critics, fans, and subjects (with tavi gevinson)
we also discuss self-knowledge, immediacy, blogging, and (obviously) Taylor Swift
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It’s a weird time for zines, and a weird time for “girlhood”, and a weird time for blogging, and a weird time for autofiction, and a weird time for young people online. (It’s sort of an awesome time for Taylor Swift, but that’s kind of weird, too.) With all this on my mind, only one thing made sense: it was time to talk to Tavi Gevinson.
For many readers of this blog, Tavi will need no introduction. She’s been a blogger, an essayist (this NYMag piece is always worth revisiting), an editor (of Rookie Mag, a definitive pillar of 2010s girlhood), an actress (on Broadway, Gossip Girl, etc), a fashion world figure, and a kind of child star that didn’t really exist before she did it. Most of all, I think of her as someone who is very smart and interesting, and who has been smart and interesting for a long time, and who has consistently subverted, in smart and interesting ways, many of the expectations that people might have had for her over the course of her very visible life.
One such subversion: About a year ago, she released Fan Fiction, an autofictional satire inspired by her real-life relationship with Taylor Swift, on an independent website for readers to download and print out for free. The zine moves through three formats — cultural criticism, Rookie-esque first-person narrative, and email exchange — to reflect on obsession, female friendship, girlhood, fame, blogging, youth, and the strange and complicated places where each of those institutions intersect. It feels a bit cliche to call a piece of writing “brave” these days, but I really did think it was brave, in that it played with cultural ideas around honesty, persona, and women’s confessional writing in a way that legitimately challenged many readers. Blurring the line between critic and subject is no simple thing. I read it in one breathless sitting, feeling — as I often do when I read Tavi’s writing — that it must have somehow been written specifically for me.
Throughout our almost two-hour-long conversation, we kept returning, in various ways, to a discussion about fans vs critics vs subjects. Can subjects be critics? Can critics be fans? Is the fan the enemy of the critic, as so often seems to be the case in the discourse around Marvel movies and pop stars? Does creating culture, and joining a class of people who do the same, threaten your ability to critique it? Tavi pointed out to me that writers like Hilton Als find a way to marry fandom and criticism, to make them not only complimentary but inseparable from each other. I’ve been thinking, since our talk, about the other kinds of intersections between the three identities, and have found myself trying to map the perfect nexus of all of them — to identify the prototypical figure that exemplifies fan, critic, and subject all at once, whose identity cannot be understood without a robust analysis of all three archetypes. The best answer, I decided, can’t just be someone who happens to be a fan of some things and a critic of others, while also being a subject of public interest; it has to be someone whose fandom, criticism, and subjecthood are all intrinsically connected, feeding into each other, each identity generated by and generative of the others. Many people could fit this bill, to be sure, but one answer felt truer to me than all the rest, seeming so immediately obvious once I’d thought of it that it felt like a discovery of a natural law: the intersection of fan, critic, and subject is girlblogger.
To be fair, this idea feels like it’s basically a primary thesis of Fan Fiction, and so was not really a discovery at all. Either way, I was moved to sketch out this (very rudimentary) chart. More on this later, perhaps.
Anyway, back to the matter at hand: here is our long conversation! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. As I was sketching out my questions for Tavi, I wrote a reminder to myself at the top of my interview notes: remember do not just ask her for personal advice. Despite my efforts, I ended up getting it anyway.
This transcript has been edited and condensed.
Rayne: Well, it's hard when you have a whole conversation before you actually start recording because then you kind of have to pretend that you're starting a conversation again or whatever. But — ugh, well, what should I start with? Okay: Fan Fiction was published about a year ago. How are you feeling about it now?
Tavi: Good! I was just supposed to do an event for it in LA at Heavy Manners, which is the independent library that's now printing them. We had to cancel it, but I want to do more stuff like that. I self-published it, so when it came out, I had to make the choice between how much I wanted to be my own publicist so that it would find its audience, versus moving on and doing other writing. I don't love the feeling of anxiously trying to get people to do anything, such as read my work.
