Maggie Nelson is an unapologetic Taylor Swift fan. She knows the discography, drops song lyrics into conversation and tells me she took her family to the Vancouver leg of the Eras tour. So she’s a dyed-in-the-wool Swiftie? Nelson seems not entirely comfortable with the breathless connotations of that term but yes, the love is real. So much so, she has written a book about the billionaire singer-songwriter, or rather, a joint analysis of Swift and Sylvia Plath, who recurs in much of Nelson’s oeuvre.
The notion of uniting these two cultural titans, who are seemingly poles apart in sensibility – one a melancholic American poet, the other an all-American poster girl – came to her when she heard Swift’s 2024 album, The Tortured Poets Department. Alongside its literary references to F Scott Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare, there are heavy resonances of Plath in its introspection and emotional tumult. But the book only started to take shape after a chat with her 13-year-old son’s friend, Alba. “We were making bracelets and she said ‘Have you ever heard of Sylvia Plath?’ I thought that was funny because I’d written my undergraduate thesis on Plath and I was [almost] 40 years older than her. So I said: ‘I have heard of Sylvia Plath.’ As I sat there, I thought, these kids don’t want to hear me talk on this topic but I have a lot to say because I’ve been thinking of it all.”
From that clarifying moment came The Slicks, a book-sized extended essay that is, sweetly, dedicated to Alba. Nelson has written about pop musicians before: there were reflections on Prince and Björk in Like Love. Here she makes a case for Swift as poet as well as lyricist. “She has songwriting moving through her,” she says, referring to the star’s hydrant gush of productivity. “Like Plath said, the blood jet is poetry, there’s no stopping it.”
Nelson makes work from the blood jet too. She was a poet before she took to nonfiction and turned it into her own idiosyncratic brand of formally experimental art, sometimes written in what appears like hybrid verse-prose. She has gathered an enormous fan following with books such as Bluets, a mournful paean to the colour blue, and her memoir, The Argonauts, about mothering, family and queerness.
Now, it’s Nelson doing the fan-girling. Sitting backstage at the Edinburgh international book festival at the end of August, she has a scrubbed-faced informality and ease about her. What is it about Swift that appeals to children and celebrated writers alike? “I think one of the most beautiful things about the Taylor Swift phenomenon has been the celebration of her creativity and her power … She’s modelling for these people (a lot of girls, but not all girls) a form of fame, being proud of yourself and proud of what you’ve done.”
Fame, and its relationship to women, is the nub of the book. Those who want it with a clench-jawed desperation but never get it (Plath killed herself, never knowing how famous she would become), those who have it in dazzling abundance (Swift), and those who abjure it entirely (the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson).
Neither Plath nor Swift hid their ambitions; both aimed for stratospheric fame. The shadow of a third, unnamed, ambitious woman looms over The Slicks, that of Kamala Harris who, according to Nelson, takes a more covert tack. “I was writing the essay the entire way up to the election [which Harris lost] and there was almost a heart-in-your-throat kind of way of writing through it. A lot of people made this point about Harris – that she didn’t ever say ‘I want it’. It was given to her by [Joe] Biden standing down. There was something about that which obviated the entire problem of ‘I want this big thing’. I thought that was fascinating. I heard some people saying ‘Well, that’ll give her a better chance because if she actually wanted it, people would hate her for it.’”
So the book aims an arrow against the deep-seated cultural belief that flagrantly announced female ambition – and expression – warrants punishment. This is where Swift’s brazen wanting it, and getting it, comes in. Her productivity and profile is analysed by way of ancient Greece as well as Freud’s theories on the female “hysteric”. This history is underpinned by the misogynistic assumption that women who excavate their personal lives for their art are somehow cheapening themselves. Shutting these loud women up is a part of the patriarchal project, suggests Nelson, even now. “There’s something about wanting, and naming your want – which I think both Plath and Swift did – that is still generally a punishing sphere for a woman.”
It is not so dissimilar to the judgments that sometimes orbit Nelson’s intimate, boundary-blurring nonfiction, or more generally memoirs written by female writers. “It would not be a hot take to say in the field of autobiography, women have a different time of it,” Nelson says. “We’re somehow considered ethical guardians for our children, our parents, for people that we know. The idea of making revelations for the sake of art is much more ethically freighted because women aren’t supposed to take those kinds of liberties without deeply considering every other factor of how everything they do might affect somebody else.”
The Slicks sits adjacent to another book Nelson published this year, Pathemata: Or, the Story of My Mouth. Its title (taken from the Greek for “suffering”), she points out, carries distant echoes of Plath’s words: “I don’t want to mouth other people, I want other people to mouth me.” The mouth being peered into here, though, is Nelson’s own. It is memoir mixed with dreamscapes: Nelson’s own chronic and inexplicable pain in the jaw but also the broader failings of healthcare, and maybe even the collective pain of the Covid pandemic.
