma of internal-
nternal-
I blink around from the middle of a king-size bed at framed
ized antisemitism and feeling generally “gross.” I was so close,
photos of her friends and family that she has also posted on
yet so far: thin. Pale. Blonde, though mine was
as bleached. Simi-
Instagram. Is it weird that I know that? To observe it? To take
lar aesthetic leanings, referencing a fantasy
asy of innocence, with
pictures of the pictures, in my mind? To wonder if I’ll write
our braids.
br But Taylor was a foot taller than
han me, internationally
about it? Can you out-Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift?
famous, and
a wearing a red-carpet dress. Taylor
yylor knew how to
put muddy feelings
f into three-minute
inute songs. Taylor
Tay possessed

44 33
the comfort it must require to pull someone
ne into a photo-
p It was in this fragile state that I went to a screening of
booth, spill your legs over theirs, and pose with your hand over Nashville at MoMA. I had never seen it before. It was so epic,
your mouth as though God is telling a special little joke that so well-written, its cultural significance so—why was I crying?
only you can hear. I imagine all the minions inside my brain Geraldine Chaplin, the amateur journalist, was in bed with
started pulling emergency levers and flipping through refer- the musician, Keith Carradine. He was still sleeping, and she
ence books to find the most relaxed body language to respond was staring into space, her head on his chest. His record was
with before melting down. In one photo, I am mimicking her playing. She was repeating: “I love you. I love you. I love you.”
faux-shocked expression, my real shock whispering help with Absolutely not. I belonged. I would belong.
my eyes. In another, I have found some compromise between
the performance and my discomfort via a scowl that strives for I texted Taylor. A spontaneous hang? She invited me over.
self-awareness rather than beauty—I know what I look like, I told her I saw the movie. She went, “That’s the one where
thanks. In a group photo, I seem to have surrendered to my everyone wants to make it, right?” My heart winced. What she
rank completely: the adult women pout or laugh while looking described sounded tragic to me.
gorgeous; I am making what I can only assume was meant as
an impression of a pirate, with my brow furrowed, one eye We talked in her kitchen for hours. I don’t remember what
twitching, and my mouth a toothless slant. Still, my diary about. I think that, like the other hangs, we pretended we were
insisted this was all “fun,” that I “never said anything weird”— normal young women with normal problems—problems that
the way I wanted to remember it. revolved mostly around men, our tenuous connections to the
earth. I wanted to ask more, to share more. I wanted to say
After that night, Taylor and I occasionally exchanged texts, that I was lost, that it made no sense that I was there, that I
which you can bet I agonized over phrasing and deciphering. made no sense anywhere, there was nothing inside—couldn’t
Red came out, introduced the rest of the Swifties to a new Tay- she see? Why did she even like me? What had I done other
lor, and I told her how much I loved it, and she was so gracious than seem culturally relevant and pass for normal? Instead,
in return, like my opinion meant something. I drew a map of we stayed in the clouds: stories about men. She put on music.
where all its songs take place and mailed it to her. I made a We danced around the island like clumsy ballerinas. It was like
diorama of the dancin’-‘round-the-kitchen scene but then hid the kind of slumber party where girls listen to Taylor Swift, the
it under my bed, forever. Backstage at the Red Tour, she asked ones I’d once been jealous of. We took turns choosing songs.
me which deep cut to play that night, and two hours later, she “Everybody Loves Somebody.” “Everybody Wants to Rule the
launched into “Our Song.” When the fans screamed, I felt like World.” “Beautiful Girl” by INXS, which I’d never heard.
their puppet master, a genius, a god. Back at the Holiday Inn
in Columbus, my friend’s mom ordered us Domino’s and we We talked so late that she insisted I sleep over. She lent me a
recorded an hour-long recap on my computer before the show nightgown and helped me into a fluffy white bed.
could leave our veins. When I uploaded the audio to iTunes
 and I’d learn what kind of adult I was. for posterity, it misidentified the file as one from the iTunes
store, and automatically titled it “Open Heaven.” Presumably a
Once the play closed, I wasn’t so sure, just that I was less sermon of some kind.
likable than my younger self. The psychological issues
announced themselves but with a limited vocabulary. There Meeting Taylor did not dispel any illusions; it only made my
were panic attacks. Vices and enemies. I no longer needed my obsession grow. She had been even more perfect than imag-
parents to access any spaces, and so searched for them without ined and now the Red Era—though back then we called it
knowing. I tried to write about the play; I have been writing “2012”—provided countless new objects for my fixation. I was
about it ever since. If you go to 48th Street, you’ll find me possessed by a kind of madness, one I’d not felt before or since,
pacing, pointing at the theater’s marquee: “That was my of checking a website that posted multiple times a day with any
youth!!!” It makes no sense for a 27-year-old to feel like Taylor-related updates—today we call this “reading the news.”
Norma Desmond, and even less sense that I felt this way I’d come home from school, unfold my laptop, and let the
at 18, but sense is for adults, and I was—am—a teen. paparazzi shots wash over me: the idyllic pastures evoked by
her riding boots, the leathery smell emanating from dark SUVs,
To make things extra ghostly, I was outgrowing Rookie’s her flawless deer-in-a-spotlight expressions. I don’t know why
audience/subject matter/purpose, and the professional world I did this. Every day, for two months. An escape, perhaps, from
beyond it terrified me. Like, it was simultaneously a social my professional responsibilities? Who knows. Back then I
world, with undefined boundaries and unspoken expectations. called it love.
My personality, appearance, and writing would no longer gain
points for their teenage earnestness and authenticity, but I The following summer, my dad and I visited colleges on the
also could not crack the code to adult socializing, dressing, and East Coast. Taylor invited us to stop at her beach house in
dating, unless, I figured, some man was grinning at me with Rhode Island. I’d trembled before the iron gates of Brown,
approval. And so, my nights were spent trying to recreate the gasped at the Great Gatsby manuscript in its library. Neither
play—its highs, through booze and romantic tumult and parties felt as sacred as the historic Holiday House of Red Era pub-
that woke you up just a bit more because they featured extra- licity. We pulled up to a security booth, then drove through a
famous people whose basic politeness could feel like other- gate that made Brown’s look ornamental. We were welcomed
worldly generosity, acceptance. And, I wanted to recreate the by Taylor, her dad, and the friendly Sheeran clan. The house
sense of freedom the play had given me—to feel like just a girl was full of white wood, stars and stripes, antiques, mementoes.
in an apartment, the way I had used Rookie to feel like a teen in It was so much nicer than the McMansions of middle school
her room, the way I had used Taylor’s music to escape Rookie, friends but way less pretentious than the modern abodes of
the way that real life is never enough. fashion/media/showbiz sharks. Which holiday was it even
named for? Just every day, because here, life was perfect? I
probably saw the aesthetic as “Americana” or “East Coast”

