The Slicks
Author: Maggie Nelson
ISBN-13: 9781911717652
Publisher: Fern Press
Guideline Price: £9.99
Maggie Nelson opens The Slicks, her brief new book on Taylor Swift and Sylvia Plath, with a quote from the psychoanalyst Jacqueline Rose: “Above all things, Sylvia Plath desired fame.” I’m not really convinced that what Plath desired most was fame for fame’s sake; it feels more accurate to say Plath’s ambitious striving was a maddening desire to be taken seriously as an artist within a 1950s society that wanted women to be housewives. As Nelson points out, Plath only garnered fame after her death, which simultaneously “made her and annihilated her”.
Unfortunately, Nelson’s analysis of Plath rarely goes deeper than this, which is surprising, and her link between the two women hinges tenuously on the fact that both write from an autobiographical perspective; a mode, Nelson suggests, that is often derided.
Bolstering her argument with a quotation by the Canadian writer Anne Carson, who writes, “putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day”, Nelson outlines what she sees as a kind of snobby, intellectual silencing of Swift – the incredibly successful billionaire who, in case you live under a rock, has for years been the most popular songwriter on the planet.
In response to what Nelson deemed unfairly negative reviews of Swift’s 2024 album, The Tortured Poet’s Department, Nelson essentially argues that any criticism of Swift is the result of the patriarchy’s obsession with silencing women. This is hard to take seriously: I’m not sure even Swift herself would argue that anyone is trying to “put a door” over her mouth; the album in question sold almost four million units in its first week alone. If this is the kind of silencing Nelson is worried about, I would quite like to live in her version of patriarchy.
Finishing this hopefully intentionally unserious book, I felt an overwhelming sense of anxiety emanating from its pages. It struck me that Nelson, who made her name as a brilliant, subversive chronicler of queer sex, cruelty and desire, is afraid of being judged for liking something so blandly common denominator. I want to tell her it’s okay – she’s allowed to like the popular thing without having to anxiously argue that it comes from a place of maligned feminist indignation.