Book Review | Taylor Swift Is Life: A Superfan’s Guide to All Things We Love About Taylor Swift

Rating | ⭐⭐

Continuing with my celebration of Taylor finally owning her life's work, here is one book you can absolutely skip. Giving it two stars was extremely generous.

The first issue is that the author clearly is not even a Taylor Swift fan. That would be fine if the author wrote factual and correct information, but she didn't. If she were, there's no way she would have made such massive, glaring errors throughout the entire book. In looking at her other writing, this is actually from a whole series about several artists - Harry, Gaga, Rhianna, etc. It reads like the author went through other books about Taylor, looked at Swiftie TikTok accounts, rounded up more info on Twitter, and STILL managed to get a lot wrong.

Secondly, Taylor would absolutely HATE the cover. She opened up about her eating disorder in the 1989-days, and the choice for the cover image is a supremely emaciated, elongated version of Taylor? Gross. Like, Taylor is tall, but not that tall. And she's healthy, not stick-thin with no muscle.

Now for the content. It will be easiest to just bullet point all the ways this book got everything SO, SO wrong.

• Author states that Red only references Jake and Conor. No Harry? Are you kidding me? Some of the best songs on the album are about Mr. Harry Styles (The Very First Night, Trecherous, Come Back...Be Here, Run, Begin Again, I Almost Do, Everything Has Changed, and obviously I Knew You Were Trouble).

• Song titles in the wrong sections for whatever she was talking about

• About folkore, the author says the love triange is between Betty, Inez, and James and he cheats on Betty with Inez. NO. Inez is the only who likes to gossip. He cheats with Augusta/Augustine.

• The song is called You're on Your Own, Kid, NOT You're on Your Own Now, Kid.

• Book claimed to include all eras, but did not include The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. TTPD dropped at midnight on April 19th, 2024 and The Anthology dropped two hours later. It's a double album, 31 amazing songs. The book was published way after the albums came out, so why exclude some of the best songs she's ever written?

• There's a section called 'Who's the Muse' and man, did she fuck this up, too. The author says Jake, John, and Calvin can breathe a sigh of relief for not being referenced on TTPD (and Calvin can, but he's the only one. She literally wrote a song about him for Lover called 'I Forgot That You Existed'). Yet anyone who has half a brain can listen to this amazing collection of songs and realize that it is Taylor looking back on her entire career, all of those relationships, friendships, situations, and people. Almost everyone is included here somehow - Jake/John, Harry, Kim and Kanye, Joe, and even Ratty fucking Healy. To reduce this album to a break-up album only about Joe is incredibly insulting.

• The color theme for folklore is gray, not brown.

Quite simply, there are way better books about Taylor Swift and her music. In-depth break-downs of literary references, her work as poetry, etc. This is a cash-grab by an author who probably doesn't know much about ANY of the musicians she writes about.

Not recommended.