rainbow trout's Reviews > Fan Fiction: A Satire

I am treating celebrity as my medium, exploiting public knowledge of private relationships to create the illusion of reality, committing to a postmodern performance of the self in the style of my chief muse.


girlies who are fascinated by celebrity/surveillance culture/social media/cultural critique/teen icons of the 2010's/taylor swift and her empire, eat your hearts out!!

i need to reread this immediately. i have a little zine collection AND a rookie collection so i'll definitely order a hard copy to annotate the hell out of; there are SO many lines i kept chewing on to get all the goodness. tavi gevinson has such a brilliant mind, god. this is a difficult first-time read but fun and rewarding. a little insufferable at times but in a cool way if that makes any sense at all. im not a swiftie but i found this fascinating as i am very interested in pop culture in general, and in the way taylor has enslaved so much of the population and reigns over them like an ant queen, commanding via subtle pheremone signals, her commands passing in ripples through her armies. i think a lot of her music is fun? idk. chappell roan sounds just like her (or am I crazy? I just noticed that lately lol).

i grew up reading rookie (fated not to survive long past tavi's own teen years, sadly: rip to an incredible thing!!) and tavi's intensely self-aware letters from the editor helped me form a lot of my ways of thinking, of mythologizing and seeing and processing the world and my reaction to it. for better or for worse. this same tendency in tavi today reads both as exhausting and as a fascinating outgrowth of her early fame and disrupted teenhood. the self-eulogizing and intense desire to prolong her childhood forever, to remain the prodigious and interesting young'un, seem to mirror a cultural impulse as of late: to root onself in childhood, to never have to grow up, to want to be special, the "gifted kid" forever. i loved the various cultural dissections, and especially the insights on what it was like to be famous and young, to be famous still: to be let in on that part of tavi's world feels very sacred, and i'm so happy she decided to write about it and share it.

very fitting that the woman who is perhaps best in the world at writing about internal surveillance, about the meta of it all, and who is the most scrupulous record keeper of what it was like to be a teen, to be experiencing things while watching yourself experiencing those things because you've been raised on a steady diet of media that shows you what things should look like, that tells you "this is the time of your life, remember it" -- how very very very fitting that tavi gevinson take on taylor swift.