Heartbreak Is The National Anthem by Rob Sheffield: A Swiftie Reviews
Overall: 3.5
I guess I'll start by talking about me—particularly me in the context of Taylor Swift. My first Taylor concert was the 1989 Tour when I was 12. I loved Taylor, had a burning desire to go, but was just at the very start of being old enough and having the tools (thank you Apple Music) to form my own music taste. By the time the Reputation Tour came around, I was a full blown Swiftie. I made a costume, a replica of the You Belong With Me pajamas, and touched Taylor's hand as she ran between B-stages. I was priced out of the Eras Tour. By then, Taylor had gotten astronomically bigger than I could've ever fathomed, and the culture of being a Swiftie shifted with the influx. I pulled away a little. But Taylor Swift has inevitably shaped who I am. I made way too many life decisions spurred on by my own parasocial version of Taylor in my head. She's shaped my worldview and my personhood and my writing and my relationship with my father and my entire life. While I don't make being a Swiftie a central part of my identity anymore, I will always be some version of a Swiftie. I poured way too much of my life into her Twitter and Tumblr worlds to ever fully let it go. Even though this era (pop culturally, I love TTPD) isn't my favorite, I know I'll always come back around.
So, anyway, on to the book. I was excited about this one, curious to see what Rob Sheffield would do with a story as massive and layered as Swift's. How do you write a book about a story that's still so quickly unfolding? Having grown up 1) in pop fandom and 2) fascinated with music journalism, I am well aware of Rob Sheffield as a writer. He does great profiles. I've always admired his commitment to taking pop stars and their fans seriously.
But I didn't love this book. It certainly got better as it went along, but I almost put the book down while skimming through the timeline and introductory chapters. The way that he wrote these in what is clearly his approximation of the language of "stan culture" as if to desperately scream, "I am one of you," came off as reductive and a bit demeaning in my eyes. One, because it was annoying to read, and two, because it felt like Sheffield wasn't taking this seriously. Yes, the book should be fun and accessible, but tonally, I want a bound item to have even a slightly academic bend, a certain sense of seriousness towards the subject. I thought maybe I was being overly critical, but then I remembered Kaitlyn Tiffany's book about One Direction and stan culture and the internet, Everything I Need I Get From You. It blended an innate knowingness of having lived through something with the weight of, "Yes, I'm writing a book." But Tiffany doesn't have anything to prove. She lived it, she knows it backwards and forwards. Sheffield, as he discusses many times in the book, is not a natural Swiftie. He didn't grow up in the culture of it. He is an appreciator from a different lens, and he does best when he just owns it. That doesn't happen consistently enough.
The best parts of this book are where Sheffield blends criticism of Swift's music with memoir. It's what he's famous for doing in all his other books. It's what he does well. Writing a biography of Swift is less of a strong suit. And his obvious fear of the Swifties that just feels utterly pandering is grating. If you're going to write a book about Taylor Swift, I feel like you need to engage with more of the dimensions of Swift than her PR persona. The only bit of controversy he skims is saying she made a miscalculated choice in her 2016 election post, which is a generally agreed upon note, especially after she made more direct posts in 2020 and 2024, and going over the same tired Kimye drama. The most critical thing he's willing to say about Swift's persona is that she doesn't let things go. She'll keep a feud going just for the hell of it, even when it's only making her look bad.
At one point, early in the book, Sheffield talks about the different ways Swift is perceived. He throws out detractors calling her a capitalist in a long list of valid and invalid criticisms of Swift. It's cast as almost a petty, stupid thing people throw out just to try to take her down. If Sheffield was truly a part of the Swiftie universe, he'd know that her ruthless obsession with squeezing the most money possible out of her audience—to what end, I'm not sure—is something that does drive a wedge in the fandom. There's plenty of nuance available in seriously having this conversation.
On one hand, you could say Swift does get more heat for her actions than both male pop stars (who do not have empires anywhere near this big) and male billionaires (who should most definitely get more heat) because she's a successful woman. Sure. But there's also something to be said about Swift being a billionaire and choosing not to turn off dynamic pricing and creating an anxiety, panic-shopping inducing system of limited drops with items that will inevitably come back around when they don't sell out originally. With Swift, there's always more merch, more variants, more everything to buy. And, yes, that's business but also maybe something we should think about critically when it comes to the magnitude of waste and the fact that it's largely young, impressionable people she keeps on the hook. When she could just... not. Not produce such extreme quantities of new merch or use cheap sales tactics or allow tickets to go for thousands of dollars on the first sale market. If you genuinely wanted to stop scalpers, you would close off the ability to resell tickets for more than someone paid for them. Ed Sheeran's done it, so has Noah Kahan.
I know that rant had nothing to do with the book, but the lack of grappling thoughtfully with some of the more negative feelings that Swift can evoke felt like a major oversight for a book. There was so much surface here, so much easy dismissal of any bumps in the road, that it didn't feel like he was taking the subject seriously. I can't figure out what the book really succeeds at or what it's trying to do. The layout doesn't make sense as a biography. There isn't super in-depth analysis of each era and the context it was in musically and the metric impact of Swift's choices. There's nothing about the artists she's inspired or really much focus on the lasting impact Swift has left in reshaping pop, as the subtitle promises. The biography is too scattered and shallow, and there's not much deep critical thought when it comes to Swift as a pop culture figure either. There's hardly any discussion about her fandom and the deep, rich world that exists there besides talking about the costumes and the crying at the concerts, which also felt like a somewhat flat depiction to me.
Again, I wish Sheffield had just owned this as, "My Taylor Swift Memoir," where he told his stories about meeting Taylor and covering her and wrote a few pieces about songs that were meaningful to him. Those were the parts of the book that were genuinely interesting and were most similar to his prior books. Don't try to tell her story, tell yours as—in a term my dad came back from a recent dinner with that I'd never heard before—a "Swiftie over fifty" and not the conventional archetype of a Taylor fan. Listening to him compare Swift and connect her to a lineage of "classic" artists was cool. He has such a rich knowledge of music. Lean into that! Instead, this book just feels muddled. I don't know who it's for. It's clearly trying to play to the Swifties, but he's not saying much they don't already know, and he's not grappling with any of the more meta-Swift topics that would capture their thoughtful attention. It's also not written in a way where a Swiftie skeptic would take it seriously or find an interest. I'm really struggling with this one. I was hoping this would be my fandom Swiftie book of record the way Everything I Need is my 1D fandom authority book, but that's not the case.
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