Rayne: Well, asking for anything is one of the most embarrassing things you can do.
Tavi: [Laughs] Totally humiliating, yeah. And it did find its audience in a special, organic way. I couldn’t have achieved the effect I wanted if it had been published with the safety and muscle of a publisher. But now I'm like, oh, I didn't get to have the feeling of bringing people together. Which was such a nice part of all the Rookie books.
Rayne: I thought it was really interesting that you chose to publish a zine for free. I feel like there are more avenues than ever all the time for people to kind of squeeze money out of their art and their work, which in some ways is really good, but I think can also be sort of, you know, complicated. I also think we’re in this specific moment where it feels like there's almost been kind of like an elite capture of zine culture a little bit.
Tavi: Yeah, yeah.
Rayne: Like, Conde Nast is releasing a zine, Hinge released a zine. A lot of these big corporations are buying into this DIY zine-style ethos. So, all this to say — I'm curious what you think about all of that — but I also just thought it was a really cool and interesting choice to release this really big, serious body of work and not charge for it, to make it free to the public. I'm wondering why you chose to do that.
Tavi: Even though it's fiction and ultimately reveals nothing about Taylor Swift, I felt like charging for it would mean trading in the currency of my previous proximity to her. And the piece already exploits that, but as a bait-and-switch.
There's also some critique within the writing around commodifying one's personal life and relationships, or trying to make as much money as possible off of art that comes from a very personal place. It felt wrong, then, to sell it. Or rather, it felt good and freeing and in the spirit of the piece to give it away.
Of course, you can now buy them from Heavy Manners, and my cut of that goes to the National Network of Abortion Funds. Also, people should be paid for their work, but I was in a position where I didn't need to be, and where the work was better served by this model.
Rayne: Totally. Honestly, that really strikes me as connected to a kind of artistic conflict I’ve felt as well, that I haven’t really been able to articulate until you said that. I publish on one of those platforms where you can squeeze money out of everything you produce, which is good, in many ways, for me and for many independent writers. But I have completely had a feeling of, if I paywall this essay I wrote about my breakup, am I so literally commodifying this relationship, so literally trading in a currency of experience? It feels like the immediacy of blogging adds this interesting layer that can feel scary — you wonder, are people paying for the work, because of course work does deserve to be compensated, or are people paying for access a private story about my life, or, like, paying for access to this very personal relationship? Does that change the transaction? Is there such a thing as a pure artistic exchange? Of course, this isn't the fault of the consumer at all. But I feel like it is this interesting question.
Tavi: Well, another way of looking at it is that you can assume that someone who's paying for your work is reading in good faith, or that they're literally invested in you as a writer, so I would understand if you're publishing something that feels like it carries more of an emotional risk, why you wouldn't want it to be something that anyone can find, or can read. But I also understand that kind of questioning.
Rayne: Of course — and that’s actually the whole reason why I did end up paywalling that essay. Which is so complicated in itself… it’s an interesting feature of the platform that that intimacy, or that safety, is necessarily functionally synonymous with commodification. Did it feel like Fan Fiction carried an emotional risk for you?
Tavi: Yeah.
Rayne: Was it scary to distribute it so widely, in that context?
Tavi: Yeah. But then, after a little bit, I was like, I think this is also just the adrenaline of publishing. It kind of makes me feel 12 again, which is not always great for my nervous system. I've been doing this since I was so young, and the internet can be a scary place. Some of it was just the vulnerability of publishing writing that you're proud of and hoping that you're not completely delusional. But some of it was also anxiety about social consequences. [Laughs]
Rayne: How did you deal with that anxiety?
Tavi: I came up with a set of rules for the writing that forced me to distinguish between what’s socially unacceptable versus harmful. I had a lot of friends read it very carefully. I think that made the piece more intentional around indicators that the narrator is misremembering or making something up. It got more surreal. And a lot of this grappling was put on the page. Then what first felt like “problems” were no longer problems, but very fun subject matter.