4
42 35
more than high-WASP and vaguely understood that my full tour again. Then then then. I stopped texting people I always
identification with it would be rejected by the stewards of felt like I was bothering. I met people who’d had the same
Gatsby Vibes in some split-second unconscious fantasy. friends since childhood. Imagine! How transient, the lives
Although, the Vibes couldn’t have been that inaccessible of teen professionals; how flimsy our bonds—surrounded by
to me, because, well, there I was. praise, fans, and fairy godmothers who introduce you to your
idol just because they think you deserve it, and yet, few people
With my dad, of course. I was used to needing him to access w
who can tell you who you were before you were also your
such rarefied spaces even though the access was meant for me. image-double. Maybe we were no one at all, Taylor and I, before
Sometimes I was grateful for his protection and sometimes it our flatter yet richer doppelgangers came into being—unreal
just embarrassed me. Also, his khakis from Goodwill. Not that to ourselves until our image-doubles could speak for us. But at
such modesty did not work to my advantage. No one who met least they did speak. At least they were—are—writers, too.
my dad would suspect that his daughter was so attuned to
hierarchy and half-imagined social codes. When Taylor later Her narrator’s failure, when I revisit those early albums, is only
wrote “The Man,” she was not thinking of guys like Steve. that she is young. Unrealistic. Idealistic. She was bound to get
intercepted by real life at some point. So too did I stumble in
The dads went fishing. Taylor and I talked about boys. We all my own brain’s gummy pink terrain the night that I think I
went water skiing, and my dad fell in the water and lost his might’ve blown it—our friendship.
glasses (goddammit), and Taylor lent him her glasses to wear
for the rest of our road trip (or, bonding!). She woke up early to It was my first year in New York. I’d decided not to go to
bake everyone their own cake. She told me to put on college and to keep working instead. Taylor had also just
“Pictures of You” by the Cure if I ever wanted a date to feel moved to the city, and her new album 1989 was actually about
like a movie—confirmation that even if she was the most my life, which was then mostly spent acting in a Broadway
popular girl in the high school of the world, she was still a production of the play This Is Our Youth as a girl my age who
moment-hoarding squirrel, like me. One morning, we climbed finds herself in a guy’s New York apartment. Every night, 800
a ladder to the house’s widow’s walk, just the two of us, and sets of eyes watched me play a (yes) normal teen and be on a
she said that a widow’s walk is where women would stare at the date. I had to give up on orchestrating moments and learned
ocean and wait for their husbands to return from war, then that how to listen and talk instead. It was the most fun I’d ever had,
she saw songwriting as sending a message in a bottle, and it the most pressure I’d ever been under, too much stimulation,
was like a Taylor Swift song—both her musings, and the two of adrenaline, anxiety; I was scaling higher and higher stakes (for
us looking out—and then I was so emotional that I got out her failure, humiliation) at the same time that I was insulated from
thank-you present: a vial of my baby teeth. She gasped. Then, real life—repeating the same story eight times a week, feeling
we just enjoyed the silence. the impact of fictional emotions; the ticking clock above consti-
tuting my biggest problem, which was that the story would end,

