Books

Maggie Nelson
The Slicks

In October 2012, after the release of the album Red, writer and director Lena Dunham hailed Taylor Swift in the most complimentary way she could imagine. Dunham tweeted: “If she’d been here when I was in college, I would have written papers on her, not Sylvia Plath.”

Linking the two women – whether on social media or in academic essays – is a recurring theme with intriguing possibilities. In The Slicks: On Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift, Maggie Nelson brings them together with a flourish in a slim volume first published in 2024 as a limited-edition zine.

Plath and Swift share ambition, a strenuous work ethic and a hunger for fame, and Nelson references these traits immediately. There is a crucial contrast, however. When she thinks of the pair together, she writes, “I find myself returning to a simple thought. Sylvia Plath is dead, and Taylor Swift is alive.” This might seem like a glib, even macabre, statement. But it speaks to the different trajectories of their fame, the mythologies that have accumulated around them and the conditions of their reception. Above all, it highlights the difference in their control of their work.

Plath, who died by suicide in 1963 at the age of 30, published a single book of poetry under her name in her lifetime; her novel, The Bell Jar, appeared under a pseudonym a couple of weeks before her death. In her final months she was in the midst of an extraordinary outpouring of creativity whose force she recognised; she proclaimed in a letter, “I am writing the best poems of my life. They will make my name.”

She was right. But her publication, fame, influence and impact have been posthumous. There is still a hunger for all things Plath and an industry to feed it. Her poetry, her stories, her children’s books, journals, letters and articles: whatever she had written down seems to have found its way into print. And the biographies, the critical studies, the fiction based on her life continue apace.

Swift – who will turn 36 in December – prepared herself from childhood for stardom and from the outset was writing her own material. She began as a country singer. Her parents, a stockbroker and a marketing executive, moved the family to Nashville to support her ambitions. Her self-titled first album was released in 2006. Post Red, she left country music behind, and embraced pop stardom. In early 2023 she embarked on her worldwide Eras tour, a lavish, epic concert survey of her work to date. She is a billionaire. She presents as thriving, indefatigable, relentless, her career an upward curve still ascending.

To consider these two, Nelson marshals the likes of the artist Carolee Schneemann and the poet Anne Carson to reflect on the notion of profusion, flow and silencing, and to consider the derision directed at artists, particularly women, who traffic in the personal.

The set-up is promising, but The Slicks, for the most part, skates across the surface. There are several occasions when Nelson makes sweeping, unhelpful comparisons between her two subjects. She declares, “One of the words most often associated with Swift’s music is ‘joy’. Plath, not so much (which is to say, not at all).” There is a passage that highlights something Plath “allegedly” (Nelson’s term) said to a friend: “When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn’t want it, you cannot take it back. It’s gone forever.” Nelson uses this sentiment to draw a contrast between Plath and Swift, saying, “Some may express incredulity at the repetitiveness of Swift’s paeans to falling in love and subsequent heartache, but when placed beside the severity of Plath’s ‘It’s gone forever’, the repetitiveness can be quite heartening, even comic relief.” It feels reductive to use something Plath “allegedly” said about the collapse of her marriage in this way, as a means to make a simplistic assessment of the scope of Swift’s lyrics.

The Plath of The Slicks is essentially the Plath of Nelson’s 2011 book The Art of Cruelty. “I … celebrate Plath’s darkness, her outrageous jostling with historical trauma, and her genuinely scary extremity,” Nelson writes.

In contrast, she celebrates “Swift’s genius for pop, her apparent sanity and joy-giving capacity”, and seems to think that her fans are uncritically adoring. Yet critique, ambivalence and frustration can be an integral part of Swift fandom. Nowhere has this been better explored than in Fan Fiction: A Satire, a 2024 zine by actor and writer Tavi Gevinson, available free online. It is an exhilarating, playful and ambiguous mix of cultural criticism, fiction and recollection.

Nelson reflects on Plath’s “self-mythologising”, but says nothing about Swift’s. This is surprising, because it has been very much part of the performer’s strategy, in everything from her songs to her presentation and marketing and the coded messages in her lyric booklets. Nor does Nelson take up something Plath and Swift have in common: works that are competitive towards or sharply dismissive of other women.

Since The Slicks went to press, Swift has released another album, The Life of a Showgirl, and announced a six-part docuseries about her monumental Eras tour, and a concert feature, to be released in December. As for Plath, next year there will finally be a properly annotated, comprehensive Collected Poems to replace the inadequate volume from 1981. Whatever else we can say about Plath and Swift, profusion rules: we can feel sure there will always be more to come.

Fern Press, 80pp, $19.99

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 12, 2025 as "Maggie Nelson, The Slicks".

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