i clung to every word. i am a longtime maggie nelson detractor and i feel so vindicated. i am not at all surprised that she wound up here. sorry you had to read that, but so glad you did, to take us on this ride. thank you!!!!
I haven't read the book so can't comment on its quality. But it seems, based on your review, that Nelson doesn't consider the fact that Plath's poetry is infused with a sense of doom. There are many references to suicide in her work. She wrote a novel that revolves around attempted suicide. I like Swift's country albums—shrug at her pop stuff— but there's no doom in any of her songs.
Nelson does sort of comment on this—"In part because Plath died by suicide, and in part [because of her poetry], she posthumously became, in Rose's words, 'a figure for death. Death in the shape of a woman, femininity as deady.' Swift by contrast, is no such thing. In fact, one of the words most associated with Swift's music is 'joy': Plath, not so much"—but this only further begs the question, why even make this comparison in the first place, when the two are so radically different in temperament, content, life, format, etc? It just doesn't make any sense
Interestingly there’s actually a number of lyrics that point to Swift suffering from depression and contemplating suicide, though like any written work it’s hard to tell how much is poetic hyperbole versus truth.
For instance in “Hoax,” she writes:
Stood on the cliffside
Screaming, “Give me a reason”
Your faithless love’s the only hoax
I believe in
Don’t want no other shade of blue
But you
No other sadness in the world would do.”
Her albums, folklore and evermore actually have quite a bit of songs about depression
Sherman, reread Plath. The novel doesn't center around the suicide attempt, it's simply part of the story. And her poetry is full of all sorts of strong elements, but is mostly about power, not suicide. You see suicide because that's where the poet ended, but it's not where her poetry lived. I know it's REALLY important to put her in that box bc then you can diminish her actual accomplishments. Read her with some respect.
Suicide is a pretty central them to The Bell Jar, and I don't think it's wrong to characterize her oeuvre as being preoccupied with suicide, death, and doom. Even Nelson in her book acknowledges this and I don't think she's wrong to either, I think that's a fair assessment, and I don't think Sherman is being disrespectful to repeat this popular assessment. You can make the argument that this reduces Plath's a work a little and forges engaging with other elements of Plath's work (I, for instance, think people don't pay enough attention to how funny Plath is), but that's true of how people speak about basically every artist. Sherman himself probably gets reduced to "funny writing about young Indigenous guys" a lot, that's just sort of what happens.
I have a poster of Plath's "Lady Lazarus" on my office wall along with posters of Toni Morrison, William Blake, and Scott Fitzgerald. Also, I'm not sure why you would think suicide doesn't play a central role in Plath's writing. She often writes about her suicidal depression. She once briefly worked at a mental hospital. She writes often about her fear of being "institutionalized." Also, she committed suicide with her two children in the house. She was one of the great poets and she was extremely troubled and mentally ill.
I haven't read the book and don't intend to. No way am I subjecting myself to that, but to me the whole thing just seems lazy and half-assed. I don't even think she believes her own case, she just wrote about Taylor Swift because it's a good way to sell books and that's what she needed to do. It's less like Scientology and more like those advertising tie ins do with fast food restaurants. This book is the toy inside the happy meal.
I don't think we can rule out this being a cynical pivot by Nelson to break herself into the BookTok / girlboss-affirmation space, where the work is easy and the money is plentiful (one of the last niches this is true in a dying industry).
I read every word and really enjoyed the footnotes and links to other reviews. Thank you for reading “this little zine” so that I didn’t have to! I’m married to a casual Taylor Swift fan who, like me, got into Nelson by reading the Argonauts during quarantine—I gave her a five second overview of your piece over our morning coffee and she couldn’t believe this was a project Maggie would even think of undertaking.
I’m offended right along with you at the egregious misreadings of Marx and the failure to notice Taylor’s drift into MAGA world. It mirrors Maggie’s drift into detached liberalism from the comfort of her LA bungalow.
She claimed she wrote the book during the 2024 election (I'm actually starting to remember I heard of this project earlier than this year, I think she may have even mentioned it in her last appearance on Bookworm?). But the fact that she didn't try to suspend the publication once it became clear things were going this way reeks of an inability to confront reality.
whenever I see a writer openly grovelling at the feet of some rich and famous person I immediately hear dr johnson's serenely timeless voice: "no one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money". nelson might be a relatively successful writer but that doesn't mean anything compared to a figure like taylor swift. it would change her life if she could ingratiate herself to swift even a little. she has the cultural cachet to bestow some respectability to the star and this looks like her offer at a mutually advantageous trade. "it is smart" as bill hicks might have said.
I had the same thought when writing, I do think Nelson is hoping with this that Swift will give her at least a crumb of attention. But the grovelling also clearly comes from an honest place; Nelson is, I think, someone who genuinely worships this woman. More likely, Swift will completely ignore this, and Nelson's esteem will plummet. Or maybe that's just my wishful thinking.