41
 beds, all to myself. A selfie in the mirror. Taylor’s cat on my These moments of unity were important. Reminders of our
l
ladder. I posted one on Instagram with a caption that played differences were cause for despair. I didn’t know how to react
it cool. Taylor and Ed were referred to simply as “yesterday’s to any reference to fame or money, even though they were all
crew,” which is fucking stupid, basically propaganda for my indirect and innocuous, like mentions of her recent tour, or
nonexistent chill. of me applying to school. Was I supposed to pretend I didn’t
know she was rich and famous? Or pretend that I was, too?
The rest of the photos went on a new, secret account. It Or try to project a grounded awareness of our differences but
followed no one; no one followed it. It was just a place where without sounding bitter nor hysterically self-deprecating nor
I could post more photos from the weekend, satisfying an urge suspiciously sycophantic?
to see them all stamped with the app’s filters and interface—
a frame—which would make them, of course, real. My Hell: she had a book of blank Proust questionnaires for
guests to fill out, and my dad asked what a Proust question-
The posts felt amazing. I beheld them like jewels, like blue naire is, and Taylor started to explain who Proust was, and I
check marks, things of beauty and power, which on Instagram watched my dad, a 60-year-old English teacher, make a split-
are the same. I tried to imagine them as public documents, second decision between letting a 23-year-old pop star explain
shiny and new—and popular. But I could never post like this Proust to him or telling a 23-year-old who was hosting us at her
on my regular account. That would be fan behavior, tacky, mansion that she didn’t need to explain Proust to him. He gave
uncouth. No one who truly belonged in that weekend would do a little laugh and said, “I know Proust, but what is the book?”
such a thing. Then again, no one who belonged would create My soul prolapsed. Taylor responded as though nothing had
a private Instagram solely to method act a public Instagram, happened, which probably, to her, it hadn’t.
either. I was sick. Disgusting. Ashamed. I deleted the account.
The public posts, too. Having lost all my phone photos pre- For the next stop on our college tour, we stayed at an America’s
2016, I now have neither the originals nor their secret doubles. Best Value Inn. Our room had two prints of the same painting
above each bed—a beach house on a shore, much smaller than
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly Taylor’s. I woke up twice in the night, first because someone
into the past :-( in the next room was loudly vomiting, and then because there
were sirens in the parking lot just outside the door. My dad and
* I joked about the contrast to the night before. Back to reality,
am I right?! There was a whiff of superiority—for having our
I hope it is accurate to say that Taylor and I faded away, lost feet on the ground, for the sense of humor only outsiders can
touch—nothing dramatic. I hope I was merely immature and access. Yes, I could tell this story later, in writing. I could own
not unkind. If I think about it, we really only hung out alone it, the way Taylor had taught me.
one fateful time. The rest were in groups. Then she went on

40 37
 * “Right, okay. So when you wore them, did you feel like you
were seeing as her?”
I just called him up to ask: “What was it like to wear Taylor
Swift’s glasses?” “No.”

He laughed. “Why?” “Did they look like anything? Was life more beautiful,
perhaps?”
“Just curious.”
“You know…they weren’t perfect. The prescription was not
I thought I heard him frown, then shrug. “Let’s see what I exact. So I was mostly focused on the road and trying to not get
remember. I’ve told the story so many times that I don’t really in an accident.”
know what I experienced.”
“Oh…kay.”
Perfect. “So what’s the story?”
“What are you using this for?”
“Well, we got back to the house, they all knew we were driving
for the rest of our trip, so anyone who had a pair of glasses they “And you still have the glasses?”
could do without, I tried them on, and out of everyone, her
prescription was the closest to mine, so she went, you know, “No, no. I asked where I should mail them after, and she went,
‘Take them.’” ‘Just hang onto them,’ but I sent them back.”

I waited. “That’s it?” “Really? I thought they were the pair on your desk all these
years.” In the little giraffe-printed armchair-shaped cell phone
“Y
“Yeah!” holder.

“O
“Oh.” “No! I wasn’t gonna keep them.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Totally. And thank God, by the way. Good old salt-of-the-earth
Steve. No souvenirs here! If he were any less trusty, I might
“It’s not much of a story.” have never stood a chance, although I guess the juryy is
is still
stil
st illl
f o
from
out re: my hold on reality. You see, I kept souvenirs fromm that
tha
hatt
“Well, I’m just telling you what happened. But it was pretty weekend. Photos, of course. Taken with the group, and off the
the
cool that out of this big group, it was her glasses.” ntt bunk
view, and of my guest room of choice: three different b nk
bu k

38 39