Can you out–Taylor Swift Taylor Swift? On April 14, in a move that felt right out of the singer’s playbook, Tavi Gevinson’s new zine, an obsessive and enigmatic work called Fan Fiction: A Satire, was released from the vault, available for download or pickup at a handful of bookstores in New York, Chicago, and L.A.
In 75 pages, Fan Fiction explores the tenuous intersection between being a fan, a critic, and a friend to Taylor Swift. Like all Swifties — “among the most well-organized grassroots movements of our time,†she writes — Tavi is a close reader, and she uses Taylor’s eras as a prismatic mirror to reflect her own life as a young celebrity trying to find herself as an artist. From the debut’s youthful idealism to 1989 soundtracking her move to New York, Fan Fiction dives into Tavi and Taylor’s parallel and, at times, intersecting lives. Both writers and performers (Tavi profiled Taylor for Elle in 2015), they both know what it’s like to have fans read their work biographically, whether or not they were invited to. But Fan Fiction, stuffed with delightful-to-decipher mirrors, lyrics, and meta-textual jumps, is all about play.
Split into three parts, the zine feels at once fictional and plausibly true. “Part One: New Romantics†is the type of hybrid essay a Taylor Swift–themed seminar might produce, weaving thinkers like Barthes, Woolf, and Berger into a grand unifying theory of the singer’s relationship to memory and writing. In “Part Two: Mirrorball,†a Tavi-like narrator remembers the enthralling anxiety of meeting Taylor for the first time, befriending her, and growing apart. (Who doesn’t want to think Taylor actually texted the words “we found you clinging to a light post, like a chic Dickensian orphan�) “Part Three: Mine†poses as a series of emails in which “Tavi†tells “Taylor†she is writing about her and shares a manuscript. The pop-star character becomes a mouthpiece for self-criticism: Taylor leaves Tavi on read for a time, responds to her writing with mild praise, then cuts it down unceremoniously.
Ahead of The Tortured Poets Department’s release, Gevinson hopped on the phone from a residency in Maine to discuss the project — which she stresses is entirely fictional as “the piece does not give access to Taylor the person, only to the character that exists in my mind†— and the process of creating Taylor (Tavi’s Version).
Why did you decide to write about Taylor Swift?
I have a lot of favorite artists, but I think her music invites close reading and inspires obsession. I related to her ongoing project of writing about her life from a young age for public consumption. Her work, and her as a figure, have captured my imagination for a long time and given me a sort of structure in thinking and writing about my own experiences. Finding ways to use those experiences, or those kinds of superficial similarities, as a foundation for something much more was fun for me.
The zine immediately announces itself as fan fiction. How would you define your relationship with Taylor now, and where do you see yourself on the spectrum of friend to fan to critic?
Where do I see myself now? Those different roles that you named and which I list in the piece, I have just straddled these different worlds for a long time. One of the most important things to me is to follow my fascination around that in my work and preserve a sense of creative autonomy.
The project has so many different degrees of removal and carves out space between the writer and the narrator. Was that process liberating?
Using these biographical details as a sort of jumping-off point and not necessarily in a confessional way brought some lightness to a subject that I think about a lot — growing up with an audience or writing about difficult experiences and how that changes your relationship to your own life. Being able to self-publish and not deal with institutional stoppage — it kind of feels like being a teenager again. It gives a sort of freedom around voice that isn’t called for in other things I’ve written. It felt really good not to be thinking about likability.
Anxiety around likability is folded in as a theme in both Taylor’s life and the narrator’s life — readers are going to want to know whether the emails are real.
To quote the daughter from Proof, “I wrote it.â€
Was there anything you were nervous about, especially when it came to navigating the space between being a fan and being a friend? Fan fiction doesn’t often include this type of negotiation of ethics writing about a real person.
It was a very thorough process. When it comes to writing about people in fiction or nonfiction, I’ve often wished I had some blanket approach or rule. This is something I’ve been working out and talking to friends and to other writers about for many years, and I think it’s sort of case by case. I had a rubric for myself, but … I want credit for those emails. [Laughs]
Who was particularly helpful in thinking about that?
I’ve just talked to a lot of friends about it. About a year ago I saw Sarah Polley give a Q&A and someone asked her about writing personal essays about real people, and she said to treat every relationship differently and not have a blanket approach. I think you get more nuance around the content and context of what you’re saying.
Have you heard from Taylor since putting this out in the world?[Laughs] Isn’t it more fun if I don’t answer? Maybe not.
