Maggie Nelson Sputters And Stalls In ‘The Slicks’

For a few years, Maggie Nelson was everywhere. The celebrated autotheorist is the voice of, if not a generation, a meaningful corner of one; her 2015 memoir The Argonauts is one of the rare unifying must-reads of the millennial intelligentsia. Nelson is omnipresent within her own work, too: She theorizes on sex in the Chelsea Hotel and the birth of her son, philosophizes the shades of her own grief, pairs her experience alongside quotes from Lacan and Sontag. While she didn’t invent the critically informed memoir, she’s created a version that now feels ubiquitous—immediate, intimate, pulling from an expansive database of external sources, like if a Romantic poet had internet access.

That her latest book is called The Slicks: On Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift was cause for some trepidation, but I held out hope. After all, the book claims to take on Swift and Plath as “twinned targets of patriarchy’s ancient urge to disparage…creative work by women rooted in autobiography and abundance”—an apt description of Nelson, as well. As eyeroll-inducing as anything written about Taylor Swift as a victim of patriarchy may be, Nelson’s own career as a thoughtful and capable memoirist promised that The Slicks might hold some great wisdom on the nature of autobiography and womanhood. If anyone could pull it off, surely it would be Maggie Nelson.