The text message [in the zine] from the Taylor character that's about me being drunk and messy — at first, I had an amazing text from her in there. It was amazing because A. my behavior when I was 20 was ridiculous, but B. She's just such an amazing storyteller, even in this little text message. It had a perfect three-act structure. But my friend said that quoting personal messages feels too invasive, and I was like, oh, you're absolutely right. But then, about another part, my therapist was like, “Why do you feel comfortable saying that this person sees her art practice as putting a message in a bottle?” I was like, “Because she has a song called ‘Message in a Bottle.’”
Rayne: Yeah. I think when you’re talking about social consequences — I'm always interested in how people navigate the tension of being a person that wants to criticize culture with being a person that is in some way producing culture, or at the center of culture. Like, you're a writer, of course, but like you're also an actor, and you’re a person that is, and is also very adjacent to, a type of person like Taylor Swift — people who are at the center of the culture that people critique. But then I also think that you want to critique culture. And there's a couple people in that position. A while ago there was this great clip of Tina Fey talking to Bowen Yang, I’m sure you’ve seen it — where she says, basically, authenticity is dangerous and expensive, and you’re too famous now to keep trafficking in it. I think about this a lot, because I love critiquing culture so much, but I also want to, you know, create culture in some way.
And I think it often feels like a betrayal that only goes one way: a lot of people critique culture until they have the chance to be in the center of culture, and then they forgo the criticizing of it because it threatens that position. And I think something I thought was so cool about this piece, whether or not this assumption is correct, is that, well, it feels like you almost betrayed it the opposite way and critiqued culture from being in the center of culture. Which not a lot of people do, because I think it does feel a little bit risky. And there maybe are a series of incentives and rewards in place once you’re in the castle or whatever. Have you felt that tension?
Tavi: Yeah, because I haven't really had a plan all this time. Like, for years of my life, I felt so allergic to thinking in a long-term way. When I was younger, I hated when people would be like, but which thing do you want to focus on? What do you really want to do? I would always respond that I just cared about each project as its own self-contained thing, whether I was participating as writer or actor or critic, kind of ignoring the way that these roles set a certain expectation for the audience or reader. Maybe this zine was me playing with those rules. I obviously knew that there was some kind of — sacrifice is too grandiose a word, but…
Rayne: Betrayal was also too grandiose a word, to be clear. [Laughs]
Tavi: [Laughs] Well, it was a choice! I thought about how it might alienate some people. But I just felt like, well, if you don't want to alienate people, don't be an artist. When you're excited about something — especially with writing, which is so hard and so solitary — you have to go toward it. You'll just be able to do so much more artistically. The possibilities are so plentiful if you are enthusiastic about something and if it feels really new to you. I had been sitting on parts of Fan Fiction since 2020, so when I finally figured out what it would be, it would’ve been truly delusional to not follow through just in case the most famous woman on earth one day wanted to reconnect.
Rayne: Of course. I think sometimes it feels like a great tragedy that the natural structure of things so often is that, you know, you see so many people who come up because they say exciting outsider things about art and culture and movies and books and stuff, and then suddenly they get a book deal at the same publisher that publishes the books they used to criticize, or they get a TV agent and suddenly they want to work on that movie, so they can’t criticize it. Through being really good at criticism, it feels like the system can reward you in a way that neuters your ability to produce the same kind of criticism without risk or without sacrifice, which a dynamic that I think sometimes is very sad to see uninterrupted. So I thought — even though you of course didn't do anything offensive or crazy — I thought it was cool just to in some way signal a divestment from that traditional route of things.
On another note… Fan Fiction has drawn comparisons to I Love Dick. Which I say because I am comparing it to I Love Dick. [Laughs] Which is one of my favorite books.
Tavi: I read it when I was 16 or 17. And I have two journals from that year that say on the spine, Mostly I Love Dick Quotes, Part One and Part Two. I haven't read it since then, but I mean — so, so formative.
Rayne: Did you feel like it was like a direct inspiration, or more just that it was just sort of in the water?
