Taylor Swift Has Rocked My Psychiatric Practice
There was an essay in the NYT this week called “Taylor Swift Has Rocked My Psychiatric Practice.” In it, Dr. Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell describes the deluge of “What would Taylor Swift do?” queries that seem to have all of a sudden colored her practice. She doesn’t see this as a bad thing; quite the opposite, actually. “[Swift] says: Borrow my strength; embrace your pain; make something beautiful with it — and then you can shake it off.” (Side note: Can we all agree that incorporating Taylor lyrics into text is now passé?!)
Placing our dreams at the feet of a person of influence is not new. It’s actually what The English Teacher by Lily King is about — kind of. But replace Taylor with Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. (That said, this is not “let’s transport 21st-century celeb culture to a different era!” treacle.) Vida looks around at everyone in her sphere and thinks: “They had, every one of them, misunderstood [my] entire life.”
At the same time, I was reading Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion by Jia Tolentino. An essay devoted to finding our heroines in literature caught my eye. She writes “The stories we live and the stories we read are to some degree inseparable.” Paging Vida. Tolentino begins delineating that chasm between the literary heroines of a girl’s youth and what happens in all the years after that. She charts a trajectory “from brave to blank to bitter.” I admit I struggled with this analysis. (For the record, Tess of the D’Urbervilles is mentioned.)
We’re all, always, trying to “figure out ourselves.” At some point, though (and I suppose this perspective comes with age), isn’t the onus on us — the real, actual people involved — to determine the line between admiration and influenced?
The late Carol Shields (my fave) wrote this about others interpreting a writer’s work: “’They,’ out there, want double or triple resonance. You may be tempted to claim their insights or else cry out in support of ignorance. But it is better to keep quiet; let them have their way with your work. One can never dismiss the subconscious, after all. Shake hands with what is offered…Who knows, in the end, what is true? Not you. Especially not you.”
originally published on instagram