On Wednesday morning, I was filling a water glass in the kitchen recounting Sunday morning when Michelle asked if “I was a Swiftie.” I said no. Is 1989 the only CD I have in my car that no longer plays CDs? Yes. Did I make someone listen to it on repeat once from Berkeley to San Diego? Yes. Do I also have the Ryan Adams cover? Only on my phone.
As the water poured out of the Brita the Amazon Alexa chimed. “You have unlocked a free release of Taylor Swift’s new album.” Stop it, Alexa, you don’t know me!
This began on Sunday with a Lithub review of Tavi Gevinson’s Fan Fiction, a 75-page, 19,000-word autofiction zine about her life and Taylor’s intertwined. Don’t worry, it’s also literary.
In what seems to be part account of Gevinson’s coming of age as the best, first, and last child-teen fashion blogger, and rise to fame (xoxo Gossip Girl 2.0) alongside her obsession and occasional interaction with Swift. Let me make something clear—I have never been jealous of Taylor Swift. Tavi Gevinson is a different story. She is a different kind of rockstar.
The zine, inspired by Nabokov’s Pale Fire, evolves as a tryptic. It’s insane that Gevinson is not MFA-trained because all the breadcrumbs of MFA code are scatted through out the pages. She quotes Barthes and compares Swift’s use of “the frame” for her narratives to a Cornell box. She is one use of “void” away from a contemporary grad student. The first movement is a literary critique. The second, a window into Gevinson’s rise to fame with Rookie Style, Rookie Mag, and Broadway alongside a few times she spent with Swift. It’s unclear what is fiction. It is unclear in any context of Taylor Swift what is and is not fiction because the desire is always a reality of extreme. The heartache is in excess. The rage too. Put on your red lipstick that doesn’t smear through the tears and smash that guitar, baby.
Part three records imagined letters of Gevinson’s fictional novel about Swift’s songs and Swift’s response.
“Also, omg, it’s fiction!!!! Should’ve said that right away, jeez. The reader should feel as though everything they’re reading may have been a non-event.” Gevinson writes.
Nothing about Swift is a non-event. (Swift’s character does eventually sneak void into a sentence, so all the quinticential MFA boxes are checked.)
Earlier she details the critiques people have had that early Swift was too young to experience the nostalgia she wrote about. There is always something to criticize. Honestly, if she could mobilize her troops towards any social-political-environmental justice, that would be enough.
What is enough? Not just in the context of Swift or this satirical zine that I can’t stop reading because it sucked me through a giant boba straw of teenage nostalgia and for a moment made me think—wow, Taylor, maybe I do like you after all. Or maybe this isn’t even about you, and that’s the problem.
To be clear, when I listened to 1989 on repeat I lived in a difficult time through a few heartbreaks, had green hair, and was told inappropriately by my employer I might need to see someone about my depression. Now, the Ryan Adams’ cover plays while I run in circles under the Colorado sun and it feels like just songs that are too slow to run to.
Am I feeling 22? God I hope not. My interest isn’t Taylor Swift but the way she is written.
In the third epistolary movement, things begin to take a turn. Gevinson’s character starts to go a little Baby Reindeer (unhinged? comedically unhinged? satirically unhinged?) waiting for Swift’s response to the novel she’s written about Swift’s songs. It is the list poem of edits Swift sends that creates the mirror and frame and might even shatter it:
Delete my first text to you. Too close to the bone.
- Delete NY lunch scene. This is basically all gossip.
- Delete bday scene. We don’t talk anymore.
- Delete Grammys party. Not quite relatable.
- Delete paparazzi scene. You did not look like an owl :)
- Delete “matchmaking” phone call.
- Delete Nora Ephron convo.
- Delete “You’re So Vain” story.
- Delete ride upstate.
- Delete motel bar.
- Delete dive bar.
- Delete cafe.
- Delete Coney Island.
- Delete takeout coffee.
- Delete note I left you.
- Delete letter you sent me.
- Delete ring you gave me.
- Delete voicemail I left you.
- Delete secret language.
- Delete polaroid.
- Delete film reel.
- Delete postcard.
- Delete locket.
- Delete cardigan.
- Delete dress.
- Delete key.
- Delete scarf.
- 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
actual lives. You can amplify the emotional essence but change the
specifics.
What constitutes fiction? What qualifies one person’s narritive as deletable? Who dictates the story?
The characters of Swift’s music turn on the zine’s protagonist, who might also be the tyrant. Or is the imagined Swift the tyrant? I was reminded recently the Greeks did not have “tragic heroes” in their plays, only tyrants. The former is a misconception. I think if anyone lives in an and/both dichotomy it is the collective projection of Taylor Swift.
“If you sing “just between us” to millions of people, they get confused.” Gevinson’s character replies to Swift’s.
They confuse celebrity with godliness and friendship. I imagine many people reading this zine over the last week, sharing it (I did) and reliving that Rookie Mag era with a nostalgic frame. I imagine the confusion between person and god. I reread Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison, an essay I’ve thought about a lot since it came out in the New Yorker last fall. There is something of the nostalgia Gevinson fixates on in Garcia’s memories of obtaining and listening to Swift’s albums in prison. Like Fan Fiction, Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison is on the surface Swiftie infused. I bet you think this essay is about her. At their core, I see these pieces addressing our deeper systemic issues of patriarchy, incarceration, capitalism, loss, the way in which we care for each other, longing for a nostalgic past or imagined future.
Since I began writing this, the chorus “Hi, it’s me. I’m the problem it’s me/ at tea time/ everyone agrees” is playing on loop in my head. The music video for “Anti-Hero” begins with Swift cutting into the yoke of an overeasy egg that oozes a purple glitter gel. The purple ooze later takes the place of blood and vomit. It must be excausting swapping filth for glitter.
I’ve spent most of this week thinking about this zine and what autofiction means alongside the politics of taboo. Last week, I wrote about Cutch Risling Baldy’s use of “the politics of taboo” as cultural behavioral patterns around traditional taboos that were once both sacred and dangerous (as in respect their power, bro) but are not just danger or dirty. This week, the anthopologist Camilla Power said, “pollution is a mistranslation,” in reference to the concept of “menstrual pollution.” This is where the conversation should go—mistranslation, confusion, illusion, fantasy. Patriachal systems frame Swift and those who write about her personal life, work life, and imagined life. The politics of taboo do the same: affect everyone’s perception and experience, whether we realize it or not.
Today, I asked Alexa to “Play Taylor Swift’s new album.” She replied, “I’m sorry, the internet is unreachable.” I guess I know how Gevinson’s narrator feels. It turned out I had unplugged the router. Maybe I also know how her imagined Taylor Swift feels.
Hi. It’s me. I’m the problem it’s me—and you too.