Friday Tchotchke #35: Tavi & I
Who up fanning their fiction?
Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift Taylor Swift? Taylor, Swift. Taylor Swift Taylor Swift, Taylor… Swift.
Okay, now that we’ve gotten the SEO out of the way, let’s talk about Tavi Gevinson’s Taylor Swift-themed Pale Fire-inspired zine, “Fan Fiction: A Satire.”
Available for free download on a purpose-built website (which I love, let’s keep doing Websites please) and also as a physical zine available at bookstores, the work is a tripartite metanarrative meditation on fame, growing up, and female friendship, a clever and creative work of autofiction quite unlike anything Tavi has put out previously. (I’ve gotta call her by her first name. We’re basically besties—well, not really, but there’s some history there.)
While “fan fiction” can raise hackles on fans tired of that stupid space between fan and fiction being enforced by Merriam Webster, I propose that her use of the title is actually sensible—taken that we understand “fanfiction” (a genre of transformative work created within the context of and for consumption by a subcultural and self-reflexive media fan community) to be a different thing than “fan fiction” (literature for a general audience dealing with the experiences and emotions which accompany fan existence and practices). This is a useful division and this work falls squarely in the latter camp.
However the “satire” part seems a little vague. What exactly is it satirizing? Hard to say. She says she called it that “to set the reader’s expectation.” She certainly is not satirizing the genre of fanfiction—it has no relation at all to, say, Reader x Taylor Swift imagines. Tavi admitted in a Vulture interview that she does not actually read fanfic, which is a shame. Of course she’s allowed to do her own thing, but I do think that this work as a whole would have benefited from some basic knowledge of other practitioners of the noble art of writing amateur fiction about celebrities.
Because despite what the Vulture interviewer claims, fanfic does often include “this type of negotiation of ethics writing about a real person.” Within the hugely popular genre of RPF, from whence came noble concepts like Omegaverse and tinhatting, RPF has often skirted and stepped past the sacred boundaries of the fourth wall.
In Bandom, the fandom that sprang up around Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, and the Decaydance label scene in the late 2000s, the fourth wall was described as “more like a fringe curtain.” Fanwriters would become IRL groupies, bandmembers would read and comment on fic about themselves.
There have in fact been people, groups of people, who have written fanfiction (no space) about people they carry on separate relationships to in real life. This is the really juicy stuff. The urge to make art out of a celebrity’s life is universal across literary cultures: they are some of our most readily available templates for storytelling, our accessible gods and heroes and dolls to smush together and put in situations. Sometimes those gods, because perhaps they are only gods to you and a handful of others, become your friends. That may dissipate the urge, and it may not. Have you ever heard the story about—no, I’ll stop there.
Tavi’s relationship with Taylor as depicted in “Fan Fiction” is personal, almost solipsistic, a closely-held feeling rather than a lived-in identity. Like many fans of popular music and celebrities, she is a genuine fan from an emotional standpoint, but not necessarily part of a larger fandom except by name. She does not run a stan account or attend concerts with a large group of other dedicated fans. The relationship she (the narrator-Tavi, potentially also real-Tavi) developed with Taylor herself isolated her even more, calcified her fandom into odd inflexible shapes which she then had to try and grow around.
But seems like the release of this work was just that, a release, a softening, using transformative work (such as it is) as a kind of cultural laxative. “Being able to self-publish and not deal with institutional stoppage — it kind of feels like being a teenager again,” Tavi said. She was able to effectively transform her complex feelings about Taylor Swift into art—really good art, in my opinion.
In turn this has reawakened my own complex feelings about Tavi. She has publicly self-declared as a fan, but my instinct is to stand my ground, defend my turf. You may love Taylor Swift, I want to tell her, but so does the entire world. That’s nothing. You don’t know what it’s like when your fandom makes you feel like an outcast. You’re no geek, you’re no nerd. For God’s sake, you’ve never even read fanfiction!
At the height of her passion, she “was possessed by a kind of madness, one I’d not felt before or since,” checking Taylor update accounts every day. A glimpse into another kind of life—my kind of life. My everyday madness, the madness of real, pure, peak fandom.