Tavi: It's so in my DNA that it wasn't conscious, and then my friends were like, oh, this is your I Love Dick. And I was like, oh, of course it is.
Rayne: I read I Love Dick for the first time like a year ago, or maybe even like six months ago. And obviously it was like a lightning bolt struck through me and the world opened up, of course. Part of the alchemy of the book is that Dick is not really so special of a person. Or, at least, he's not a star: it's very easy for him to be subsumed by Chris's amazing ideation and her writing and her artistic production. Part of the whole point of the book, its feminist power, is how it becomes so clear that the story isn't about Dick, it's about Chris.
And, as I was reading Fan Fiction, it really helped me understand Taylor Swift's work in a very similar way. I thought you wrote about that so compellingly, how the men in her songs aren't really the stars — the song ends up being all about her desire, or her nostalgia, or her ambition. She’s always the subject. And, of course, Fan Fiction works similarly, too, where Taylor becomes this way for the you-character to explore all these feelings she has about youth and fame and nostalgia and so on. But I was thinking that the zine runs into a dynamic that is actually so different than I Love Dick. Because Dick is nobody, and Taylor Swift might literally be the most famous person in the world — her presence, at least for many readers, is almost impossible to ignore.
Tavi: That's such an interesting observation. She gives me so much as a subject that it never felt like an issue that there's so much her-ness in this world. It just meant people would be bringing their own feelings about her to it, which, as I say in the piece, is also one of the joys and obstacles of her music — the presence of her celebrity. It’s why fandom can be fun but also preclude a potentially more interesting experience of art.
I feel like when you're negotiating writing about real people, it's more often about the ethics of writing about what a real person, perhaps without much of their own platform, did in real life. This was more about the ethics of leading a reader to believe that a real person with a giant platform had done or said things that she hadn't. For example, friends of mine who are Swifties thought the emails were real. I think it’s because she's just so real to them already that they were like, Of course I'm getting the access to her that I want!
But I think even with all the access to her work and her life, all that stuff is still not her. None of us are totally consistent or knowable — by strangers, our loved ones, or ourselves.
Rayne: It’s so interesting, too, because she is so written about. Obviously in the genre of cultural commentary and celebrity gossip, but she’s also so present in huge commercial genres of fiction. I don’t know if you’ve seen these romance novels — there’s a whole genre of romance novel, some of them hugely popular, that are all totally downstream of her music. I know admittedly very little about the romance fiction community except as a voyeur, but it’s such a huge market, and a big subgenre of those books are marketed as “Taylor Swift inspired”, and it's not that it’s books about Taylor Swift, although those also exist — it's books where, like, every chapter is named after one of her songs, and the lyrics of the songs are woven into the story or referenced constantly as just part of the book’s natural language.
I thought it was really interesting because it’s a style of engagement that is pretty rare, today, I think — I struggle to think of a modern writer that is so completely interpolated into a cultural consciousness of artistic production, to the point that her lyrics just pop up integrated in romance novels all the time, and it’s understood as a universally recognizable reference to build the atmosphere of the book. It’s a method of engaging with work that almost vaguely reminds me of, like, how Shakespeare is engaged with in a lot of texts — like there's so many writers throughout history who weave in these lines of Shakespeare or Dickens whatever as universal literary references. But I struggle to think of another recent writer or artist where whole books and bodies of work have been written that reference their work so completely and constantly. What do you think it is about her that draws people to want to do that?
Tavi: The first thing that comes to mind is that I think she interpolates her influences really well, which is not at all a dig. I mean, how many people have been inspired by those same country singers and rom-coms and novels? That doesn't necessarily mean that you can create the songs she has. Even the fact that the song Love Story is like, what if Romeo and Juliet didn't die? — there's a collective consciousness, with motifs and imagery and ideas of love, that she's playing into and packaging in her singular way.
