Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a Swiftocrat

Summary

Sentimental Garbage – Episode Summary: "Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a Swiftocrat"

Overview

In this engaging episode of Sentimental Garbage, host Karen O'Donoghue sits down with acclaimed journalist and novelist Taffy Brodesser-Akner to delve deep into the cultural phenomenon of Taylor Swift. Framing the conversation through the lens of being a "Swiftocrat"—individuals who use Taylor Swift's songs to decode their own lives—the duo explores the profound impact of Swift's music on personal and societal levels.

1. The Swiftocrat Concept

Karen introduces the unique angle of the episode by explaining how her admiration for Taffy Brodesser-Akner's work, particularly her novel Long Island Compromise, led to this special interview. She humorously recounts a moment of frustration that culminated in Taffy being invited to the podcast to discuss Taylor Swift from a Swiftocrat perspective.

2. Taylor Swift's Storytelling Mastery

Taffy articulates why Taylor Swift's ability to craft intricate, relatable narratives in her songs sets her apart in the music industry. She highlights Swift's transition from country to pop, emphasizing how her storytelling retains the emotional depth and narrative structure characteristic of country music.

"She is now fully a pop singer, but she has never left the part of country that is a story." [18:32]

3. Emotional Resonance and Sincerity in Music

The conversation delves into how Swift's music serves as an emotional anchor for listeners. Taffy shares a personal anecdote about using the song "I Could Go with You" during her book tour to navigate feelings of anxiety and responsibility.

"She makes it safe to have those feelings." [29:02]

Karen expands on this by discussing the cultural shift from cynicism and irony to a resurgence of sincerity, attributing much of this change to Swift's influence.

4. Gender and Cultural Analysis

Taffy provides a critical analysis of how Taylor Swift's work addresses the gender disparities in media and culture. She contrasts the abundance of male-centric narratives in literature and film with the scarcity of relatable stories for women navigating their personal and professional lives.

"Taylor Swift does not say, I am without romance. She is singing for women and advocating for a girl to be what she is." [14:51]

5. Impact of Specific Taylor Swift Songs

The hosts dissect several of Swift's pivotal songs, exploring their lyrical depth and cultural significance:

• "Love Story": Discussed as a quintessential teenage love song that blends Shakespearean elements with modern romance.

  "Love Story is such a complete song. It has a beginning and a middle and an end." [18:32]

• "Getaway Car": Analyzed for its vivid imagery and storytelling prowess, capturing the essence of a tumultuous relationship.

  "She evokes an entire movie in just a couple of phrases." [39:00]

• "All Too Well": Celebrated for its emotional intensity and narrative structure, allowing listeners to project their own experiences onto the song.

  "It's about this very gothic imagery of being this walking undead thing, almost." [63:30]

• "Look What You Made Me Do": Explored as a masterful response to public scrutiny and personal growth.

  "She metabolized her cancellation... and dared us to remember the times we had to process that moment." [48:09]

6. Personal Reflections and Shared Experiences

Both Karen and Taffy share their personal journeys with Taylor Swift's music. Karen reflects on her growing obsession with Swift, while Taffy discusses how Swift's songs have helped her process complex emotions and experiences.

"I think I'm generally a basic. And I think that every emotion I have is not breaking any ground. We're all exactly the same." [65:24]

7. The Role of Sincerity in Modern Culture

Taffy emphasizes the importance of sincerity in an age dominated by digital cynicism and irony. She praises Swift for maintaining an earnest connection with her audience, providing a safe space for genuine emotions.

"Friendships I've had that have gone south... I don’t think of it as a lesbian affair song. I think of it as a song about a friendship." [51:17]

8. Conclusion: Embracing Intensity and Sincerity

The episode wraps up with reflections on the importance of embracing one's emotions and history without shame. Both hosts advocate for a cultural shift away from forced cynicism towards authentic emotional expression, inspired by the sincerity embodied in Taylor Swift's music.

"You are allowed to want pure sincerity of emotion." [31:55]

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• "She makes it safe to have those feelings." – Taffy Brodesser-Akner [29:02]

• "Love Story is such a complete song. It has a beginning and a middle and an end." – Taffy Brodesser-Akner [18:32]

• "Taylor Swift does not say, I am without romance. She is singing for women and advocating for a girl to be what she is." – Taffy Brodesser-Akner [14:51]

• "She is now fully a pop singer, but she has never left the part of country that is a story." – Taffy Brodesser-Akner [18:32]

• "If you have a violent reaction to it, then you have to rethink what you've been taught." – Taffy Brodesser-Akner [31:55]

Final Thoughts

This episode of Sentimental Garbage offers a profound exploration of Taylor Swift's cultural and emotional impact through the insightful perspectives of Karen O'Donoghue and Taffy Brodesser-Akner. By framing the discussion around the concept of a Swiftocrat, the conversation underscores the therapeutic and connective power of music in navigating personal and societal complexities.

Transcript

[Karen O'Donoghue]

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[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

How are you going to know who.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

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[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

