‘Just like a great book.’
Taylor concludes her essay for Elle UK with this seemingly straightforward comparison between successful songwriting and a satisfying book:
This glimpse into the artist’s story invites us to connect it to our own, and in the best case scenario, allows us the ability to assign that song to our memories. It’s this alliance between a song and our memories of the times it helped us heal, or made us cry, dance, or escape that truly stands the test of time. Just like a great book.
Several of Taylor’s own lyrics suggest that her romantic relationships can be constructed symbolically as story-books — notably, ‘Holy Ground,’ ‘New Year’s Day’ and ‘The Story of Us’ (x). And, collectively, the liner notes to 1989 contextualise the songs as chapters of a ‘story’ about a girl whose ‘heart belonged to someone who couldn’t stay.’ (It is not, I think, incidental that ‘The Story of Us’ is connected to Taylor’s ‘next chapter,’ professionally and, possibly, personally).
Taylor named F. Scott Fitzgerald as her favourite author in Vogue Australia in 2015: ‘[h]is writing is more poet and songwriter in nature than novelist.’ She, subsequently, elaborated on this sentiment in the introduction to her essay for Elle:
The writing I love the most places you into that story, that room, that rain soaked kiss. You can smell the air, hear the sounds, and feel your heart race as the character’s does. It’s something F. Scott Fitzgerald did so well, to describe a scene so gorgeously interwoven with rich emotional revelations, that you yourself have escaped from your own life for a moment.
In this context, it is perhaps instructive to consider the several specific instances in which Taylor was (seemingly) inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
1989; or This Side of Paradise
Why don’t you tell me if the girl had been worth having, she’d have waited for you? No sir, the girl really worth having won’t wait for anybody.
– from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Taylor’s ‘quote to live by,’ according to Marie Claire (September 2013).
Taylor posted two further quotations from This Side of Paradise to instagram on the 19th November 2013 (x).
I’m a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires….”
“You are not!” She brought one little fist down onto the other.
“You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.”
Reputation; or Zelda Fitzgerald (and The Great Gatsby)
Look closer and you’ll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we’ve seemed.
Taylor’s favourite quotation from Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, according to Vogue UK (interview Memorial Day Weekend, 2014; published November 2014).
Z was the last book that Taylor had read in the second week of May 2014 (x).
Zelda Fitzgerald is credited as an inspiration for the character of Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby (x).
In January 2014, Taylor was photographed wearing a sweatshirt printed with the words ‘The Great Catsby.’
In October of that same year, Taylor was photographed for People imitating Mia Farrow’s pose on the inaugural cover in 1974 (as part of the promotion for the film ‘Gatsby.’)
In addition to the line in ‘This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things’ — ‘feeling so Gatsby for that whole year’ (properly a reference to 2014?) — The Great Gatsby has been identified consistently as an important influence on Reputation (for example, by Slate here).
Taylor was photographed for British Vogue’s January 2018 issue in a look described by one commentator as ‘a goth Gatsby fantasy.’
TS7; or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
For what it’s worth, it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you are proud of and, if you find that you are not, I hope you have the strength start over.
– from the screenplay to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Taylor liked a tumblr post of this quotation on 10th July 2018.
Taylor adopted a cat called Benjamin Button on the set of the music video for Me! in 2019.
Taylor publicised her essay for Elle with an instagram post captioned ‘ME.’ This may or may not be the answer to a riddle posted by @taytaysbeard on the same day (28th February 2019), quoting Tiare Tahiti by the (bisexual) poet Rupert Brooke, whose concluding words – ‘Well this side of paradise! There’s little comfort in the wise’ – are also the epigraph to Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise.
Taylor has suggested that French/France is in someway significant to TS7 (x).
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald toured France in 1921 and 1925, staying first in Paris — where they attended the salon of the socialite Natalie Clifford Barney (‘l’ impératrice des lesbiennes’) — and, subsequently, on the French Riviera — famously the setting for Tender is the Night.
Barney’s sometime lover Dolly Wilde (niece of Oscar Wilde) and her ‘flirtation’ with Zelda supposedly inspired an episode in the novel, later deleted, in which ’Vivian Taube’ seduces the girlfriend of the central character.
Significantly — or not! — Barney’s salon was also frequented by Daisy Fellowes and Loie Fuller (x//x//x).
Scott Fitzgerald later lived, during his brief career as a screenwriter, at The Garden of Alla(h) on Sunset Boulevard (whose first owner, the actress Alla Nazimova, had established Hollywood’s notorious Sewing Circle.)
‘Sunset’ was, seemingly, the codename for the music video to ME!.
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