Taylor Swift fearlessly bid farewell to her detractors, they are rising above the attempt to bring them down, with confidence, she leaves the negativity, focusing on the happiness they shares

From her teenage crushes to her feuds, Taylor Swift has been using confession, testimony and narrative to shape the public story of her life.

Taylor Swift is renowned for her autobiographical songwriting style. Her lyrics feature her friends, lovers, enemies, frenemies and partners. And her fans love her for the personal stories of heartbreak, joy and revenge she includes in each and every song. She is one of many celebrities telling their stories in their own words – it’s powerful because, at our core, human beings are interested in other human beings.

If we look at the hottest-selling books of 2023, memoirs led the charge with Prince Harry’s Spare selling over 3.2 million copies and two million copies of Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me being sold globally (albeit written with the aid of talented ghostwriters). The concept of a person owning or reclaiming the narrative of their life, from the painful and shameful to the triumphant and joyful, has become a focal point of twenty-first-century culture.

From her early albums documenting teenage crushes to her Reputation-era dish on her feud with Kim-ye, Taylor Swift has been using confession, testimony, and narrative justice to shape the public story of her life. Her songs are known for the use of what life-writing scholars, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, call the autobiographical “I” (“It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me”).

Whether her fans think they know exactly who and what experience she is writing about, or whether certain lyrical images from her songs remain mysterious, Swift is widely understood as a woman who writes from life. The first autobiography in history is widely agreed to be Confessions by Augustine de Hippo, written sometime between 397 and 400 CE.

Polish life writing scholar, Matzgorzata Czerminska,has noted a long tradition of autobiography belonging to the masculine, long after Augustine’s and even It wasn’t until the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that a surge of women’s voices were heard across genres – like poetry, memoir and song.

The confessional poets — Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop and, of course, Sylvia Plath — were an important part of this chorus of interior lives. In recent years, academics have particularly linked Taylor Swift’s work with Plath. With themes of mental health, broken-heartedness and death, there are many similarities in their work.

While scholars teaching Swift Studies courses at NYU, Ghent University and Berklee College have been making this comparison for some years now, some critics disagree that Taylor Swift should be called a poet.