Part of why I put it out now was that Tortured Poets Department appeared to be on theme with the questions I was interested in and questions around writing about people. I wanted to put this out before my scholarship would be outdated. I was really stressed out by the idea that the album would give me more to think about or that it would explicitly spell out some of the things that I think she’s been circling for a long time but that I wanted to write about. My dream is that there is some resonance.
So whether or not she reached out to you, was there a fantasy about the type of response you might get from her?
I’m just so delighted that this is happening. A fantasy, you say? With other things I’ve written about people, there’s kind of a stage where you’re suppressing the possibility that they could ever read it. There’s a stage where you are really seriously thinking about their reactions and trying to anticipate them. And if you can’t anticipate them, then at least feel clear about what you’re doing and what your values are. I feel humbled by my own curiosity, and I think the fantasy is that I could somehow know, but I don’t know what that possible reaction looks like.
You wrote in an interview with Taylor from 2015, “Since the age of 14, I have littered — excuse me — adorned the internet with Taylor Swift analysis.†How long have you been working on this? Did you draw from your own archives?
I had been sitting on pieces for it, such as what her music meant to me when I was in high school and her narrator’s obsession with the past. I was in a waiting period with other projects these last few months and I wanted to write about the meta narratives, the Eras Tour, and Taylor’s versions, and it felt comical that I was trying to do that. It felt divorced from reality to try to be just a critic. I was also reading novels about obsession or doppelgängers or literary hoaxes, and I felt that there was an opportunity to take all those contradictions and make it something new entirely. That gave me a way to work out feelings about growing up and Rookie and other things that I write about. I kind of made this album release my deadline.
What fan fiction do you read?
None.
Is that why you chose to call it a satire also as opposed to straight fan fiction or parody?
I’ve written other kinds of satire or at least things that are satirical. Once I started thinking of it that way, as a work of fiction and as a work of satire and writing toward that, I felt like it clarified things for me. I wanted to set the reader’s expectation by calling it that.
You were talking about other experimental works about obsession, and I was curious about why you gravitated toward Pale Fire?Â
That book is just so fun. I think your obsessions say a lot about you. To go back to your question of why Taylor and not anyone else, her music is simply so well known that you can, from a fan-fiction perspective, play with it a lot and make a lot of really small references that people can get. I mean, she’s created this. She’s given us so many different ways to connect with each other, and that can also inspire a lot of conspiratorial or paranoid thinking or obsession, which I wanted the zine to be about. I guess the way that fandom can be both of those things really inspires me.
Well, on behalf of obsessive readers, I have to ask again, is anything real about these interactions with Taylor and the narrator? Does Taylor actually wear glasses? Did she actually explain Proust to an English-teacher father?
It would be a mistake not to ask, but I just worked so hard on it that I feel like it undermines it to apply a matrix of real or not real and to answer your very reasonable question.
What has your reaction been to the zine’s reception?
I’m just delighted that people enjoy the literary references or they’re saying, “I’m not even a Swiftie, but I really enjoyed this.†My friend dropped some print copies off at Topos in Ridgewood and said someone was already reading it on their laptop. So that made me happy, that interaction between the virtual and the physical world. I’m aware that publishing it is inviting all kinds of responses, and that’s part of why I did it. I’ve been really delighted with the things people have said to me, and it could be different in other corners of the internet, but I’m not going and looking for that.
What made you decide to do it as a free zine and not turn it into a book?Â
[Laughs] I’ve written and sifted through so much material over a long period of time. It always kind of feels like something could be a book or go in a book — just trying to find the right container for different socks.
I am just really lucky that I can do something like this. I’m glad that I can spend a lot of time on something for fun, and it was similar with my blog and with Rookie, which was so challenging financially to run as a business. I love having a physical copy of a piece of writing and to know that it would be tactile and that anyone could just print their own. And going back to the different contexts and considerations around writing about real people, I do think there’s a change if you are profiting in some way. Obviously if I publish work and people like it, I benefit from that. But for the spirit of this to be actual fan fiction that is accessible and in the spirit of fan zines — that ended up being important to me.
What are your listening plans for album release night? Are you a member of the Tortured Poets Department?
I should be the chairman. No, she’s probably the chairman. Of course she is. My parents are visiting, so I guess it will be a little like I’m a teenager and I’m staying up late to listen, and my parents are sleeping, so that’s what I’ll do.