To know each other.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Imagine that. Get who gets you on eharmony? Sign up today. Hello everyone. I'm sure you're very surprised to be hearing from me today, especially with content that has absolutely, and I can promise you this, nothing to do with the US Election, because I am recording this intro on Monday and I recorded the episode you're about to listen to last week. So if you have election fatigue, regardless of how that whole thing turned out, yeah, nice to know that there's none of that happening here. I'm bringing you this special off season sentimental garbage simply because this was an opportunity that was too good to pass up. If you've listened to the podcast closely over the summer, you might remember that several times, and also on social media and also on my Goodreads account, how much I loved Taffy Burdesser Akener her second novel, Long Island Compromise. Now Taffy is already a very, very famous journalist and a very famous novelist, for Fleischman is in trouble and very famous for having adapted herself and won an Emmy for it. She's a huge hero of mine and I just adore, adore her work. But I couldn't stop talking about Long Island Compromise this summer, and eventually I couldn't stop talking about it so much and I was so frustrated that I wasn't seeing my love for the book reflected in the world. Then I ended up putting Taffy's publishers on blast in the last episode of Continental Garbage. I shouldn't have done that, and to be honest, I was slightly drunk when I did. But it all kind of turned out for the best. Because what happened was, is that Taffy's publishers heard it and they got onto me and said, well, if you want there to be more opportunities for Long Island Compromise to get the, you know, love it deserves, why don't you put her on your podcast? And I was like, that's a fabulous idea. And because Taffy is an enormous Taylor Swift fan, I thought, what better way to interview Taffy Brittas or Achner than through the lens of being a Swiftocrat? So what you're about to hear is I had to Cut down from two hours of talking to one of my biggest heroes about one of my favorite subjects. And I think you're going to hear it throughout that I'm just vibrating with glee about the whole thing. So I hope you enjoy it. I think it's a real bam on what has been a very stressful couple of weeks in the news for everybody. Some news for me as well. I actually have a Sentimental Garbage live show coming up. I mean, I say coming up. It's happening in February. Let me pull the date up here. 2-6-7. I'm going to be playing the Union Chapel, which I feel like for me to darken the Union Chapel's doors with my, like, ridiculous pop culture commentary is nuts to me. But even so, they've booked me. And if you would like to book a ticket to that, it is, you can do [e-mail] sentimental garbage. Get your tickets in advance because these things, not to toot my own horn, tend to sell out and there won't be a ton of Sentimental Garbage lives next year. So if you've always meant to come or simply love coming to our regular live shows, then you really want to get to get this one. Okay, I'll stop talking now. Enjoy the episode and enjoy Taffy. Hello and welcome to Sentimental Garbage, the podcast where we talk about the culture we love that society can sometimes make us feel ashamed of. My name is Karen O'Donoghue and I've risen up from the dead to bring you this special off season interview with one of my favorite ever novelists and writers, Sapphie. Bless her. Acne.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Did you say acne?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

No.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Oh, I thought you said Ackner. It would be fair. It would be fair.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Imagine my favorite ever novelist whose name I cannot say.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

You know what? My family can't say my name. It would. You'd get a pass.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Okay, that's good.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

But you rose up from the dead.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I know. I do it all the time.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

All the time. All the time.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

And so when I was, you know, generally when I'm given the opportunity to interview somebody off season, I say I'm extremely lazy and it's off season. But I've done several episodes about Taylor Swift in the past and I've also talked about you several times on this podcast in the past.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Somehow, I mean, thank you.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Often in the same episode because for one of our latest Taylor Swift episodes, I sort of cited your journalism on it, that you. You attended the ERAs tour recently enough.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Not recently enough. That tour has been going on. I mean, I Don't know. Like, I think the thing I thought the other day was that if you were a baby conceived on the first night of the ERAS tour, you are now a person in the world who can talk.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

That's nuts.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

You can walk and talk if you weren't even a thing.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

And she's not done.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

She's not done. This is her job. Her job is to be. Her job is to be on the ERAs tour, a concert that has gone on for so long that it now contains an additional segment about an album that was written during the ERAS tour and contains a song about how hard it is to be on the ERAS tour. I could do it with a Broken Heart, which was going to go on my list because I have a very close relationship with that song. And it's emblematic of a lot of my feelings about the. About the most recent album, which is that at first I was like, ugh, was this rushed? And now I love it.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yes.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

And that song, which I thought was terrible, I now not just love it, but I use it. And I think that's the thing about her music is that it becomes a way to speak about what your experience was. When I was on my book tour this summer, I was getting calls from a child of mine at camp who was miserable. And I would get these calls right before I'd have to go on stage and be charismatic and smiley and talk intelligently about my book. And in between those two things, I would sit in the back of a car that was taking me to the venue and I would play. I could do it with a broken heart. And I was so glad that that song existed to give a name to the thing I was experiencing. I, Taylor Swift, on a very, very small, minor, regional scale.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Well, that's. Everyone is the Taylor Swift of their own life.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

That's the thing. That's what she knows. What she knows is that everything about her life is relatable because we're all essentially the same. And if she can stay on the wavelength of this is what my experience is, even as she's so famous that to look at her is like looking at the sun. There's no comparison. You can't even. You can't even understand. Are you like me? Are we all imagining what Taylor Swift's life is like on a sort of daily basis? Like, what does she do during the day? Why is she out to dinner when she has to go to work tomorrow? Those are the things that I think about for her. And all I know is that she is going to. She is 15 years younger than I am. I wish she were five years older than I am. Because I think she would be a good companion to head through middle age with. She would help me figure out what was going on. And instead I'm going to have to wait 15 years for her Perimenopause album. And. And, and only then will I understand what I've been through.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Oh, that's so. Oh, that's so fun. That is actually a question. Cause I'm almost the exact same age as her. And so one of the most wonderful.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Do you look a little like her or is that the Beter Meinhof syndrome? Do you know what the Beter Meinhof syndrome is? It's when you're talking to someone about something and then you see it everywhere. Like, you do look a little like her.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