Rayne: She's so good at reflecting parts of a culture. And I feel like she’s not… I mean, I feel there are people, like someone like Lana Del Rey, for instance, who really pushed pop music in a different direction, and Taylor Swift doesn't exactly do that. She’s not really ever building a completely new script for what pop music can look like, or what a song can look like. Her talent is much more in intaking cultural ideas and then reflecting them back and packaging them in a sometimes-perfect way. And I think something you address really beautifully in the zine is that I’ve felt there’s almost something a little bit sad [about her work], or, rather, there's a deep empathy I’ve felt for it: when she writes about high school or something, maybe I’m being so parasocial, but there’s something about it that feels like the type of fixation that comes when you want so badly to be a part of something, to understand it, from the outside looking in. Like, collecting little pieces of what an idealized normal life looks like and writing the story and scripting yourself into it. Because we know, of course, that she didn't have a normal high school experience. But so much of her best writing, even today, is about imagining being the cheerleader, or imagining herself in comparison to the cheerleader.
Tavi: I was talking with my friend who’s trans about this, in terms of Taylor's performance of high school, and my friend was like, “That's how I feel about her performance of femininity”— that it reveals something about how much the “real thing” is a performance. Like the Judith Butler line that gender is imitation without an original. The “real” American high school experience is constructed, even though it can feel at that age like these milestones are somehow natural, and if you don't experience them, there's something wrong with you. There are the dependable physiological changes people go through at that age, and then there are the much more constructed cultural expectations. And obviously the two inform and change each other as well.
Before I became a full devotee of hers, I was already having this experience with Twin Peaks and The Virgin Suicides. I wrote a blog post when I was 14 or 15 about watching them and relating to this longing that the characters had for Laura Palmer and the Lisbon Sisters — and of course, the Lisbon Sisters themselves are listening to records and longing for some experience they're not allowed to have because they're being kept inside by their parents. Also, the girls I’m talking about are all dead, being remembered through grief, at times by boys who barely knew them. Going back to the void at the center of some of these desires, a handful of critics have even argued that the Lisbon family is a metaphor for white flight, with whiteness and suburbia as fantasies of total safety. In any case, I think Taylor Swift can be that object for a listener, but I always felt like she was a listener with her own objects, too.
Rayne: I think there's an element of fixation on the romance and importance of these experiences that comes from feeling like you are denied it, or outside of it. By and large, I think most people who are “authentically” living and enjoying some experience, like high school, tend to not be the people writing pages and pages of mythologized meta-analysis about what it might mean to be living and enjoying that experience. But, contradicting that — I think maybe everybody feels denied these experiences in some way, even the people who seem to be on the “inside”, because it is, like you said, imitation with no original. Girlhood doesn’t exist, the perfect high school experience doesn’t exist, everyone is circling a drain of imitation. But I think it is really interesting in that context that Taylor Swift didn't have a normal high school experience, which you didn't either, I would assume. I feel like both of you made this work that felt both really culturally representative of what a high school girlhood experience looked like, which then also became a referent for people. Like, I listened to You Belong With Me when I was in middle school and was like, this is what high school is going to be like, and built my expectations for what that experience would be for me by listening to somebody writing about a fantasy of what they wished that experience could look like for them. Which is an interesting cycle of desire, of unfulfilled desires.
Tavi: Yeah, totally. It's also really useful. When I was younger I was so concerned with whether that kind of dream space we're talking about is a legitimate form of experience. And now I'm like, oh, that just means you're a writer. It's imagination. When I feel some version of that longing now, I'm a little like, still got it! [Laughs] Even when I know better, even when I’m like — you've been inside that room! You know there's nothing in that room! I'm still kind of pleased that there's still any desire at all. As long as it isn't soul sucking, like wishing I looked a different way, or any of the more toxic kinds of yearning that images give us.
Rayne: Yeah. Like, I really like being in a lovely, committed relationship with my boyfriend, but I sometimes have this worry of like — it feels like being alone can be so generative for people as writers and artists. Not at all because of the experiences you might get or something, because actually real love is, of course, a wonderful experience to write about and think about. But more because I feel like desire begets desire. Writing is so much about wanting, to me, and being in a state of wanting things all the time in your life feels like it helps generate more creative desire too, more ambition. And sometimes it feels like when you interrupt that by falling into satisfying love…[laughs] I always worry that it can put you in stasis or something. Which I'm sure is not actually true. It’s just an anxiety.