Since eighth grade, when I discovered her Style Rookie blog, and simultaneously found out she was my age (7 months younger, same school year) and also Jewish and also from the Chicago suburbs, I’ve had this image in my head of Tavi as my doppelganger. An infinitely cooler, prettier and more talented version of me who would have a better, more interesting life because she wasn’t so fucking obsessed with dumb shit—which is to say, the stuff she was obsessed with was cooler, objectively, than the stuff I myself couldn’t help caring about. Tavi didn’t read Homestuck. Tavi never daydreamed of being the Doctor’s companion. Tavi went to fashion shows and hung out with real celebrities (not C-list actors at Chicago TARDIS who were, I must admit, really really nice people).
Tavi, do you remember the Facebook messages we exchanged in 2012, around the time I wrote one of Rookie Mag’s monthly theme songs? You friended me first; I screamed. I sent a pathetic message practically begging to be friends with you.
“thank you for making us that video, it made me smile and be happy,” you said. “i would love to get coffee (i will prob get chocolate milk because i am 5) at some point. i'm so glad we live nearbyish!”
This was it, I thought, ecstatic. I suggested a date to hang out, a few weeks in advance. A week after that date, you got back to me: “agh, this weekend is bad for me and next weekend i'm going out o town. when is your spring break? mine is the last week of march. maybe that'd be a better time?”
After a few more fruitless back-and-forths it seemed clear to my anxiety-addled mind that you, busy, famous, chic, had no time for me, a fangirl loser. I stopped trying to make the friendship happen.
The Tumblr posts, bubbling over with shame and insecurity, continued. “every time i read or see something about tavi gevinson i just feel the weirdest combination of guilt and dread and admiration,” I wrote in September 2012. “everything i do just seems so meaningless and stupid in comparison and i get really sad about it but at the same time i really love her? and want to be best friends with her and talk about feminism and pop culture with her for hours.”
I realized, reading “Fan Fiction,” that this must have been right around the time that you, apparently just as desperate and just as insecure, met Taylor. It was turtles all the way down.
Like your lost Taylor pictures, I can’t find the selfie I took of us at the Rookie Yearbook Two release party in 2013, when we met IRL for the first and only time. But I’m sure it was cringe as hell. I remember the outfit I wore—my aunt’s vintage tartan jumper dress, which I still wear all the time—and I remember how awed I was at what you’d created, the room filled with girls who had found their voice and their style thanks to Rookie, who had been empowered to curate and cultivate beautiful and authentic lives.
Rookie had helped me too, even as I seethed. With its endorsement, I leaned into my obsessions, made thousands of dollars selling Doctor Who music on iTunes and spent it all on imported Lolita dresses. It wasn’t my own magazine, but it was something.
“there's a parallel universe out there where i have the same amount of poise and talent and networking skills as tavi gevinson,” I tweeted in 2013. The following year: “tavi gevinson's existence makes me ache deep inside but in a good way, mostly.”
I was so soul-destroyingly jealous of you for so long. But after reading “Fan Fiction,” I think it’s clear that I dodged a bullet.
You write—desperately, and with great feeling—about how you and Taylor are both trapped by your past, compelled to recreate the moments of your teenage mythology over and over. I’m like that too, except not really. Sure, sometimes someone comments on one of my stupid TikToks, “aren’t you the Homestuck girl?” but I can ignore it with impunity. Sure, my adolescence follows me around too, but not like the Sisyphean weight you describe, more like an amusing elderly little dog it’s fun to let people pet sometimes.
I have the freedom to switch up my obsessions as I’ve always done, pivot into something new and absurd, go to grad school, become a journalist, become a socialite, become an expert on Antarctic exploration. I think I’m more grateful now for that than I was before I read “Fan Fiction,” before I read plaintive paragraphs like:
“How transient, the lives of teen professionals; how flimsy our bonds—surrounded by praise, fans, and fairy godmothers who introduce you to your idol just because they think you deserve it, and yet, few people who can tell you who you were before you were also your image-double.”
I could have told you who you were, Tavi, if we had made that Oak Park coffee date in 2012. I could have told you that you were just like me.
Loved this.