That's hugely flattering. But I did choose this lipstick today. And the hope that you would feel at ease, maybe like you're with her.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Oh, yeah, I would feel totally at ease. It's. That's the experience when you've written about somebody without their consent, is definitely to feel at ease with them in the room.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Cause this is something else that came up in your article was that you wrote a huge piece for the New York Times where you didn't speak to her at all.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I did not speak to her at all. I went to the ERAS concert, the ERAS tour. And I sat so far away, like my New York Times powers did not work. I could not get access to her. I could not get a good seat. And I think I say in that piece that I was so far away from her that I only truly believe she was there. Because the people closer to the stage seemed to believe she was there. And I took their word for it. Right. But it was an incredible thing to be around all of those people who were there to share this experience. I had never been to anything like that. I had never experienced anything like that. And to talk to people who were. Who. Who. Who showed up. Unlike a sporting event, they showed up to love. They showed up to connect. They were armed with their bracelets. They wanted to make friends. It was like a place. It was a place for everyone who had ever felt like a loser in life to reckon with who they were and how forgivable it was to be every version of yourself. I was so profoundly moved by it. I have a lot of conversations with men. A lot of that story I wrote came from the men I know who would say, I don't understand what's going on. Some women. But mostly so is she like Springsteen? No, no, no, she's not like Springsteen, is she? Is she like, you know, is she like Kanye? No, she is not like Kanye. She means something to girls that a man could not possibly mean to boys. Because all of artistic history has been to serve boys. The boys are served. The boys have their stand by me, they have their baseball movies, they have their coming of age movies, they have their Field of Dreams and we have so little of that. I hate to be so binary in gender, but when I wrote this, it was to explain one end of the binary to the other. I'm not a gender essentialist, but it was to explain what girls have been missing. And what we had been missing was for somebody to say to us, which by the way was a capitalist move on her. What she wants to do is make it so that you who she's having a long career. And what if you wanted to discard the version of yourself whose era was red or whose era was, you know, the Taylor Swift self titled album. What if you are now in your reputation era? How do you metabolize the versions of yourself that existed? We do not have a long history of literature, film or song that helps a girl figure out this entire project of being a girl and turning into a young woman and turning into a woman. We just don't or we don't have enough of it. Whereas for men and boys it is everywhere. I, a woman, know all the stages of male development because I've been asked to imagine myself into them in every movie and every book I've ever read. Girls don't have that.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I think about this subject so often and that's so beautifully said and like, the image I always find myself resting on is that if you were to go into a teenage boy's bedroom in the 90s and you might see posters on the wall that were like, of the Godfather or Scarface or Fight Club and you might see, you know, Eminem or something or whatever in the records and you might see a skateboard in the corner. And if you were to go into a girl's bedroom, you might see, you know, Britney Spears and a Pretty Woman poster and all this kind of stuff. And, and in the boy's bedroom, every single thing in that bedroom we still stand by as a culture. Those, those movies are still in the top 100 movies of all time. And then you look at the girl's bedroom and it's like everything will have a stain on it of some kind or another. Britney, you know, was treated the way she was treated and, and Then was left the way she was left. Pretty Woman is a pretty good movie, but it's kind of. If you think about the treatment.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I mean, if I show my children Pretty Woman, they will not even understand what I'm allowing. But like everything on a feminist basis.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Everything we enjoy is supposed to have some sort of asterisk next to it on the reasons why it is either stained or beneath us or that we should be reaching for something higher. And I do think that is a huge reason why Taylor Swift's music is so important and her personhood is so important, because the sheer numbers, right, swell enough of the fans and the people who are. Who care. It's so much that it's sort of. It's an army that's too big to kill. And it's like, you will not stain this for us.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

And also she. All of the things you mentioned were created for women in the service of training us how to continue serving men.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yes.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

How to continue to exist in the context of men. And Taylor Swift does not say, I am without romance. She does not say, I am without sexuality. But the project of Taylor Swift is very much to exist as Taylor Swift without. Without needing to exist that way for men. She is singing for women. And there are million men, millions of men who love her work, but she is singing for women and advocating for a girl to be what she is. And she has evolved. She's gone from Love Story. She's gone from a sort of catalog of songs that were about romantic love to songs that are about friendship. They are about business. Business. I mean, about the ways you. You change, the ways you feel betrayed. Who else ever gave us that? Nobody, right?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I guess.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Joni Mitchell tries, but, like, you know, I tried. I'll tell you, I tried. And the closest I got was writing was sort of crossing a line where I was considered a writer that men liked. Meaning I worked at gq and, you know, I'm on this book tour now. And the publicists remark at how many men are in the room, which is rare for talks like this. But that's not the same. Like, trying to be someone who appeals to everyone is not the same as standing up and saying, it is enough.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

To just beat girls.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

And it is remarkable. And along the way, the amount of people who said to her, don't do this, and she said, I'm going to do this anyway, and it was enough. That's what genius is. It defies the status quo. And that's what she's done. She's amazing. You're so lucky. That you have that instead of being old like me and my friends and looking and saying, my God, where was this for us?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

But that's something that gives me so much reassurance, is that, you know, she is a kind of phenomenon that's unlike any other and that we are basically the same age and that we're going through the same things, like, and we look and that, like, we're both freaking out about whether or not we're gonna have babies.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Right.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I know neither of us can stop thinking about it and neither of us can stop talking about it. She's given me all the songs that I need to navigate this.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Right.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

But back to the sort of. We mentioned Love Story a second ago, and you gave me a list of your favorite Taylor Swift songs.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Yes.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I'm hoping that we can possibly get.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I mean, it was a hard. It was very hard.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I know. I asked for 10, you still went to 12.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I went to 12, and I stopped myself. You asked for 8 to 10, and I said, but here's 12, but we're gonna.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I've sort of put them in a random order, but good, because they were.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

In a random order, not.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Well, sort of. Actually. I. It's quite a prescriptive order, but I wanted to start with Love Story, actually. It's one of the oldest songs on the list that you have here. And she quite literally wrote it when she was a teenager, Right. I think she was 18 when it came out, so presumably she was 16 or 17 when she wrote it. And I think so much about how some of the greatest love songs have been written by teenagers, right? Because I think. Because their emotions are so unsullied by experience, and so they're just having the.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Emotion, and they're not embarrassed by what they want, which is love. That's a really good point you make. Love Story is such a complete song. It has a beginning and a middle and an end. It has a story in it, and it has. One of the things that I think that has made her so successful across the board is that she is now fully a pop singer, but she has never left the part of country that is a. That is a story. That is a story that has hopelessness in it and an ending, and that is what country music is. And country music is phenomenal in terms of storytelling. And she still took that, and it still has its twang in it, and it still has the things that she is like, a goofy romantic about. I mean, you. Have you been to the tour?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I actually haven't.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Oh, my God.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I Know. I know. What are we doing here? I was touring myself a lot this summer. I was on book tour and so I just was never in the right place at the right time.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I am sort of wondering why I'm here in the UK when she's going to be in Indiana. And I was like, what if these are my last chances? I think it's the cultural event of our lifetimes.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

It is nuts that I haven't been.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

It is nuts. I don't know. How can we get you there? Can you go to Vancouver? Can this podcast. Doesn't this podcast have to send you to Vancouver?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I guess I own the podcast. So I could send me to Vancouver.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I think you should decide to send you.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Maybe I'll go to Vancouver.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Call me up. I'll go with you.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I'll meet you.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I'll meet you in Vancouver.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

It's the Judy Garland movie no one's ever heard of. Meet Me in Vancouver. Meet Me in Vancouver.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