Tavi: I get that. Also, I think that narrative is readily available. Not that you’re not really experiencing that — but even in all these books like All Fours, it's like, the partnership is you know what's going to happen, and the world outside is anything could happen. But, of course, both are both things at different times. Sometimes stability and comfort make you more able to take emotional risks in your work.
Rayne: Have you ever been written about? Obviously you've been interviewed and stuff, but I mean, like, unauthorized — has somebody in your life, someone you know or love, made you a character in some way?
Tavi: Not that I know of.
Rayne: Do you think about what it would be like if that were to happen?
Tavi: Yeah, I thought about that when I was working on this. I tried to create a parallel scenario in my head and ask myself how I would feel if someone younger than me who I had been generous to, who had been in my home and spent time with me, made a weird zine about it 10 years later. I'd be weirded out, but I would also understand the creative process. I think so much of [the zine] is also such a love letter to her work, not that that cancels out whatever else might be uncomfortable about it — but the point was not to try to control anyone's response to it. I felt like, okay, for there to be real risk here, it has to walk a line and live in these questions about celebrity and privacy. But I still had my rules about what felt actually unethical.
Rayne: Yeah. I'm often in this position of writing about people I love. For my book, I'm writing a lot about my mother and my best friend; I’ve written about my ex-boyfriend, I write sometimes about my current boyfriend, and my friends, and I have been very lucky that, by and large, all of those people are pretty okay with it. Or at least accepting of it. But I do think I'm in this privileged position where it's kind of easy for me to be like, this is all a love letter! But, like, they're the ones, of course, who are ultimately getting picked apart and having to interface with my perceptions of them.
Tavi: It is certainly uncomfortable to see yourself through someone else's eyes and realize how powerless you are to control their perception. It is also the human condition. I guess because I've been written about since I was young, I sort of expect everyone to have that understanding. Which is not fair because in some ways, it's healthy, but in other ways, it's not that healthy to be like, Oh, that's just the girl who looks like me and has my name, and our lives are the exact same… that's just my ego, whereas I am an ocean of presence! I think that ability can be useful for making art and writing and performing, but also, as an adult, I've had to really work to unearth the human being with needs.
Rayne: And for you it’s also just cast in stone the version of you that the person was seeing when you were 14 or 15. And so much of living, for me at least, has been realizing again and again how lucky we are to be able to forget! I am so lucky to have forgotten certain parts of what it was like to be 14 or 15. I imagine it must be really strange to have so many versions of yourself committed to the record. Especially when it's like, I don't know — when someone writes about you, that's a version of you that is real now, in some sense. It might not be the real you, whatever that means, but it exists. That person’s perception of you is real now.
Tavi: Yeah. I think about that a lot. My book is about that. I mean, I use writing from throughout my life in it, and some writing about me, and working on a book has been a good way to process those disparate realities, because I think the principles that you operate from when you are trying to make a hopefully funny-but-insightful book are way more interesting than thinking about all of that from a place of grievance. Certainly there's a time and place for processing hurt. But writing gives me the ability to look at my life in a different way, in a more interesting way. And also to be imaginative with those selves — to use them as characters and material.
Rayne: This is gonna be way too involved of a lead-up to an ultimately silly question, but there's this essay in the Paris Review that I really like that's about the author, Sophie Haigney, playing this game called Dichotomies. She talks about this game where you just think of any dichotomy, like thunder and lightning or, like, jock or nerd, or you know, whatever. And you sort yourself and all the people you know firmly into a side of the dichotomy. And she writes about how it seems so simple, but you actually end up playing with all these really interesting ideas around self-knowledge and perception — like, it actually starts to feel like a very important question, whether you're thunder or lightning. Maybe your boyfriend thinks you're thunder, but you always thought you’d be lightning. It actually opens up all these very interesting questions, and ends up being sort of a dangerous game. All this to say, it created for me a moment of intense self realization and self-knowledge because I was playing with the dichotomy of critic or fan, and well — first, are you a critic or a fan?