Her creativity felt crushed by the experience of lockdown, she feared she would never write again, so the book was conceived inadvertently, as a playful diversion from the blank page: “I thought I would mess around with ugly content that I would never publish.”
Some of its source material came from a pain diary she had kept for over a decade: a log of her innumerable doctors’ visits, medications and therapies alongside their outcomes – hope raised and dashed, all codified on her desktop. She had also started writing down her dreams, and those two files collided to form the premise of Pathemata. “I thought these documents would be hilarious to marry. So I began amusing myself with a pastiche project … A lot of people who have read it have said ‘I was so mad on the diseased speaker’s behalf.’ But I was very aware of a certain genre of diagnosis and complaint. I was trying to think ‘What’s the next station past that where I could arrive?’”
It may not be laugh-out-loud funny, but there is awkward humour and a quietly incendiary absurdism to the probes and promises made by dentists, doctors, alternative therapists and “gurus”. “Maybe because I live in California I’m more tolerant … I think a lot of these people truly believe they’re trying to help. To me, there’s more pathos in them thinking they could help. And for anybody in chronic pain there’s a kind of shame spiral where you want to be the patient who comes back in three weeks and says ‘I did all that and I feel so much better and you’re great’. When you feel yourself drifting into the category of unhelpable, that’s a very sad space for both [patient and doctor].”
Nelson’s books are often slim, as Pathemata is. She references Plath “burning away all the peripherals” in her pithiness, leaving no unnecessary word on the page; Nelson could be seen to be striving for that same elemental reduction. Yet paradoxically, she remembers “copious speaking” as an unstoppably talkative child. How has she become so spare on paper? Through “tonnes” of editing, she says. “I began as a poet where you do long sessions of outpourings and then you literally carve … You’re hacking off to get it into a form, so I probably do something similar. I was making this book [Pathemata] so small I kept telling myself ‘Don’t whittle it away to nothing.’”
So she really is burning away all the peripheries? “Yeah, I think so. Although in The Slicks I defend Taylor Swift’s excess.” We’re back to the singer, who in some ways presents her own paradox in Nelson’s literary life. As a spangly all-American starlet, along with her famed business acumen and lean-in feminism, she is a creature of the mainstream, while Nelson resides in a far more leftfield space. That, she says, is exactly the appeal: “Part of the joy is to be brought to something that, compared to the world I came up in, which was more queer and punk, is very norm-core … Insisting on being there for it is a way of continuing to insist you are part of this culture.”
The example she gives is of the Super Bowl, now synonymous with Swift and her footballer fiance, Travis Kelce, but also the heartland of popular American culture. “I like football so I was watching it but there were these anti-trans commercials that Trump was running. We were having a party to watch the game and it was signalling that ‘this isn’t for you’. I’m interested in who gets to be a part of this mainstream. I’m not willing to give that up.”
Living amid Trumpian politics and the contested ground of trans identity within her family – she lives in California with a son and a gender nonconforming partner, the artist Harry Dodge – must carry its own dissonance? “It’s not terrible for my family right now, but it is shifting sands every day in which vulnerable bodies are going to be brutalised,” she says, building to a politely voiced outrage. “I care a lot about freedom. I’m not going to be lectured about it by people intent on taking it away. I wrote a book about it [On Freedom], about the two biggest discourses in the States: one about the abolition of slavery/civil rights, and the other one from white supremacists. They’ve always been present in the States.”
Is America currently dealing with white supremacy? “Do you mean Trump? Sure. It’s very obvious what we’re in here.” Perhaps the capacity for joy that Nelson describes Swift as channelling in her music is a necessary light to fend off this darkness. To that end, will Nelson go to a Life of a Showgirl concert? It will depend on whether her son is still a Swift fan, she says, but also if she can justify the cost of the tickets. Last year, she did a direct trade-off against a book licence she sold, for Bluets, which was adapted into a play in London. “I had wanted to take my son and his friend to the Eras tour but it was too expensive. I was on the fence about licensing the play, but then I realised it was about the same cost to take everyone to the tour. In Taylor Swift’s spirit, I thought I’ll sell it and go to the show.”
So, she laughs, if that happens again, she’ll be there for Showgirl. Swiftonomics indeed.
• Pathemata: Or, the Story of My Mouth by Maggie Nelson is published by Fern (£12.99). The Slicks will be published on 13 November (Fern). To explore all books by Maggie Nelson, visit the guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