And it's the low budget sequel that nobody knew they wanted. Except it wouldn't be low budget, it would be $4,000 a ticket. And wait, what was that?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Love Story.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Oh, Love Story. And if you look at her outfits on it, like she really leans into sort of. When I was in my enchanted era, I wanted to wear a purple, flowy, frilly dress. And I do not apologize for that, even though anyone else would look back at that. But at that age, she was dreaming of the things that America gave a young girl to be romantic about. Balconies, a moon man.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Balcony's so number one on the list in bold.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I mean, how crazy is it that the most romantic image we can conjure is from a Shakespearean play where the killers kill themselves in a way that is gruesome and horrific? Men on one knee, people galloping, proposing, asking father's permissions. Asking father's permission. And by the way, that it all ends in a marriage proposal. And it's the sort of ground zero of what you then get to see as. Wait, what? Like that's the beginning of her grappling with. What happens after someone says yes to the proposal? Well, there's this wedding and then what? And you see in Miss Americano, which I'm sure the doctor, I'm sure all of your listeners have seen, that her questions are not about who do I end up with. They are about what will become of me while the world, when the world decides I am no longer sexually desirable. And she, I think in that documentary, she decides that that's at 40. I think she's gonna get to 40 and find out that actually nothing on your 40th birthday happens. Like you don't wake up a hag the next day. And that the gifts of the things that happen after 40 are so much better than being sexually available to the world. And I can't wait to hear what she discovers from it. But in that time, she thought she wanted that or she thought she should be singing about that and she thought she should be singing country songs where chaos turns into order and she'll sing love songs throughout everything. I think that's one of her best love songs. What do you think about it?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

It's interesting because I took me a long time to like Taylor Swift and it took me a very short time between liking her and becoming obsessed with her. Right, right.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

That gap close. You just totally. You so articulately disgust described my what happened to me.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just sort of this thing that. This thing on the edge of the horizon for so long and then it just gallops closer and closer and suddenly.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

It'S a pond and then suddenly you just. It's all you can see and it informs the way you will look at the world. Oh my God.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yeah. But I remember Love Story coming out and I was. I remember being a big music magazine person at the time and I was reading this magazine called Q magazine. It's a great. I'm not sure it's still around, but I used to love it and get it every month. And they had this interview with Taylor and the journalist who I guess was, you know, in their 30s or 40s, was talking about how insane it was that they were sitting with a 19 year old who had the world before her. And all she could talk about was how she was afraid she was never going to meet someone.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Wow.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

And it was this thing of he's like kind of wanted to shake her and be like, it's okay, you're fine kind of thing. And I'm so interested in this kind of paranoia that she's had since forever that no one will love her forever.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I wonder if that was real or if that's what you think you're supposed to sing about. Like, as a writer, I know that there's a period of time where you write what you think. My first novel was very much. I am going to write a novel about a couple and it sort of fell apart in there because I realized that's not what I should be writing about. And it bears out in the novel which makes it a sort of postmodern Novel. But I wonder how much of it is this is. What else are you supposed to sing about? You're supposed to sing about your longing. And when you're that age, don't forget you have so much longing in you, and you attach it to romantic love. Because the other things that it is about, the longing, are so scary and unnamable and. And you don't really understand them. You don't have the maturity to understand what it is. What you're longing for is independence. What you're longing for is to see how this all works out for you. And that is not a love song. A love song is about a man or a woman or a person who loves you back.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

It's so serious. You've really turned me onto this. In your Taylor Swift scholarship.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Thank you.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Of the idea that, like, I think about this a lot as well, and as a novelist as well, how the romantic relationship offers the perfect sort of hero's journey in terms of. If you want to write a story about anything. Because there's always stakes built in, like, are they going to kiss or not? Are they going to marry or not? Are they going to be faithful or not? Are they going to have a baby or not? Are they going to die together? And there's so much ingrained stakes that the human brain is already so used to that you can write a story about anything based around any one of those journeys, or even all of them.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

But maybe you can't anymore. Maybe we've become too cynical. I will give you my greatest example is the Notebook. I remember watching the Notebook. And you swoon at the fact that they die together, right?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

And then you leave the theater. Because I saw it in the theater, young person. You leave the theater and you're like, is that all I'm supposed to hope for? Like, no matter what happens, this ends with death.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yeah.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

If this works out, it ends in death. And. And in the Notebook, it's death within minutes of each other. I guess it's like it's not.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Is that how that ends? All I remember is the Alzheimer's in the diary.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

No. And then she says, I'm tired. Don't you think it's time for us to go?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Oh, my God.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

And they get into bed together and they do. They both die. I think they both die. Or am I confusing?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Is it like a Titanic?

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

That couple on the Titanic, that's spooning. I don't know. Maybe I'm a little off. I have to revisit all of this. Please, nobody check my work. But when you realize that the amount of romantic comedies that we were exposed to in the 90s and the early aughts that they all end with this couple that shouldn't be together together, it is left to the intelligent young person to say, well, what happens the next day? You wake up and you are in bed. You're an environmentalist in bed with an oil executive. That's not gonna work. Like, what are we supposed to do? And then apps come along and they make all romance transactional in favor of the hornier person, the person who most wants the hookup.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

The horniest person wins.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

The horniest person wins, and it's left to the other person to pretend that that's what they want too. Right? That's what I see on apps. And nobody. Can we have a word now we use the word cringe. And what is cringe? Cringe is criticizing somebody for having sincere and earnest feelings. And what is more sincere and earnest than love? How can you, like, how can you live in a world of cringe and say, no, no, no, no, I want somebody to love me and I want to love somebody back like that. Those two things can't exist on the same Internet that it's so I would love.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I'm really interested in your relationship with sincerity because like your writing has been like, compared to, you know, Philip Roth and these great writers who are not known for their open hearted sincerity and you know, like when you were a teenager in the 90s and in the sort of the real, the eye of the storm of like cynicism and irony and all that. And like, how do you think that, like we've moved towards a sort of a sincerity, an acceptance and embracing of sincerity. Like, I mean, that's what Ivira's tour is about.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

A real.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

How is that whiplash for you culturally?