Hoping for Swift’s attention, labeling the writing as “groveling,” the assumption of “genuinely worships (Swift).” No writer is beyond reproach or critique but you have not done a meaningful analysis here. It doesn’t seem like any of the men in your comments have actually read the book either, so the commentary is based on your piece, not the book itself.
this haaaaas to be a My Pafology-style experiment. like she’s about to follow it up with a book of serious Plath scholarship, plus an angry note that her publisher or agent asked her to “make it more relevant”
It's really a shame, I think she started to lean into her worst impulses. Her theory-dropping worked when it was in service of her personal explorations; she has increasingly opted to ramp up the theory (which she now often fails to utilize for any real purpose) and cut out the heart. An author who came to mind immediately while I reflected on that was Alison Bechdel, who had the same transition between Fun Home (very good) to Are You My Mother? (sucked). She, like Nelson, got lost within the weeds, started trying too hard to prove she was clever and erudite when that was never the "core" of her work, just a peripheral element.
She started one of her books with a Wittgenstein reference. Most of the analytic philosophers I encountered as a philosophy student who’d written phds in philosophy of language said they didn’t know what Wittgenstein was saying and doubted he himself completely understood it. Takes quite a bit of hubris to even venture an interpretation. And from Nelson it felt pretentious, as if name dropping to envelope the opening scene in some mysterious shroud of erudition
Bechdel is a blowhard, but I think Fun Home gets by on the fact that her relationship with her father is just so compelling imo, as is the frustrated lack of closure brought on by his apparent suicide. What's crazy however is later realizing that basically nobody in her family thinks it was a suicide but Bechdel, that he was literally just hit by a truck and this is all just an elaborate fantasy of hers.
I haven't read Fun Home since I was 20, so maybe it hasn't held up -- I certainly don't know how much it would when I see comments from Bechdel that she thinks it was a "suicide" "because it’s less painful that way. He didn’t leave a note. I have no proof. It just makes psychological sense. My coming out dislodged something. My parents were managing this secret of his, then I shone a light on it," which is an extremely deranged and narcissistic thing to say. Maybe I will have to revisit it.
Came for the righteous Taylor hate; stayed for the trenchant Bechdel analysis. Never seen a bigger drop-off than between Fun Home and Are You My Mother?
This is the brutal part! She's written three or four books that I think are as excellent as any poetry / essay writing of the past decade, and then we get... this. It's starting to feel like she's lost the plot for good.
Finally cracked open Tha Argonauts after The Slicks and I think I hated it. Going to go back to Bluets to see if I still like it, but I think from my memories of it that it will still moreorless hold up. It's a bad genre, "autotheory", but Bluets is one of the handful of works in that stream that I really enjoy
great work as usual. Honestly I have no clear idea who Maggie Nelson is either way or why her work was ever considered important -- I suppose I mentally filed her under "Sheila Heti" or one of those other 00s/10s writers of autoslop. anyway this sounds really terrible
Worse than regular autoslop, auto*theory*, autoslop with some shame about itself that feels the need to justify its worst tendencies by marrying them to the sterile outlook of an "academic." A perfect fusion of all the worst tendencies killing 21st century writing
I think I just have intrinsic literary antibodies or something because I've always been able to sense these writers are going to be like that even after reading a two or three sentence description of them. If the selling point is ever anything even slightly adjacent to them being an academic who tendentiously hauls out Audre Lord or Dworkin or Althusser or someone to prop up a bunch of diary entries that calls itself a novel, for me it immediately and automatically establishes itself as less than D-tier quality and warranting no further attention. There were so many of these types back in the 00s and 10s that their names all blur together for me.
Greatly enjoyed this...without any knowledge of Nelson and very little of Swift. I did once read a few poems by Nelson and could find nothing much in them. Definitely here, though, for more reviews.
i clung to every word. i am a longtime maggie nelson detractor and i feel so vindicated. i am not at all surprised that she wound up here. sorry you had to read that, but so glad you did, to take us on this ride. thank you!!!!
I haven't read the book so can't comment on its quality. But it seems, based on your review, that Nelson doesn't consider the fact that Plath's poetry is infused with a sense of doom. There are many references to suicide in her work. She wrote a novel that revolves around attempted suicide. I like Swift's country albums—shrug at her pop stuff— but there's no doom in any of her songs.
Nelson does sort of comment on this—"In part because Plath died by suicide, and in part [because of her poetry], she posthumously became, in Rose's words, 'a figure for death. Death in the shape of a woman, femininity as deady.' Swift by contrast, is no such thing. In fact, one of the words most associated with Swift's music is 'joy': Plath, not so much"—but this only further begs the question, why even make this comparison in the first place, when the two are so radically different in temperament, content, life, format, etc? It just doesn't make any sense
Maybe, as Swift grows older and enters middle-age, she'll recognize doom as a subject worthy of art.