Tavi: Fan.
Rayne: And what does that mean to you?
Tavi: This is maybe superficial, but I think I am less of a critic because I am compromised by being an actor who's in things. Like, yes, I have opinions about movies, but is it in my best interest to share them all online? No. [Laughs] If film criticism were my passion, then yes, of course. But it's not, so I feel like I have to be more of a fan. Also, I just think my enthusiasm is more fan-like. But then there are critics like Hilton Als, who I think writes as a fan, too — who writes about the way he can feel so personally impacted by individuals, like a figure like Prince.
Rayne: Totally.
Tavi: Which one are you?
Rayne: I decided that I was a critic. I think that maybe we were sort of playing two in tandem: we were talking about critic and fan, and then mapped onto that was hater and enthusiast. And, and I felt a little hurt almost for a second because my boyfriend said right away, you're a hater, you're a critic. And I had thought so deeply of myself as an enthusiast. Because that feels like the engine of my life, how enthusiastic I am about all these things I love. But then we realized, no, the way that you show enthusiasm for things is by criticizing them. And, it was truly a moment of intense self-realization for me, where I was like, that's what it means for me to be a critic. The entire way that I metabolize love is through sustained critical attention. And that's true of like a movie or a book, and it's also true of the people I love, where I feel like the most intense expression of my love for them can be something that sounds like criticizing them. [Laughs]
Tavi: Mmhmm. Well, that's why I hate when people are like, I have a love-hate relationship with, like, White Lotus — like, you love it! You love it!
Rayne: You love it! That's what love is. Yeah. I can't imagine loving anything that I didn't want to pick apart. And I thought that was the only way to be, and I think a lot of people are like that, but I do have friends who are like, yeah, the way I like to like things is just straightforward love, straightforward enthusiasm.
Tavi: After Fan Fiction came out, I had so many interactions with people in my life who were like, you're such a cynic! I love it! And I was kind of like, what the fuck? Where I landed is that I'm a skeptic. Also, to me, writing about celebrity and media — it's an act of optimism. We are constantly being fed garbage that calls itself reality. Celebrity, images, narrative itself — they architect our relationships to reality, time, selfhood, our bodies, other people. I’m not saying it’s all fake or bad or wrong. But the machinations are often invisible, and that’s dangerous. So I think making things that destabilize those authorities — that’s a very hopeful act.
Rayne: Yeah — like, the idea that something can be redeemed through sustained attention.
Tavi: Or even just to be like, guess what? Life is stranger than this. It is everchanging and mysterious and has very little to do with a celebrity profile. I don't know if I'm interested in redeeming celebrity, but I enjoy that my life experience so far and my capabilities now as a writer allow me to play with it. Even the way Swifties were reading the zine and having mind-melts once they realized the narrator was unreliable, that they couldn't judge it based on how much I was confessing, because none of it could be trusted — that was really exciting to me.
Rayne: That's really exciting. It reminds me of something Ottessa Moshfegh said to me recently that I thought was so cool. We were talking about how, particularly for women writers, I feel there's sometimes this assumption that there's no mediation or no craft put into the thing that we're doing — that we're just sort of like smearing our period blood on the page, that our writing is purely confessional, purely diaristic. I was talking about how that is sometimes frustrating for me because people don't understand there's like an effort and a mediation in what I'm sharing, that it is how it is on purpose, as the result of conscious creative labour. And Ottessa said something that I thought was so cool, and so interesting — she was basically like, yeah, I don't get so upset about that, because I want to write in a way where if they are going to believe that, I am going to get them.
And I loved that — I thought it was so impressive. The idea that the story itself, the work itself, can make a fool of the reader if they go into it looking for a diary entry.
