As Fans Speculate On Folklore, Why Can’t We Just Let Taylor Swift Write Fiction?

The album dropped with a surprise announcement, the glowing reviews rolled in and it immediately reached number one on the US iTunes Albums chart. Then came the inevitable speculation: who is Taylor Swift’s eighth album Folklore about? What is Taylor trying to tell us about her life? Are some of the songs code for her ‘relationship’ with a woman?

Vulture, the culture and entertainment site from New York magazine, quickly published a piece about one of the tracks, ‘Betty’, with the headline: ‘Taylor Swift’s ‘betty’ is Queer Canon. I Don’t Make the Rules,’ in which the writer suggests the song is about Taylor’s supposed relationship with the model Karlie Kloss. In a comprehensive - and often hilarious - deep dive, writer Madison Malone Kircher declares: ‘So this is a story about James (Taylor) and Betty. Which is, not for nothing, just a very queer name. This is simply a fact.’

She goes on: ‘The rumors about Swift’s sexuality, and her purported not-just-a-friendship with Karlie Kloss, have run rampant for years. And maybe, just maybe, she’s been trying to tell us we should believe them.’

Another American journalist, Jill Gutowitz, tweeted: ‘yeah so a bunch of people thought betty was about taylor swift kissing a girl but really it’s from the POV of this guy named james who was in a love triangle with betty. cardigan is betty’s POV, illicit affairs is the homewrecker, and betty is james haha. it’s kinda hard to get.’

The internet is ablaze with conjecture. But, have we ever thought it might actually be… a story, dreamt up and deliberately crafted from her imagination, as the album name strongly suggests? Sure, Taylor’s musichas often been autobiographical in the past. Calling a song Style wasn’t the most cryptic code to crack. But this time she’s telling us she’s done something different; this album has come from her imagination.

On the album’s release, she wrote: ‘In isolation my imagination has run wild and this album is the result, a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness. Picking up a pen was my way of escaping into fantasy, history, and memory. I've told these stories to the best of my ability with all the love, wonder, and whimsy they deserve. Now it's up to you to pass them down.’

So, why can’t we let Taylor write fiction? Perhaps because she’s a woman and we still live in a world where we eagerly accept that a man is a creative genius when it comes to storytelling, but with female artists or writers, their craft is simply incidental. It must be autobiographical.

A famous example of this was when Kristen Roupenian’s short story ‘Cat Person’ went viral – which was about a woman going on a bad date with an older man. It was widely assumed it was non-fiction, even though Kristen had explained in an interview that her life doesn’t resemble the protagonists.

When Sally Rooney, author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends was asked whether her work was autobiographical, she answered: ‘Does it imbue the reading experience with some kind of increased authenticity because of the proximity to my real life? Or does it imply that rather than being the invention of a creative mind, this incident was just something that happened to me as a passive observer? In which case, is the story somehow less “literary”?’

We’re quick to read into a woman’s artistic output that it MUST be about them, then we often use it against them to suggest they can’t be as scholarly as imaginative male writers.

Writing in The Atlantic on ‘the hazards of writing when female’, Helen Lewis says women face a strange dynamic: ‘They’re encouraged to write in a personal tone, and then dismissed for it,’ she points out.

So, as fun as it may be to speculate – and God knows Taylor has invited us to in the past – how about we accept that, this time, she’s trying something creatively different?

It’s possible Taylor Swift isn’t only an artistic mastermind when it comes to writing about her love life, she’s also a brilliant storyteller.

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