Interestingly there’s actually a number of lyrics that point to Swift suffering from depression and contemplating suicide, though like any written work it’s hard to tell how much is poetic hyperbole versus truth.
For instance in “Hoax,” she writes:
Stood on the cliffside
Screaming, “Give me a reason”
Your faithless love’s the only hoax
I believe in
Don’t want no other shade of blue
But you
No other sadness in the world would do.”
Her albums, folklore and evermore actually have quite a bit of songs about depression
Yes, you're right. She does write about her depression and insomnia—thanks for the reminder—but I wouldn't call her doom-laden.
True, she seems to have a strong undercurrent of optimism. Can’t relate but seems nice! 🤪
Hahahahaah
Sherman, reread Plath. The novel doesn't center around the suicide attempt, it's simply part of the story. And her poetry is full of all sorts of strong elements, but is mostly about power, not suicide. You see suicide because that's where the poet ended, but it's not where her poetry lived. I know it's REALLY important to put her in that box bc then you can diminish her actual accomplishments. Read her with some respect.
Suicide is a pretty central them to The Bell Jar, and I don't think it's wrong to characterize her oeuvre as being preoccupied with suicide, death, and doom. Even Nelson in her book acknowledges this and I don't think she's wrong to either, I think that's a fair assessment, and I don't think Sherman is being disrespectful to repeat this popular assessment. You can make the argument that this reduces Plath's a work a little and forges engaging with other elements of Plath's work (I, for instance, think people don't pay enough attention to how funny Plath is), but that's true of how people speak about basically every artist. Sherman himself probably gets reduced to "funny writing about young Indigenous guys" a lot, that's just sort of what happens.
I have a poster of Plath's "Lady Lazarus" on my office wall along with posters of Toni Morrison, William Blake, and Scott Fitzgerald. Also, I'm not sure why you would think suicide doesn't play a central role in Plath's writing. She often writes about her suicidal depression. She once briefly worked at a mental hospital. She writes often about her fear of being "institutionalized." Also, she committed suicide with her two children in the house. She was one of the great poets and she was extremely troubled and mentally ill.
I haven't read the book and don't intend to. No way am I subjecting myself to that, but to me the whole thing just seems lazy and half-assed. I don't even think she believes her own case, she just wrote about Taylor Swift because it's a good way to sell books and that's what she needed to do. It's less like Scientology and more like those advertising tie ins do with fast food restaurants. This book is the toy inside the happy meal.
I don't think we can rule out this being a cynical pivot by Nelson to break herself into the BookTok / girlboss-affirmation space, where the work is easy and the money is plentiful (one of the last niches this is true in a dying industry).
wait til you hear about the launch event...oh boy
oh????????
I want to hear about the launch event! Spill!
I was there. What didn’t you like?
didn’t say anything about disliking anything! lol
Oh okay, what did you mean by, “wait til you hear about the launch event, oh boy” then? It didn’t sound positive so I was curious.
You could rule it out if you had real knowledge or insight to the author.
do you
Yes, quite well.
that's so cool
Homie is an "empath" or sth
Insightful. And such generosity in sharing your knowledge.
I agree with this! I think it was mainly a marketing move.
I read every word and really enjoyed the footnotes and links to other reviews. Thank you for reading “this little zine” so that I didn’t have to! I’m married to a casual Taylor Swift fan who, like me, got into Nelson by reading the Argonauts during quarantine—I gave her a five second overview of your piece over our morning coffee and she couldn’t believe this was a project Maggie would even think of undertaking.
I’m offended right along with you at the egregious misreadings of Marx and the failure to notice Taylor’s drift into MAGA world. It mirrors Maggie’s drift into detached liberalism from the comfort of her LA bungalow.
She claimed she wrote the book during the 2024 election (I'm actually starting to remember I heard of this project earlier than this year, I think she may have even mentioned it in her last appearance on Bookworm?). But the fact that she didn't try to suspend the publication once it became clear things were going this way reeks of an inability to confront reality.
This was a pleasure to read, because I love to hate on Swift.
whenever I see a writer openly grovelling at the feet of some rich and famous person I immediately hear dr johnson's serenely timeless voice: "no one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money". nelson might be a relatively successful writer but that doesn't mean anything compared to a figure like taylor swift. it would change her life if she could ingratiate herself to swift even a little. she has the cultural cachet to bestow some respectability to the star and this looks like her offer at a mutually advantageous trade. "it is smart" as bill hicks might have said.
I had the same thought when writing, I do think Nelson is hoping with this that Swift will give her at least a crumb of attention. But the grovelling also clearly comes from an honest place; Nelson is, I think, someone who genuinely worships this woman. More likely, Swift will completely ignore this, and Nelson's esteem will plummet. Or maybe that's just my wishful thinking.