Tavi: I did one interview around Fan Fiction where the person interviewing me was asking a lot of questions about my childhood, and obviously the piece invites some of that, but I was like — the degree to which you think that I am distraught is a feature of a piece of writing in which I was trying to capture the madness of having fame from a young age. Like, I don't think about this every day. Or very often! It was a choice I made, a series of countless conscious and unconscious choices, for you to feel how you do.
Rayne: Yeah, totally. On another note, they're saying we're in a blogging revival, although that might be Substack ad copy. [Laughs] It's impossible to tell at this point. There’s a part in Fan Fiction where you say you “started following Taylor’s career as a higher-stakes, more famous, more mainstream version of [your] own.” And I read it and I couldn’t help but think, like — I'm sure in this current ecosystem there are many girls who, to put it plainly, feel the same way about you. Was that on your mind while you were writing it? Your presence in this ecosystem of younger bloggers writing about girlhood, the fact that girls might be feeling about you the same way you might be feeling about Taylor?
Tavi: Not at all. Since Rookie folded, I write these occasional essays, or I wrote Fan Fiction, and I really enjoy that exchange, but I don't have a read on the internet the way I did when it was my job every day.
Rayne: Do you feel like you have your eye on the blogging ecosystem? Like, do you feel invested in blogging as a form, or is it not such a big part of your life anymore?
Tavi: I appreciate it as a reader, but between blogging and Rookie, I don't think I can ever go back to being that online. Or at least go back to responding to culture on a shorter timeline. Part of why I folded Rookie was to be able to work on long-term projects, and, boy, did I get what I asked for, because it takes a long fucking time to get anything done [laughs]. But, at the moment, I really appreciate the longer timeline.
Rayne: Totally, yeah. I worry about that sometimes, about immediacy. It feels like immediacy is such a mode of the times. I have to think about it all the time because it is currently my job, to blog, and to be clear — I feel so excited about this vast community of young people and young women writing so immediately in response to their circumstances. But I think I also feel this anxiety sometimes of, like, is immediacy the only way to respond to what's happening around us? Is it the only way to articulate what we’re feeling? It feels like there are incentives and structures, profit structures, that are interested in immediacy, that coerce people into engaging in things with as little mediation as possible.
Tavi: The last emails in the zine are me grappling with this very thing and the fact that I’ve been processing some experiences so publicly since I was quite young. Sometimes I think I was not ready for other people to weigh in, or that publishing just put ego and career and artist pressures on really personal, ongoing processes. But I think it’s easy to forget the urgency I felt behind a lot of that writing, and that that writing is partly why I feel more at peace now. The very last exchange with “Taylor” gave me a chance to look at this nearly lifelong compulsion in another way.
Yes, sometimes things need more time to cook, and our bodies need things that writing alone can’t give us, but I just think that if you need to write, write. Then you develop a gut system for determining where the pressures are coming from, what to wait on, and what to publish now. You wrote something, it needs to breathe. Can it breathe more if you leave it alone, or if you release it and let other people recognize it as real and evolve your thinking on it? I don’t know a method for developing this system other than trial-and-error. But whether you publish something or not, you can always revise it later. The future will be your collaborator either way.
I do worry that immediacy teaches you to self-censor because you’re thinking about some kind of imaginary audience all the time. And I don't know if that level of fear is good for the broader social contract. Not to be confused with — I'm not being like, oh no, cancel culture's back, we should be able to hurt each other more! That’s not what I’m saying.
Rayne: [Laughs] Don’t worry. We're reading in good faith here.
Tavi: I just did it!
Rayne: It’s impossible to escape!
Tavi has a really cool website, as well as instagram and substack. Read Fan Fiction here.
bonus: here is a playlist of what I think are the The Best Taylor Swift Songs (it might be more fair to say it’s just My Favourite Taylor Swift Songs — i could try to make an objective ranking, but it would require a real methodology and a lot of explanation and this post is already over the email length limit). feel free to discourse with me in the comments <3
so glad to see you giving you are in love the appreciation it deserves
should've said no is my favorite taylor song also ;0