‘Ambition is a punitive field for women’: Writer Maggie Nelson on why Taylor Swift is the Sylvia Plath of her generation | Articles

MAggie Nelson is a huge fan of Taylor Swift. She knows the discography, brings the 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? It seems Nelson isn’t entirely comfortable with the breathless connotations of the term, but yes, love is real. So much so that she wrote a book about the billionaire singer-songwriter, or rather, a joint analysis of Swift and Sylvia Plath, which recurs in much of Nelson’s work.

The idea to unite these two cultural giants, seemingly so far apart in sensibility — one a sad American poet, the other an all-American girl — came to her when she listened to Swift’s 2024 album, Tortured Poets Oath. Along with her literary references to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas, and Shakespeare, there are strong echoes of Plath in her introspection and emotional turmoil. But the book only began to take shape after a conversation with a friend of her 13-year-old son, Alba. “We were making bracelets and she said, ‘Have you ever heard of Sylvia Plath?’ I thought that was funny because I wrote my college thesis on Plath and I was [almost] 40 years older than her. I said: I am He owns “I heard about Sylvia Plath.” As I sat there, I thought, These kids don’t want to hear me talk about this but I have a lot to say because I’ve been thinking about everything.

From that clarifying moment came The Slicks, a book-length essay dedicated to Alba. Nelson has written about pop musicians before: There were reflections on Prince and Björk on Like Love. Here she defends Swift as a poet and lyricist. “The songwriting moves me through,” she says, referring to the star’s flow of productivity. “As Plath said, ‘Bleeding is poetry, and it cannot be stopped.’”

Nelson does his thing from squirting blood as well. She was a poet before she turned to nonfiction and turned it into her own brand of formal experimental art, sometimes writing in what sounds like hybrid poetic prose. She has amassed a huge fan following through books like Bluets, a melancholy paean to the color blue, and her memoir, The Argonauts, about motherhood, family and queerness.

Now, Nelson is the one thrilling fans. Sitting backstage at the Edinburgh International Book Festival at the end of August, she put on a casual, easy-going face. What is it about Swift that attracts children and popular writers alike? “I think one of the most beautiful things about the Taylor Swift phenomenon is that it celebrates her creativity and her strength… It gives these people (a lot of girls, but not all girls) a form of fame, to be proud of yourself and proud of what you’ve done.”

Fame and its relationship with women is the core of the book. Those who desperately want it 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 absolutely hate it (reclusive poet Emily Dickinson).

Neither Plath nor Swift hid their ambitions; Both are aiming for stratospheric fame. The shadow of a third, unnamed, ambitious woman looms over The Slicks, Kamala Harris who, according to Nelson, is taking a more underground path. “I was writing the article all the way up until the election [which Harris lost] And there was almost a way of writing from the heart to the throat. A lot of people have made this point about Harris — that she never says “I want to.” He gave it to her [Joe] Biden is stepping down. There was something about this that avoided the whole “I want this big thing” problem. I thought this was great. I heard some people say, “Well, this will give her a better chance because if she really wants it, people will hate her for it.”

So the book aims an arrow in the direction of the deeply held cultural belief that has blatantly declared that female ambition – and its expression – deserves to be punished. This is where Swift’s shameless desire to make it happen, to have it, comes in. Her productivity and profile are analyzed by means of ancient Greece as well as Freud’s theories on female “hysteria”. This history is based on the misogynistic assumption that women who excavate their personal lives for the sake of their art are somehow cheapening themselves. Silencing these vocal women is part of the patriarchal project, Nelson suggests, even now. “There’s something about desire, and naming your desire—which I think both Plath and Swift did—that is still generally a punitive domain for women.”

It’s not that different from the judgments sometimes made about Nelson’s intimate, boundary-blurring novels, or more generally memoirs by women writers. “It wouldn’t be interesting to say in the biographical space, ‘Women have a different time for it,’” Nelson says. “We are somehow considered moral guardians of our children, our parents, and the people we know. The idea of ​​revealing secrets for the sake of art is more ethical because women are not supposed to take that kind of liberties without deeply considering all the other factors of how everything they do affects someone else.”

