An essay rather than a book - but anything by Maggie Nelson is worth reading in my view. It's an improvised-seeming comparative speculation on Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift, fame, misogyny and autobiographical art, with a fair amount of Emily Dickinson thrown in. If you're wondering if the world needs another essay on Plath, Nelson has got there ahead of you: "What's done is done - to the extent that Plath's story is ever done. (Clearly, for me, it's not.)". I knew almost nothing about Taylor Swift before reading this. Now I want to find out more. "The Slicks" (Plath's term for the magazines she wanted to get famous through - old-fashioned both as a term and in the idea that poetry could make you famous) is slight and delightful, with a lovely ending.

This is a short thought piece on women, ambition and fame that uses Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift as two examples separated by generations but both publicly castigated for daring to dream big and achieve 'unfeminine' success.

This isn't an academic researched piece - it's freewheeling and intuitive, making connections in Nelson's mind and perception rather than being tied down to textual and other evidence. At times Nelson draws on e.g. Anne Carson and Judith Butler; at others she's making associations that are personal and subjective. What comes over is her love for both Plath and Swift, without putting needless pressure on 'highbrow'/popular culture categories or snobbish distinctions.

Important points about the way women's writing is so frequently dismissed as 'confessional', 'personal' etc. are not new, of course, nor is the trope - going back to classical Greece and Rome - that a woman who puts herself into public space is a 'whore'. But one of the takeaways for me is the way Swift's Eras tour might be conceived as a female epic, a heroine's journey rewritten by her - a triumphant, positive image to set against Plath's 'Lady Lazarus' rising from the dead.

Maggie Nelson offers up a series of reflections on the uneasy relations between women and fame:

“…the voyeurism and sadism, idolatry and demonisation, which characterise our treatment of the famous, especially famous women – and especially those women who traffic in making the personal public, however medicated or anaesthetised.”

Nelson’s title’s taken from an entry in Sylvia Plath’s diary in which she vows to break into “the slicks” – these were glossy, upmarket magazines, highly prestigious spaces that writers were desperately competing to enter. Partly inspired by Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department album, Nelson traces a series of possible links between Swift and quintessential ‘tortured poet’ Plath – Swift’s directly referenced Plath in her lyrics and sometimes aspects of her self-presentation. Both have been vocal about their desire for fame.

Nelson’s particularly fascinated by the ways in which so many of Swift’s and/or Plath’s critics have essentially followed the same script in their attempts to cut these women down to size: the underlying violence, the patriarchal, sometimes ‘feral misogyny’ that these efforts represent. Much of which connects to what Nelson terms “the derision of the personal” in women’s writing, often dismissed as “uncooked confessional.” Nelson’s exploration draws extensively on Anne Carson’s essay “The Gender of Sound” which is preoccupied with the policing of women’s mouths/voices. Nelson’s approach is, as always, compelling, deftly combining discipline with passion. But don’t go into this expecting a neatly rounded-off piece. This is more a thinking-through, at times close to a call to arms, stirring associations, raising talking points. And if, like me, you’re both a Swiftie and a fan of Plath's poetry it’s well worth seeking out.