The Renata Adler of It Girl Polycules Looking at Your Phone a Lot

I went to the "Smug Little Culture Critic" Department and everyone knew you...

I know I wasn’t alone this week in devouring Tavi Gevinson’s delicious 71-page zine satirizing the Rookie founder’s real-life friendship with Taylor Swift. Divided into three parts, the zine “explores the tenuous intersection between being a fan, a critic, and a friend” to the most famous woman on the planet. In the first part, Gevinson writes with the cool remove of an internet critic, referencing Woolf and Barthes as she argues that she “never cared much for “All Too Well.”” She wonders aloud whether Swift’s sheer power over her fandom has decimated any remaining shreds of authenticity, and if what exists between her and her friends can really be classified as “love.”

The zine then cuts away to a doodle-filled part two, in which Gevinson admits that part one was “my smug little “culture critic” attempt at talking about some aspects of Taylor’s music that I think get overlooked.” Having experienced fame from a young age as a prodigious writer with a massive audience, Gevinson is familiar with “a desperate need to insert myself into the Conversation,” which she does by reminding us that “I know Taylor, I knew Taylor, we were friends, maybe we are still friends, if you can be friends with someone without ever talking to them.” 

And so we spend the next 50 or so pages wondering what’s real or not in Gevinson’s imagined conversations with Taylor, although if you think you’ll get the answer, think again. Gevinson refuses to “apply a matrix of real or not real” to the piece, though the fact that we’re even asking is half the point:

“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.”

As I write this, I’m streaming Swift’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department, in the background for the second or third time and finding it mostly forgettable. At 34, Swift sounds like she’s working on autopilot at this point, sleepily begging her fans for an iota of permission to advance into more mature territory but afraid to take the leap on her own. It reads safe, like she’s already tired of the academia schtick before it’s even begun.

Is it “possible to form a genuine relationship with more people than you can crowd in the mind's eye at a given time? Whose humanity you can process as real? As not a reflection of you?” Gevinson asks of the fake-Taylor. To appease a fandom without abandoning one’s soul would mean to create a purified vision of them in your mind like they’ve done to you, knowing that you’ve crafted it to your own whims to insulate yourself from harm. In other words, mutual dehumanization:

“Few people who can tell you who you were before you were also your image-double. Maybe we were no one at all, Taylor and I, before our flatter yet richer doppelgangers came into being-unreal to ourselves until our image-doubles could speak for us. But at least they did speak.”

In Swift’s new album, she bravely reminds us of the Matty Healy of it all even after Tree Paine worked so hard to make us forget. I can hear Swift’s resentment towards her fans for meddling in her business, but I also hear self-resentment in how she casts herself as that one friend who thinks it’s her and her shitty boyfriend against the world. There’s a self-awareness to that characterization too, non? Gevinson pulls some of her punches, preferring to leave instead to the imagination what might become of a young woman who becomes a global pop star in a gilded cage of her own making. A god among women.

“Is it weird that I know that?” the Gevinson-character asks of her proximity to Taylor as both as a fan and a friend. By “weird,” she means “exploitative.” Is it exploitative “to observe it? To take pictures of the pictures, in my mind? To wonder if I'll write about it? Can you out-Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift?” Here Gevinson is gesturing towards her central conflict: as a writer who trades on her own life in her art, does she gain the right to trade on others’ lives as well? Exploitation versus creation, over and over again, all circling the question of complicity. “I could not love Taylor,” Gevinson finally admits: “I was too much of a fan.” 

“Why not be glad that a woman's inner life means this much to this many people for the first time ever?” Swift asks Gevinson in the final part of the zine, which is comprised entirely of fictionalized emails between their fictionalized selves: “Because I've monetized it like everyone else on earth?”

