rooms
I have seen Taylor Swift live twice, and both times I have burst into tears during the first five minutes of the show. The first time was eight years ago (!), during a song called New Romantics. At the time I wrote:
It was just so fucking striking to look at her and think that she has an idea of what The Best Kind of Stage Show is, and that she has taught herself to dance in order to make it happen. It’s a striving, obsessive thing that’s exactly why people don’t like her, and why I don’t think I’ll ever be able to stop loving her, at least a little bit.
Because she’s such an obvious try-hard. Because she still believes that if she’s good enough, and nice enough, and follows enough of the rules, people will forgive her for her excellence, and everyone will fall in love with her, which is the only way a girl can win. Lots of things happened on that stage that were girly, or that gestured at feminism, but the whole sensation of it was so particularly female: watching someone put on heels, and putting her body through its paces.
On Saturday it was another image that struck me, this one on screen: of her silhouette, moving through the rooms of the Lover house.
My experience (most people's experience) of Taylor Swift happens at two pretty diametrically opposed scales: the intimacy of her voice through headphones; the way her lyrics are braided through the dailiness of my life. And then the enormous, incomprehensible scale of her fame, of the 70,000 other people in that stadium that night, and the 70,000 more who have attended the countless other nights of what looks to be a record-breaking tour. The collision of those two scales in the form of a stage show can be both exhilarating-- the floor shaking with the ache and rage of tens of thousands of people chanting so casually cruel in the name of being honest-- and also numbing. This thing I feel is so blessedly common. You mean this thing I feel is so utterly common?
Anyway. It wasn't that. It was the idea of her physically sitting in a room, trying to write. Pacing its corners, staring at its walls, willing words to come. The same way I do.
Like there's basically nothing I really understand about Taylor Swift's life. Maybe actually nothing. I couldn't really tell you. But if there is anything, it's probably that. The experience of feeling something; the desire to transform it, to use it, to make something of or with it. And then, really: work that transformation takes. In particular, one image showed her climbing a ladder, coming up from the bottom of something. And I felt that immensely. The work up pushing up, up, up, trying to climb out from under. To emerge triumphant, and to tell about it.
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Speaking of work! I interviewed Edan Lepucki about her (excellent) most recent novel, TIME'S MOUTH for Alta Journal. She generously shared the story of its long path to publication with me, which I particularly valued for obvious reasons.
Enrollment remains open for my class on writing sex scenes.
And if you live in the UK (or know how to work a VPN), you can see me in a documentary about Kim and Kanye's divorce here. American release coming eventually!