By Stuart Mitchner
I didn’t know what I would find
When I went looking for a reason…
—Taylor Swift, from “The Outside”
I didn’t know what I’d find when I went looking for a reason to go downtown last week. The last thing I expected was a paperback at Labyrinth called Taylor Swift In Her Own Words (Agate $12.95), edited by Helena Hunt. All I knew of her at that moment was the spectacular silver on black image looming on the cover of the October 15 New York Times Magazine (“The Kingdom of Taylor”). The faceless figure framed in black reminded me of nothing so much as a sexy, satiny, silver-booted, silver lamé alien, an ideal mate for Gort, Klaatu’s armor-plated robot in the original Day The Earth Stood Still (1951). So that was Taylor Swift? Really?
Still, the grotesque, off-putting image made me curious. I didn’t know Swift’s music, couldn’t have named a single song, and found the idea of her billion-dollar Gala Tour totally unappealing. Not really expecting to find her in “her own words,” I opened the book and read the first thing she had to say, which was set apart on a single page in front: “I feel no need to burn down the house I built by hand. I can make additions to it. I can redecorate. But I built this.” Right away I was asking myself, “Who is this person whose illustrious namesake, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, might have written those words, such was their cranky, in-your-face command of the moment. What followed was admittedly less Swiftian: “And I’m not going to sit there and say, ‘Oh, I wish I hadn’t had corkscrew-curly hair and worn cowboy boots and sundresses to awards shows when I was 17’…. Because I made those choices, I did that. It was part of me growing up. It wasn’t some committee going ‘You know what Tayor needs to be this year?’”
Never mind, the opening sentence about burning down the house was worth a thousand glitzy cover images, so I bought the book. more
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