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

So I think that the reason people gather around her is because she still makes it safe to have those feelings. Whereas what actually you have is you have a generation of people who've been told that the planet is burning, that they'll never make a living, that they'll never be wealthy, never find love, that they'll never find love. And that once they do 10 years in, they're just gonna wanna open up their relationship, which is an absurd thing to know going into a relationship that like, at least I was sold a bill of goods where on my wedding day I would be told that my happiness is forever. You are not sold that nobody's even trying to tell you that anymore. They are sorry that they gave you a Burning Planet. They are sorry that romantic love is for chumps. And Taylor Swift says, don't worry, sit with me. You could still wish for these things. What is more beautiful than that? I think about, you know, I have children. They're teenagers, but already when they were babies, the art that was being given to me for them, the storybooks, the TV shows were all ironic. And I would think, like, how am I supposed to teach these children? Like, am I just teaching them irony as the first way in? Irony comes as a reaction after knowledge. Yeah, but like, we needed our children to be wearing punk rock T shirts. And actually, punk rock comes from a rejection of the establishment. If you haven't taught anyone the establishment yet, how could you teach them to reject it? We have a generation of children, and you are one of them, I'm sorry to say, who has been taught to be cynical and ironic first. You didn't even get to earn your own. I at least got to earn to watch it myself and decide on it. You were given it and then told that if you wanted anything sincere and real, you were a fool. And I'm sorry for that. And what you could do, though, is you could listen to Love Story. You could just listen to it alone in a room by yourself, and you could say, what are these feelings it brings in me? Because it's so sincere and it is so earnest. And if you have a violent reaction to it, then you have to rethink what you've been taught. Because it's okay for you to want those things. It is okay for you to want. Forget the man, Forget the balcony, Forget the galloping, Forget the father's permission. You are allowed to want pure sincerity of emotion.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

That's really nice.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Yeah.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I mean, we have to move on to other songs, but I feel like there's so much.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Should we or should we stay at love? Starry episode.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

But one thing I did want to light on is that something you noticed at your restore experience. And what many people have noticed and have had mixed reactions to is the amount of marriage proposals that happen to this song and how, as you just said, it is kind of. It is a misunderstanding of what the song is about. The song is about sincerity and hopefulness and not necessarily about wanting someone to go down on one knee for you and like that. Disconnect.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Give the men a break. I know the men who have. This is the only song they know because they've heard it so many times and they're being. They're being dragged to this concert. I did not. They're Being. They're being.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Being dragged for a concert for like $400.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Forget $400. When was it $400? They are being dragged the way they have dragged the women in their lives. Again, I don't mean to assume a sort of cisgender heterosexuality, but let's be honest about what was going on in my section. It was sort of payback for every sporting event that their girlfriend had to sit through that they didn't want to. This was our Super Bowl, Right. That was the ERAS tour. Like, here, let me show. Show you what I'm into. And their way of understanding it was, I guess you want a balcony. I guess you want me down on one knee. I guess you. But it reminded me of one of those, like, sort of communist weddings. It's like in every section, someone was getting proposed to. Like, it's not even when we were fact checking that. When the fact checkers were going through, making sure that the people I was writing about in that story weren't recognizable. It turned out that, like, so many people were being proposed to in purple prom dresses that there was no way to. That's how many people were being proposed to.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Oh, my God.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

In Santa Clara.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

But the thing about, I mean, yes, give the boys a break. But, you know, I mean. Or don't, hey, I've been engaged and you've been engaged and both been subsequently married. Let's hope those marriages last forever. But the day I got engaged, I was pretty sure I wanted that to be the only thing that happened to me that day.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I know. And that, like, that it wasn't one of many. I see a lot of people getting engaged at Disney World. But let me tell you about the person I know who's been engaged twice at Disney World. The first engagement didn't take or didn't turn into a marriage.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Sure.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

But I think all the time. Does the second guy know that the first engagement was also at Disney World? Does she just insist on getting engaged at Disney World?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Does she have no other interests? Is it just like, I don't know.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

You can't ask, you can't say. That's not a good comment on somebody's Instagram. Is, do you. Are you not into anything else?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Like, anything else?

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Is this your only thing?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Like, do you buy fancy olives at the weekend because he couldn't post you there.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I know we went to, like, we only were in fourth grade together and we somehow are hooked up for life because of social media, but is this what happened to you? All you care about is Disney World.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yeah. And so when the proposal ideas are circulating, the only thing that comes up is Disney World, and no one says different. That's it.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

That's it.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

We have to move on to the.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Next song because I will stop. I will take water. You bring up the next song.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I wanted to talk about getaway car and why it's on your list.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Getaway car. Getaway car is on my list. So it is supposedly. The rumor is that it's about her relationship with Tom Hiddleston. Of course, she will never confirm or deny. I had done a story for GQ about Tom Hiddleston. I came here to London and I spent a few days with him and I. I adored him. I found him so smart and sincere. He could quote JG Ballard to you. I mean, talk about somebody who is earnest and smart and sort of the whole, like, unironic package. I loved him. And my sort of point of view, always in those profiles, was that I would side with the person I was writing about no matter what. And the idea, he and Taylor Swift had just broken up. And I found it outrageous that anybody would break up with this man. And I declared her my enemy for life, of course, because I had not yet galloped toward. I had not yet taken the long walk.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

You've not been galloped over.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

The long walk to interest followed by the short walk to obsession was years away from me. It was a decade away from me. But I spent this few days with Tom. I loved him. I still love him. And also, an amazing thing happened to me that weekend. The Daily Mail published pictures of me and him together. It was shortly after my 40th birthday.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

You look great, by the way.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I was wearing a coat I got from Amazon and I was called a mystery brunette. Like, who is this mystery brunette? And by the way, like such a.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Lifelong fantasy brunette in the British tabloids.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Then the New York Post published a story saying, who is this mystery brunette? On Twitter, literally everyone was like, that's Taffy Akner. Everyone knew who that was. And it was. And then Tom, because he is the most wonderful person, called me up and said, I hope your husband isn't upset about those pictures and that I didn't mean any disresp. I hope he didn't feel like there's any disrespect. I said, tom, this has been the best week of our lives. Please, please. But that song, first of all, I am sorry to say, because I am so partisan to Tom. It is a great song. It is a great song with some incredible imagery. Can we Just talk about some of the imagery she drops in that song. I'm in the getaway car, I left you at the motel bar, Took the money in the bag, and I stole the keys. And that was the last time you ever saw. She evokes an entire movie in just a couple of phrases. The other time she does that in another song that I gave you was 1989. As a writer, I don't know how you feel as a writer, but as a writer, the phrase the monsters turned out to be just trash.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Oh, my God. I think about it all the time.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I hate myself. I think about that and I'm like, what is wrong with you that you can't think of something like that? The other thing she is so great at is knowing what is already so regular in our culture that you could just pull from the bench of it and stick it into your song in just a few words. Because we understand, because we have seen a million getaway movies. But I love that song because it made me, like, honestly, because it made me feel like I had been at some sort of vortex of history, that there was a relationship, there was a breakup, there was an interview, there was a song that may or may not have contained aspects of the story in it. Like, I wonder if when she wrote that song, she had read the story. Because it did, you know, it does have, like, you know, don't pretend it's such a mystery. And it just made me feel like, wow, I'm this. Like, I'm a hack in an Amazon coat, you know, Tom was. My kids were so upset for me to leave, and Tom FaceTimed them.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Oh, my God.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

