What if I put you in a book?

I assume it goes without saying that Taylor Swift put out a new, two-hour-long album last week; it also probably goes without saying that the internet did what the internet does and immediately set to work figuring out the precise backstory of every song. Which song is about which ex? Is this lyric referencing a guy she dated or a fellow pop star?

The tagline for this album is “All’s fair in love and poetry.” I feel conflicted about this.

I don’t actually believe all is fair in love and poetry, and I don’t think Taylor does, either. Everyone thought it would be a scathing album about Joe Alwyn, but it was mostly gentle and sad re: Joe and saved its scathing for Matty Healy. If rabidly fascinated Reddit fans are to be believed, Joe’s crime was mostly that he was never completely sure he wanted to be with Taylor, while Matty’s crime was being a toxic softboy who ghosted her. This Us Weekly article is hilarious. The songs about Matty are more precise and exposing. It seems that she’s willing to protect Joe to a certain extent, but with Matty—all is fair.

This brings me to what I spent my whole weekend talking about, which is: If you make a career out of turning your emotions into art, how much do you owe to the people who made you feel these emotions?

The stakes are obviously a lot higher for someone as famous as Taylor Swift (is anyone as famous as Taylor Swift?), but I don’t know any authors who don’t fret about this. There’s such a trend recently toward confessional, personal novels—fiction that could be autofiction—that I think, as readers, we sometimes forget to differentiate between author and character. Sometimes, the author doesn’t want us to differentiate; they want to make clear that they are not writing about an experience (particularly a traumatic one) as a plot device but as a cathartic exercising of personal demons.

I have mostly given up hope that people won’t assume all my protagonists are stand-ins for me, but this was of great concern to me five years ago. In retrospect, I wonder how much that influenced my decision to write fantasy—because I wanted a thicker wall between me and my characters. This was a pretty futile choice, as it turned out, because everyone who knew me in person immediately pointed out how the narrator sounded just like me and X character reminded them of Y friend. This was freeing. It meant that I could start writing about characters more like me in worlds more like mine because people would draw parallels anyway. But even if I’m now more willing to put myself in a vulnerable position for the sake of a book, I still feel conflicted about making other people vulnerable with me.

The tricky thing is, you don’t feel things in a vacuum. Most of my biggest and most interesting feelings, the ones I want to write about and make sense of, have to do with other people—breaking up and falling in love, being treated carelessly or being gently comforted, hurting someone and feeling ashamed, asking for forgiveness and getting it, or not. But no matter how willing you are to describe the personal experience of feeling these feelings, you are, inevitably, dragging other people into it. And while I’m not particularly concerned an online mob is going to descend on my books to find real-life parallels (see: Swift), it does make me uneasy to think of friends or family members or exes or random acquaintances picking up one of my books and thinking, “Oh my god—this is me.”

In high school, my English teacher told me poetry could not be vague, which, at the time, I thought was terrible advice, possibly because I hated the thought of sharing my deepest thoughts without obfuscating them under layers of tortured metaphor. Unfortunately, I have come to recognize that this advice is mostly true. “I felt homesick” is just not as interesting as “It was October, spring in Australia, and the fact that it was not fall made me feel disembodied and ill, so I sat on the stationary bike and listened to Noah Kahan and thought about Yosemite until I burst into tears.”

If you look at literally any “gifts for writers” listicle, there will always be some sort of mug or T-shirt that says, “Don’t mess with me or I’ll put you in my book!!” These novelty items have made me, from a young age, wish for death. Partly because the sentiment seems so self-aggrandizing. Oh my god! No one cares if you put them in your book! But also—conflictingly—I do seem think someone might care.

At first, I made a series of jokes here about being conflict-averse—hating the idea of putting someone’s bad behavior in writing even if that’s how it happened—but I am not actually particularly conflict-averse. I think what I’m averse to is freezing a conflict in amber. When you publish a book, you preserve an incident or a set of emotions as they seemed to you at a specific moment in time. And I find it nerve-wracking that I might not later be able to correct the record to something wiser or truer. But also: It’s hard to wish for a world without Since U Been Gone and drivers license and Stick Season.

Ultimately, I guess this becomes less of a question for me and more of a question for the people who choose to hang out with me. If bits of what we talk about make their way into my writing, is that cool? Is that annoying? Is that threatening? Genuinely, I’m not sure. But I do hope you enjoy worrying about it with me. That’s my little gift to you. No charge. No royalties.

Currently reading: Finished Uncanny Valley ten minutes ago and cannot recommend it enough. Precisely captures the constant low-grade ennui I felt living in the Bay Area after graduation. Just excellent.

Non-urgent thought of the week: Creative and productive mean the same thing literally (create/produce), but in a work context we think of them as almost opposite—“creative” sounding very amorphous and artsy and “productive” sounding like finances and numbers. I don’t know what to do with this information but that’s why it’s a non-urgent thought.

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