The scene is the following: I am on board a bus that rattles through deep Bizkaia, with headphones on, a pen and notebook to take notes and the mobile screen on to follow the hidden references of the latest album by Genius Lyrics. Taylor Swift, a kind of memoir about her separation from Joe Alwyn after six years of relationship, her little problems with fame and other lovers who enter and leave the drawing as charming secondary characters. At some point, I swear, a tear escapes, but that’s another story. Barely 12 hours have passed since the launch of The Tortured Poets Department, but all his letters have already been overturned and shredded by biographical philologists on the internet, who inform us neophytes about the beef or the boyfriend who hides behind each verse, although they omit, perhaps because no one cares, that nod to Sylvia Plath in I Can Do It With a Broken Heart How funny it makes me (it’s an art). I want to intellectualize it, but it’s not necessary; He already intellectualizes himself. The writing of this collection of pop poems is less naive than that of many confessional experiments that adorn the shelves of my bookshelf. Every now and then he reflects on himself, on the game of confusing life and work and selling it like this, en bloc, as the great product that we are when we write in the year 2024.
“And then he knew what all the agony had been for… From time to time I reread the manuscript, but the story is no longer mine,” say the last verses of the album that, on his Twitter account, Taylor presented under the following motto: “The author is firmly convinced that our tears become sacred like ink on the page.” I don’t know whether to feel parodied or legitimized or both, because I have given quite a few workshops on confessional writing in recent years and I always end up uttering commonplaces of this type; or testing them, at least, to see if they are questioned or confirmed from the place of enunciation. Do we write to give meaning to pain? Do we read from morbidity or from the desire that our own work can also achieve the transcendence that we grant to the work of others? As the Rapists of the Verse said better than García Márquez, could it be that everything consists of living to tell the tale? When the listening ends, I keep the silent text in my hands and check that it is a lot of text; exaggeratedly long verses, often pretentious, with insistent rhyme and a stroke of wit, that are more reminiscent of rap than pop, and it occurs to me that, before Annie Ernaux or Amelie Nothomb or Karl Ove Knausgård, who made me fond of reading and recreation of the intimate on a large scale was possibly Eminem, of whom we consumed everything, from his kilometer-long lyrics to his scandals documented by the press, because what we liked was to see live and direct how someone transformed his miseries into pure capitalist epic. It is curious that, just in the fortnight in which it comes out TTPD, Eminem announces new album and I barely find out because it doesn’t come to trending. This says a lot, mainly, about how far away my adolescence has been, but I’m excited to see how he deals with these vicissitudes of time and the fall and the generational change. What a pleasure to feel that we know those we read or listen to, even if it is fiction. He is, right now, a vice that, because it is so widely shared, I would say that it does not even reach the category of guilty pleasure.
And yet, as contemporary as Taylor Swift are the complaints against the confessional genres that seem to have eaten up the publishing market; You know what I mean, to all those women who write or we write about our egos and our traumas. Of the budding debate, there is only one aspect that intrigues or worries me, and it is the one that my research after the first hearing of TTPD, in which I become obsessed with knowing the reactions of the people mentioned by Taylor and I attend a string of communications from enemies and ex-lovers who, like stepping on eggs, claim to have the artist in high esteem, thank her for not having come out so badly or At worst, they beg for an end to the harassment to which they are subjected by their cybernetic armies of faithful. If Taylor Swift vilifies you in a lyric, you’re lost. She writes and points out from (a) pain, but also from the top of the magazine Forbes, and it would be absurd to equate, therefore, the consequences of his writing with those of any other mortal. However, I believe that my intuition is not wrong that, behind the common autobiographical projects, there is always a desire for justice, which may be perfectly legitimate but which is nourished by a space of power, that is, the discourse of authorship. , to praise one’s own point of view and silence that of others. And the truth is that, without wanting to put forward any moral opinion on the matter, it does question me, suddenly, that we have been talking about autofiction, exhibitionism and egos, when perhaps we should have debated the rise and conquest of the writings of revenge.
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