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Since Taylor Swift’s debut in the mid-2000s, avid fans of the songwriter have compared her to William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson and even Jane Austen. While casual listeners might brush off those comparisons – indeed, sonically speaking, Swift has long embraced a commercial pop sound – her lyrics regularly stand up to literary scrutiny.
Take The Lakes, for instance, a Folklore-era meditation on solitude that includes laments on “auroras and sad prose” and “calamitous love,” all in pursuit of the punny question: “What are my words worth?” Or take this year’s The Fate of Ophelia, in which Swift rewrites the ending of Hamlet (in much the same way as she rejigged Romeo and Juliet on her 2008 monster-hit, Love Story).
In The Slicks, author Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts) places Swift in dialogue with another literary giant: Sylvia Plath. Nelson highlights resonances between the writers’ work, but also between their personas and legacies, diving into the women’s twin relationships with fame, the patriarchy and themselves.
The Globe and Mail sat down with Nelson for a wide-ranging discussion about two of the most famous women in the world – and the ways their creative outputs inform each other.
Taylor Swift's lyrics regularly stand up to literary scrutiny.Scott A Garfitt/The Canadian Press
The Slicks is a short, physically small paperback that calls back to the time of zines. Were you thinking of zines when you wrote the essay? How did you decide to disseminate these thoughts in this way?
When I sat down to write it, I didn’t care if it was 1,000 words of my thoughts or 10,000 of them. When I finished it, it basically seemed like a long article, length-wise. But when I tried to place it, nobody wanted to publish it, which seemed odd but kind of interesting to me. I was talking with a friend of mine, who read it and said, ‘I love it. Let’s publish it as a zine.’ And so we did, and we had a lot of fun with it. It was a real throwback to self-publishing.
These are two really mainstream figures, Taylor Swift and Sylvia Plath. I thought the mainstream press would surely be interested in publishing it. When they weren’t, that was actually really fun. We only made about 300 copies at first, and then people started asking me for the essay and I was at a crossroads – I either had to send out PDFs to anyone who asked or it had to get published in a broader way, so we eventually did that.
I really liked when we first did it, though, this 10,000-word mini-book. It’s fun to have a small object, something kind of cheap and fast, and with a relationship to that fan culture that it’s talking about.
How have Swifties – and Plath fans – reacted to it?
I’m not very online. I have no social media. I don’t try to follow that kind of response, so I don’t really know. I’ve seen two readings of the essay that aren’t quite what I had in mind: it’s not a biography. I’m interested in these aspects of ambition, abundance and autobiography in Swift’s and Plath’s work – creating a biography was never a pillar of it. Also, the essay never says that all criticism of a figure like Taylor Swift is misogynistic – I don’t believe that and I don’t see anywhere in the essay where I say that. I think that’s very lazy thinking, and I would not hope to engage in it.
That’s the difficulty with the genre of this kind of essay: It’s not a critique in the sense of our thumbs-up, thumbs-down culture. This little book isn’t interested in that. It’s about taking further steps back and analyzing themes of reception.
Author Sylvia Plath seated in front of a bookshelf.Bettmann/Getty Images
In the book, which you say you finished in mid-2024, you suggest that Taylor Swift has largely relegated her romantic life to the footnotes of her career. While that was once true, over the last year, we’ve seen her actively showcase her relationship with Travis Kelce – she even announced her latest album on his podcast. How does an essay like The Slicks stand up to the passing of time, especially with such a contemporary subject?
Well, her archive hasn’t changed. And I think it’s important to note that there are two tracks to Taylor Swift fandom: the autobiographical interest in Swift and the interest in the music itself. One is linear, and one is this jumble that the music makes. I’m more interested in the jumble.
Most of the essay circles the notion of fame. You memorably write that “when women make the personal public, the charge of whorishness always lurks nearby.” Can you expand a little on that idea?
When I wrote the essay, between February and May of 2024, The Tortured Poets Department came out. A lot of the press around that album was that there was too much of it – too many songs, too much delivery, too much feeling, too much autobiography, too much Swift. A lot of people were like, ‘If I have to hear or see this person one more time, I’ll die.’ I get that. If you’re seeing things you don’t want to see all the time, I can see how that would feel very frustrating.
I think part of the job as a critic is to analyze in yourself or others what those moods are made up of: What are they attached to, historically? Where have I heard this before? What lineage is this in? I’m offering invitations for thoughts, invitations to wonder. They’re not saying you have to like any of this, or that you’re a misogynist if you don’t. They’re invitations to perform your own analysis on ourselves and on the culture.
This interview has been edited and condensed.