And apologized. I mean, he is England. Tom Hiddleston is the most wonderful of all of you. Do you know that? Do all of you know that? Please tell. Please make sure England knows.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I remember the day that profile came out, because I was working in a newsroom at the time, and it was very much a digital newsroom where we didn't really have the resource for real journalism. And so it was during a time in your career that whenever you publish something, we would just publish bits of it.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Where were you working?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

It was called the Pool. It was like a feminist news site. Amazing. The London answer to Jezebel.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Okay.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

That sort of vibe, it wasn't. But, like, it was almost a pop single dropping. That was, like, how much we all, as, like, young journalists felt about you at that time. It was.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Oh, my God, that's so nice.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

There was something so incredible about that moment and how you summed it up because we all were sort of reporting on the movements of Taylor Swift that summer on the shots on that rock. Oh, my gosh, the rock photographs where the two of them were kissing. It was crazy. And then all the way up to I heart ts vest. And the bit in your profile where you say, listen, Tom, it's okay. I get it. You don't have to keep explaining the vest. And he keeps trying to explain why he was wearing the vest. And now when I think about it now, it's like, it's really insane to me because you said earlier that I think that Tom Hiddleton in the US was just kind of, like, breaking through. Or maybe even say in the piece he was sort of breaking through as a name because he was Loki in the Marvel movies. But he was quite big here. Like, everybody knew who he was.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Everyone knew who he was here.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was in the Night Manager, and, like, he was. Was tipped to be the next Bond.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Yes.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

And in the space of a summer, those Bond rumors just disappeared with one vest.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

But isn't it true that every English actor that appears anywhere in America is then rumored to be the next bomb?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

That's so true.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Like, I don't. I can't think of one actor who has not been rumored to be. I think it's like a. It's just a thing that people like to talk about.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

But it did feel like one of these moments where. And I see these moments happen all the time, and even now, I'm seeing it with, like, I'm kind of obsessed with this Barry Keough and Sabrina A Carpenter relationship where when a kind of a rising man becomes attached to a much more famous woman. And then how we sort of. He sort of stales in our mind because we don't like seeing that dynamic because it's kind of a reversal of the order of things, right? And then he puts on a T shirt at a beach party, and, like, suddenly he becomes sort of gross to everyone overnight because he put on his girlfriend's merch. Like, it's so insane to think about.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

But now. Now think of it this way. That he is an. He's an Englishman. All of you are very pale. And it was sunny out there. And there was that T shirt. And he put it on, and he did not look at that T shirt and say, what if somebody sees me in this? He was like. Like, he was.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

He.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Tom Hiddleston. It. He went right in and was like, give it to. Give me that T shirt. I am going to wear this. And when he greets. He greets enthusiastically. And I. And I hope he's still like that.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I hope so too.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

He is. He's like a wonderful guy. He is. And the way we punish sincerity. I mean, look what we do to Coldplay.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Look what we do to Coldplay. I think about this all the time.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I look at the world and beautiful music. I think the minute fix you made us feel more than we were prepared to feel. We have been punishing them since.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I think about. Oh my God, you're so right.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I think about Coldplay all the time. They are an incredible band.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Like, if you look on the production notes of like those early Coldplay albums, there's like Brian Eno is on there. It's like nobody feels weird about Brian Eno.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I mean, what is it with Coldplay? Coldplay is a great band.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

We cannot forgive them for the sins of nothing.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Nothing. Nothing.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Over the sins of men having feelings.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

The way we turn on people. My God, what's wrong with us?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Like, it's when a man in public has an emotion that's too similar to a woman's emotion, we treat him like a woman. We treat him like he's a famous woman.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

We treat him the way women have been treated.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yeah, exactly, boo.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

But we didn't realize you were a woman.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yeah, we didn't know.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Gross.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I want to move on to look what you made me do. We're officially over time already and not even halfway through this. Liz.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Oh my God, look, you made me.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I love that fucking song.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

If you play three bars of it right now, I will go into a trance and three bars and like, I will just like. And when you see it at the concert and when the video. When just the rage in it.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

She's the versions of herself and also.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Like the sort of bald self loathing of it, which we have had. Which I've had this week. Have you. Have you had a. Have you looked in the mirror and said, you fucking idiot this week? Because I have that. It sums up the way we cannot bear the previous versions of ourselves. We were not. That's what I was saying about boys versus girls. We were not taught to sentimentalize the prior versions of ourselves. We were taught to look forward and to just get better and better and better and not look back and say, look at you, you adorable doof. You were such an idiot. And that's what I'm working on now. I just turned 49 and I'm working on the stupid things I said eight years ago. I'm in London for the first time in. Well, I was here in May, but then before that, for the first time, before the pandemic, and I pass a corner and I say, remember that idiotic thing you said on that corner to that person? Like, why do we do that to ourselves? And look, what you made me do is, I have a friend named Wright Thompson. He's a writer. He's the author of an incredible book that is just out now called the Barn. Everyone should read it if they want to understand why America is the way it is. Read the Barn. But sometimes Wright and I send each other a text message that says, no explanation, just reputation. And it means that we have some enemy out there that is like, it's such a good language for. I am enraged at what you think of me. Which is something that, you know, when you are a writer, as you know when you are a podcaster, when you are anybody who has the sort of first say, you don't ever get to comment on what everyone's second say on your first say is. It's unbecoming. You have to let people have their reaction to the thing that you said, and you have to suffer in silence. And that is no explanation, just reputation when you just want to burn it all to the ground. Although Endgame is just as good a song and just as good a video. I chose look what you made me do because of the way she metabolized her cancellation. She metabolized the thing that actually should have killed her, right? Yes. Like, it should have been the thing that made it so that Taylor was in the dustbin of history as someone I used to like when I was younger. But now, whatever happened to her, she took it and she brought her processing of that moment to us and dared us to remember the times we had to process that moment.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Oh, so good, Taffy.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

On such a small scale. I think about this all the. I gotta tell you, my kids are just so relieved that someone wants to hear about this. Cause I talk about it, but usually they don't want me to. So thank you. Will you please come home and be the daughter I did not have?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