The Slicks sits alongside another book Nelson published this year, Pathemata: Or, the Story of My Mouth. She points out that its title (from the Greek word for “suffering”) has distant echoes of Plath’s words: “I don’t want to talk to others, I want others to talk about me.” But the mouth being looked at here is Nelson’s mouth. It’s a memoir mixed with dreamscapes: Nelson’s chronic, inexplicable jaw pain, but also the broader failures of health care, and perhaps even the collective pain of the Covid pandemic.

The experience of lockdown had crushed her creativity, and 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 be messing around with ugly content that I would never publish.”

Some of her sources came from the pain diary she kept for more than a decade: a record of her visits to doctors, medications, and countless treatments along with their results—hope that arose and dissipated, all codified on her desktop. She also began writing down her dreams, and these two collided to form the Pathemata hypothesis. “I thought it would be funny to marry these documents. So I started amusing myself with a copycat project… A lot of people who read it said, ‘I was so angry on behalf of the sick speaker.’ But I was very aware of a certain kind of diagnosis and complaint. I was trying to think, ‘What’s the next stop?’

It may not be laugh-out-loud funny, but there’s awkward humor and quietly searing silliness in the investigations 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 really believe they’re trying to help. For me, there’s more compassion in them that they think they can help. And for anyone with chronic pain, there’s kind of a 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 like you’re drifting into the unhelpable category, that’s a very sad place to be.” For both [patient and doctor]”.

Nelson’s books are often minimal, like Pathimata. She crudely notes that Plath “burned all the peripherals,” without leaving a single unnecessary word on the page; We can see that Nelson is striving to achieve the same racial reduction. However, ironically, she remembers “talking a lot” as a non-stop talkative child. How did it become so little on paper? Through “tons” of editing, she says. “I started out as a poet where you do long sessions of streaming and then you literally sculpt…you’re working hard to turn it into form, so maybe I’ll do something similar. I’ve been writing this book [Pathemata] So small that I kept telling myself: “Don’t reduce it to nothing.”

So it really burns all sides? “Yes, I think so. Although at The Slicks I’m defending Taylor Swift’s excess.” We are back to the singer who, in some ways, provides her own paradox in Nelson’s literary life. As an all-American star, coupled with her famous business acumen and feminist feminism, she is a creature of the mainstream, while Nelson resides in a much more left-wing space. She says that’s exactly what attracts her: “Part of the fun is to feel something that, compared to the world I grew up in, which was much more alien and corrupt, is very ordinary…insisting on being there because it’s a way of continuing to insist that you’re part of that culture.”

The example she gives is the Super Bowl, now synonymous with Swift and her football player fiancé, Travis Kelce, but also a bastion of American popular culture. “I love football, so I was watching it, but there were anti-trans commercials that Trump was running. We were having a watch party and they were like, ‘This isn’t for you.’ I’m interested in who becomes part of that trend. I’m not willing to give that up.”

Living amid Trump’s politics and the contested terrain around transgender identity within her own family — she lives in California with a son and gender-nonconforming partner, artist Harry Dodge — must she carry a dissonance of her own? “It’s not terrible for my family right now, but it’s quicksand every day where vulnerable bodies are brutalized,” she says. “I care very much about freedom. I will not be lectured about it by people intent on taking it away. I have written a book about it.” [On Freedom]about the two biggest speeches in the United States: one about abolition/civil rights, the other about white supremacists. “They have always been present in the United States.”

Is America currently dealing with white supremacy? “You mean Trump? Sure. It’s pretty clear where we’re at here.” Perhaps the capacity for joy that Nelson Swift described channeling in her music is a necessary light to ward off this darkness. To that end, will Nelson go to the Life of a Showgirl concert? She says it will depend on whether her son is still a Swift fan, but also on whether she can justify the cost of tickets. Last year, she made a direct exchange for a book license she sold for Bluets, which has been adapted into a play in London. “I wanted to take my son and his friend to the Eras tour, but it was expensive. I was on the fence about licensing the play, but then I realized the cost to take everyone to the tour was about the same. In the spirit of Taylor Swift, I thought I’d sell it and go to the show.”

So, she laughs, if it happens again, she’ll be there for Showgirl. Swiftonomics indeed.