Here, Gevinson uses the Taylor character as a vessel for Rachel Cusk-like self-flagellation: “Mostly I am shocked. I had no idea you harbored so many judgments toward me. What I find especially heartbreaking and lonely is that we could've found each other again, could've had a real friendship. Instead, you have chosen the story,” the Swift character writes, dripping in irony. In reality, of course, they’ve both chosen the story. It’s why the (fake) versions of them sound so goddamn lonely. “Growing up precocious sometimes means not growing up at all,” sings Swift on her newest album, just in time for Gevinson to wonder if all that guts-spilling in her own youth was worth it:

“We are united, I'm saying, in our coldness–and our condition is spreading. So, what's a role model to do? Convince people there is some healthy way to live with the constant presence of an audience? Or pry open our brains and let them see the human cost of storytelling? How for all we gain in wealth and cultural currency, we cheapen our very existences, the only ones we've got?” 

Gevinson’s right, and she should say it! That’s why I can’t help but laugh at the constant thinkpiecing around it girls, the never-ending discourse from hell. Yes, I’m participating in it right now too, but it’s only because I’m starting to feel just like I did after I watched Shiva Baby: too old for this shit!

You see, it all started when an unsuspecting Scribner editor posted a box full of galleys of Lili Anolik’s upcoming novel, Didion & Babitz, with the caption: “Literary It Girls™ get ready.” What the editor did not realize, perhaps, was that literary it girls stay ready, as do their haters. With nearly a million views and only 3K likes, the original tweet quickly ignited a firestorm of writers simultaneously decrying the tweet and/or asking for a galley of the book. So why were people so heated?

For one, Didion and Babitz had a notoriously complicated friendship, and some took the glibness of the caption to be an intentional flattening of two very different writers. It’s understandable that anyone familiar with their storied legacies would be intrigued—yet skeptical—of the ‘literary it girl’ label being assigned to them. And dare I say it, it’s the same miscommunication Gevinson was pointing towards in her piece, too. In one corner of the internet, a group of writers may playfully portray themselves as ‘literary it girls,’ while another corner baulks at such a reduction of taste and intelligence into a commodified Self.

Opponents argue that this is due to their own internalized misogyny or jealousy, though it may also just be genuine, if misplaced, concern. Yet those ‘it girl’ writers would also be the first to highlight the enormous amount of work and pressure to market one’s work in tandem with one’s ‘persona.’ Is any side more ‘aware’ of their complicity than the other?

Besides, one read of a Babitz or Didion novel will tell you that both were highly aware of this constant layer to their work, and how their images would be perceived alongside it. In fact, I often think about this line from Babitz’s (apparently unsent) letter to Didion:

“Just think, Joan, if you were five feet eleven and wrote like you do and stuff—people’d judge you differently and your work… Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed to if you weren’t physically so unthreatening?”¹

Of course, the paradox of marketing one’s art through a personified self is not new. At what point do we get off the feedback loop of forever reacting to the backlash of the backlash, then commenting on the backlash to the backlash? Or, as Gevinson writes: “feel like a loser, go away, write something vulnerable and thorough that proves some people wrong about something, post it, receive praise, and ambivalently return to "the work" while waiting for the other shoe to drop.” The effort involved in keeping up is enough to make someone give up trying to be cool at all. So if you need me, I’ll be over here reclaiming a different pejorative label like “literary non-hottie” instead. Come join me!

On My Reading List This Weekend

Do you have a fake email job? What happens to the historical record when AI images are used in documentary films? The fake conspiracy theorist who started the “birds aren’t real” campaign is looking into a second act in politics. The secretive global network of ships keeping the entire internet afloat: “If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function.” The complicated history of posture policing. One reporter’s tireless investigation into Hilary Duff’s 2007 sampling of a Winston Churchill speech. Hollywood’s existential crisis. Celebrities take to social media to say: stop bullying Jeff Bezos’ wife and “lead with kindness” instead. What will destroy art first: AI, or rent increases? How to learn to stop worrying and love letting go:

“A couple is a conspiracy, yes, but we know exactly what the crime is, and it’s not sex: the crime is monogamy itself, our selfishness and greed, that we guiltlessly guard and hoard for ourselves the greatest thing we’ve ever found. Happy couples always feel a little bad for everyone else (even, especially, other couples), and that makes them feel good. Which is sick! We relish it: their privation, our plenty. What’s more criminal than that?”

1. See

Viv Chen

on Didion’s legacy as a fashion it girl