But, like, it's so. It's so amazing what you just said as well. Because the thing with the reputation moment in general is that we've been taught the ancient press machine of Hollywood has always been like, move on to the next thing and don't acknowledge the last thing. And eventually people forget. And for the most part, that works. But like Taylor, because she's a digital native and understands that the headlines about you are around forever, it's very much like, no, remember when this happened? Like, I'm underlining it with my little pen.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

And also, oh, yeah, I bury hatchets, but I keep maps of where I put. I mean, so good. It is so good. And let me ask you, do you ever forget anything? Cause I don't.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Oh, fuck no.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I don't forget anything and I don't think anybody does. I think that people look at you. A friend of mine, I will not mention her, who had a very large scale cancellation, said to me years later, she said, I think that every time people look at me, that's what they think about. Which is probably not true. And it's probably only true an eighth of the time. But actually the lingering effect is that she thinks it's true every time.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

But that's. Yeah.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

And anyone who's had a small flare up.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

But this is the thing about everyone being the Taylor Swift of their own lives, is that there's a distinction that we have on this podcast, and I'm curious to know where you stand on it, is that there are Swifties and there are Swiftocrats.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Tell me, tell me more about these two.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

This was a binary that me and my regular co host, Jen Countney came up with where. When we first started doing podcasts about Taylor. There's lots of other episodes of this podcast, by the way. We're not about Taylor Swift. Sure, but why, but why? A Swiftie is somebody who's following the details of her life and using the songs to decode what's happening with Taylor Swift's life. Oh, a Swiftocrat uses the songs to decode their own lives.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I'm a Swiftocrat. Of course I'm a Swiftocrat. Yes. I'm totally a Swiftocrat. I don't even need a second to think about that.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

And I used to think it was a binary, but actually, I think I thread the needle with both.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I mean, I think that your generation, by the way, has to follow what's going on with her so that you will have context when this song comes out. Like, there are a lot of songs that I hear and I'm like, oh, that's what? Like, the world will tell you exactly what illicit affairs is.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

And you have to, like, almost make yourself keep away from it so you can enjoy the music and use it to decode the own life that you could live of, which you are the Taylor Swift of.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I mean, I also. Yeah, so there's that. But I also think that, like, did I, did I even know Maroon? I was Listening to Maroon the other day and I was thinking, did I think of. I think of Maroon as a Karlie Kloss song, really. And that's not how I think of it. I think of it as a song about friendship. I mean the thing I think of that also that she does so well is that how come I tolerated for my entire life people only singing about romantic love. When I don't ever think about any of my ex boyfriends, I don't ever think about them. You would think from media, from art, that all I thought about were my ex boyfriends, not mine. Like the world that we do that. But I don't. But the friendships I've had that have gone south, I think about those all the time. And when I hear Maroon, but because everyone on TikTok was saying this, I don't think of it as a lesbian affair song. I think of it as a song about a French. I have had a best friend that I lost as a friend. We are back together.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Oh, congratulations.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Thank you. And when I heard Maroon, I cried and I sent it to her and she knew what it was and she cried too. And it was quite something. That's what I think of Maroon as I think why was I tolerating just listening to songs about romantic love when romantic love is not. Was never. Except at points when I was like fully in love newly it never even took up like 40% of my thinking or my life. There was a vague like, I wonder how it ends for me. I wonder if I'll be able to have children. I wonder if I'll get married. But I was never considered consumed by it. I was consumed by like, was I invited to the things that everyone was invited to? Am I being excluded? Are my friends being honest with me? Do they love me as much as I love them? And also the pursuit of a best friend was very important to me when I was young. Like a one person who would be there for you and who would sort of bear witness to your whole life, including the person you fell in love with. It came from such a divorced family. The idea that I've been married for nearly 20 years is like science fiction to me. Like, I can't believe it. I hope my husband understands the spirit in which I say that if he's listening. Renew your health and wellness purpose this new year with the Reset on Allomoves, a curated weekly program of Pilates, strength and step goals to kickstart your fitness journey. It's a 30 day week by week program. Three days of Pilates, two days of strength and 8,000 daily steps plus bonus nutrition tips from Sakara. Plus for only 99 you get a year's worth of access to Alo moves on demand. Full studio experience wherever you are. Get moving [e-mail] hey there Ryan Reynolds here.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

It's a new year and you know what that means.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

No, not the diet resolutions. A way for us all to try and do a little bit better than we did last time year. And my resolution, unlike big wireless is to not be a raging and raise the price of wireless on you every chance I get. Give it a [e-mail] switch $45 upfront payment required equivalent to $15 per month new customers on first 3 month plan only.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Taxes and fees.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Extra Speed slower above 40 GB on unlimited. See mintmobile.com for details.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Can I tell you my theory about Maroon?

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Yes. And it's a special episode that's just about Maroon. Yes.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I don't really think about it either as being a romantic thing or a friendship thing. But what I do think about is that so obviously maroon refers to a shade of red and maroon is also a verb. Like to be marooned.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Yes.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

To be alone. And something that inside actually isn't mine, that it belongs to my co host Jen. But then she sort of goes through in this beautiful bridge about all these different shades of red that she's seeing through this struggle she's having with this person, whoever they are. And you know, the rust that grew between telephones and the mark on my collarbone and all the stuff.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

The rust that grew between telephones. Oh my God.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

And to me I think about whatever struggle she's in in this relationship with this person, whatever kind of relationship it is. She is also filtering it through what is her, her great artistic breakthrough which was the Red Album right this moment where she really was able to galvanize both her, her life, her diary, her thoughts, her inspiration, her ambition into songs. And then they became the sort of like the songs became a filter for her thoughts like she, she figured out the.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

The recipe.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

The recipe. Yes, exactly. The recipe was perfected with that album in terms of how she writes songs. And I think about for me the significance for it is about life as an artist. I think because when I am in a situation with somebody, no matter how painful it is, I always have the comfort that I can use it for something.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Yeah, me too.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

And that both helps you.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Once you realize that you will. That whatever happens will be fine because you're going to write about it.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

