Maggie Nelson Sputters And Stalls In 'The Slicks' | Defector

"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."

"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."

"The book is ill-conceived and poorly wrought, a cynical scripture from the Church of Taylor Swift that relies on circular, shallow argumentation leading the reader nowhere. The central premise, that Swift and Plath are both victims of the patriarchal distaste for prolific woman artists, comes off as tired and outdated; parts of the book read like they belong back in 2015, on the shelf beside a Ruth Bader Ginsburg mug."

A widely influential autotheorist built a reputation on intimate, critically inflected memoirism that blends personal experience with broad theoretical reference. A recent effort attempts to link Taylor Swift and Sylvia Plath as shared targets of patriarchal contempt for autobiographical, prolific women artists. That attempt largely fails: it reads as ill-conceived and cynically celebratory, relying on circular and shallow argumentation that stalls rather than illuminates. The central premise feels tired and dated, and the work lacks previously evident strengths such as a skill for universalizing the personal and a deft application of critical theory.

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