This is so categorically untrue that it undermines your authority here.
Which part and how exactly?
Hoping for Swift’s attention, labeling the writing as “groveling,” the assumption of “genuinely worships (Swift).” No writer is beyond reproach or critique but you have not done a meaningful analysis here. It doesn’t seem like any of the men in your comments have actually read the book either, so the commentary is based on your piece, not the book itself.
"the men in your comments" lol
I cackled at "we are simply BEHOOVED".
Andrea long chu rubbing her hands together Disney villain style
this haaaaas to be a My Pafology-style experiment. like she’s about to follow it up with a book of serious Plath scholarship, plus an angry note that her publisher or agent asked her to “make it more relevant”
Her response to the runaway smash, "We's Listens to Taylor Swift on Da Radio"
That would be a cool novel to read.
It is remarkable that a person as boring as Taylor Swift has inspired this much adulation. She'd have made a good wife for Mark Zuckerberg.
i feel so bad for harry dodge lmfao
No kidding eh?
unfortunately i did read his book a few years back and it brings me no pleasure to admit that he and Maggie were made for each other
This piece is probably longer that the book itself!
Wow, I read her book The Red Parts and thought it was incredible--but this sounds truly awful!
It's really a shame, I think she started to lean into her worst impulses. Her theory-dropping worked when it was in service of her personal explorations; she has increasingly opted to ramp up the theory (which she now often fails to utilize for any real purpose) and cut out the heart. An author who came to mind immediately while I reflected on that was Alison Bechdel, who had the same transition between Fun Home (very good) to Are You My Mother? (sucked). She, like Nelson, got lost within the weeds, started trying too hard to prove she was clever and erudite when that was never the "core" of her work, just a peripheral element.
She started one of her books with a Wittgenstein reference. Most of the analytic philosophers I encountered as a philosophy student who’d written phds in philosophy of language said they didn’t know what Wittgenstein was saying and doubted he himself completely understood it. Takes quite a bit of hubris to even venture an interpretation. And from Nelson it felt pretentious, as if name dropping to envelope the opening scene in some mysterious shroud of erudition
You're kinder to Bechdel than I am!
Bechdel is a blowhard, but I think Fun Home gets by on the fact that her relationship with her father is just so compelling imo, as is the frustrated lack of closure brought on by his apparent suicide. What's crazy however is later realizing that basically nobody in her family thinks it was a suicide but Bechdel, that he was literally just hit by a truck and this is all just an elaborate fantasy of hers.
I haven't read Fun Home since I was 20, so maybe it hasn't held up -- I certainly don't know how much it would when I see comments from Bechdel that she thinks it was a "suicide" "because it’s less painful that way. He didn’t leave a note. I have no proof. It just makes psychological sense. My coming out dislodged something. My parents were managing this secret of his, then I shone a light on it," which is an extremely deranged and narcissistic thing to say. Maybe I will have to revisit it.
for what its worth, it definitely holds up, and honestly, I believe her. His choice is true to the character and it makes awful sense.
I'm somewhat biased because it's quite literally my favorite book ever so - grain of salt
Came for the righteous Taylor hate; stayed for the trenchant Bechdel analysis. Never seen a bigger drop-off than between Fun Home and Are You My Mother?
This is the brutal part! She's written three or four books that I think are as excellent as any poetry / essay writing of the past decade, and then we get... this. It's starting to feel like she's lost the plot for good.
Finally cracked open Tha Argonauts after The Slicks and I think I hated it. Going to go back to Bluets to see if I still like it, but I think from my memories of it that it will still moreorless hold up. It's a bad genre, "autotheory", but Bluets is one of the handful of works in that stream that I really enjoy
great work as usual. Honestly I have no clear idea who Maggie Nelson is either way or why her work was ever considered important -- I suppose I mentally filed her under "Sheila Heti" or one of those other 00s/10s writers of autoslop. anyway this sounds really terrible
Worse than regular autoslop, auto*theory*, autoslop with some shame about itself that feels the need to justify its worst tendencies by marrying them to the sterile outlook of an "academic." A perfect fusion of all the worst tendencies killing 21st century writing
I think I just have intrinsic literary antibodies or something because I've always been able to sense these writers are going to be like that even after reading a two or three sentence description of them. If the selling point is ever anything even slightly adjacent to them being an academic who tendentiously hauls out Audre Lord or Dworkin or Althusser or someone to prop up a bunch of diary entries that calls itself a novel, for me it immediately and automatically establishes itself as less than D-tier quality and warranting no further attention. There were so many of these types back in the 00s and 10s that their names all blur together for me.
Brava!
Greatly enjoyed this...without any knowledge of Nelson and very little of Swift. I did once read a few poems by Nelson and could find nothing much in them. Definitely here, though, for more reviews.