The worst thing anyone ever says to you. You can just write down somewhere and get money for it.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I know. And then the world will read it and thank you for, like, that and.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Call you smart and cool. It's crazy. And. But what that does is it, like, gives you this safety because everything will always be okay because you can all. It's like the Nora Ephron everything is copy thing. But also it does. It removes you from the situation you're in and makes you harder to get at. You know what I mean? Because you kind of wide out. You brown out in front of the person and you go, this is something my husband has said to me before when we have been in terrible fights where he's like, I see you go places in your head and I know you. You're like, mentally storing this.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

My husband once said something horrifically similar.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Both are a horrific thing to say to spouse and also a totally fair emotion to feel if you live with a writer.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

But also it's like, how. Isn't that how we survive? And isn't that what we. To be a writer is not to just have a job. It is a way of being in the world. And that is also. Maybe she is the first person that I ever witness going through life and doing that. I mean, I think about Bruce Springsteen, and I think about, like, how he'd never been in a factory before but was singing it, like. And that was all science fiction. But I also think about after 9 11, that the rising came out of the fact that he would read the New York Times every day. And at the times, they did, like, profiles of every single person who died. And so many of them named Bruce Springsteen as. Like, he was really into Bruce Springsteen. She was really into Bruce Springsteen. And, like, the volume of that was sort of staggering for him. And that's where the Rising came out of. And I don't know about the other albums, which are filled with amazing songs, but the Rising, when I. I wonder how much of our love for her is also being able to see and attach the thing we know it came from or the thing we suspect that it came from. Like, do I love Maroon? Because I think that. Do you love like. Like, do we love. Do you love Maroon? Do you love Maroon?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I love Maroon. I love Maroon. I love Maroon.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

To scream the rubies that I.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

The rubies that, to me, is one of her finest moments.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Just like a scream, like a sort of primal scream.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

That sort of couplet of like the carnations you had thought were roses. That's us. You should have known better. That the the rubies that I gave up to take this moment of, like, it's kind of funny that you've misunderstood something again. And then to turn around and being like. Don't you understand?

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Yeah. Like, oh, my gosh, it's so. It's so big and good, and it's.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

So over the top.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Right, right. And also to not be cheap with your lyrics, like, she has the faith that you have to have as a writer. I always think about people who are writing only about themselves. They worry they're gonna run out of story. And the thing that maybe reassures me that I'll survive is that I'm a journalist first and that I'll be able to tell other people's stories as I do.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Right.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Like, Fleischman was someone else's story that hinged on me. But Long Island Compromise, the book I have out now is the story of other people. And I wonder if I'd feel cheaper or more miserly with my lyrics if I was just worried about my own experience. I mean, the really interesting thing. I put Betty on that list too.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yes.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Because it became really interesting to me that in Folklore, she started telling other people's stories. That I guess maybe the sort of quiet of the pandemic of being in a solid, stable relationship, she just started telling other people's stories, like a good country singer. And some of those songs on Folklore and Evermore are incredible pieces of storytelling.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

They're so. They're so beautiful. Betty. Betty's never been one for me, but. But I love those two albums. But what I find so curious is that my. My elder brother, who lives in London as well, and who is like. Like a. Like a tech guy. Very, very tall, rich tech guy.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Oh, wow. Amazing.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

And he's like, obviously, there's much more to him than that. He's. He's a very varied and deep and loving.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

But does there need to be.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

But like. Like, that's. If you were. If, you know, if you saw him, that's. You, like, oh, like, rich, tall, tech guy. He is obsessed with Benny. And I was like, why do you love it so much? And I was like, I don't know. I just. I just think about those. Those two girls. And I was like, what do you. What do you mean? He was like, it's about. It's about two teenage girls who are in love. And he. He so. And I was like, where the fuck did you get that from? He was like, because it's. That's. He was just so. But it was so strange of, like, he's kind of the last person who would care about a tender queer story, but he's made one up for this song.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

That's amazing. But what about James?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I'm not.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Yeah, that's why he's singing it. Right. I know.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

That's what. I know that. And you know that James is the.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Female daughter of Blake Livestream.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yeah. No, he, again, he is very much in his purity, a swiftocrat. Because he doesn't really know that much about her personal life.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

He really is. That is a pure swifter. I love it because I love that trilogy as, like, I chose Betty. It was my last pick. It was my least enthusiastic pick, but it was still an enthusiastic pick because I love that trilogy of songs and I love. I just love just the project of it that I'm going to tell these three songs from these three different perspectives. The worst thing that I ever did was what I did to you is such a simple and beautiful thought and lyric. And you don't like. The story is told in time. It's carefully told in the moment. Like, I'm going to go to this party and I'm going to find out. But you don't find out what happened. You get right up the steps of the porch and you don't find out what happened. Except later you find out. I don't know what you find out from the other songs, but it was like a man apologizing. Sorry to your brother, but clearly a man apologizing. A man who, you know, get in the car. Yeah. There's something so beautiful about this, about that, the storytelling in it.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

There's another place on your list where she says something so simple and every time I burst into tears, I'm almost afraid of talking about it now. Tell me, tell me, tell me. Is, would have, could have, should have.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Give me back my girlhood. It was mine first. I don't even know where to begin. We don't have the time on earth to start making our way through what that lyric means, obviously, to you. To me, too. The way that you're innocent, that you give it away and then realize as you do. I mean, I think about this a lot. I think about how we are told that at 18 years old, we are adults and so we think we are. But whoever is much older than we are. It is reputed to be a song about John Mayer. Right. That he knew how old 18 and 19 weren't. Right. He knew that those are technical terms and that allegedly, if that is about him or whoever it is about that, the disgust you have for the man who made you a grown up before your time. Even as you walked in with your eyes open. You can't know until so much later that you were too young to know. There was no way to convince you you were complicit in it. And yet it wasn't your fault.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

This is what I think about all the time. And I'm sure you have an experience. I'm sure you didn't go out with John Mayer, but I'm sure you have a John Mayer.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I mean, I'm one of the few people who has not gone out with John Mayer, but I do have a. I do have a terrible. That's the guy that ruined me. Like what I obsessed over. Wait, him? I can't even tell you. Like, if I described him to you, I would dissolve into shame of like, who did that for me? But that is the most universal thing.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yeah.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

And the way she tells. First of all, Dear John.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yeah. So, yeah, these are our twin songs and they're both on your list.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

And Dear John is a sort of great storytelling, great last lyric song of bewilderment, anger and shame. And then the beauty of that song, the reason I put both of them on that list, is to go back and revisit what that is. To not pretend it didn't happen to you. To not pretend that you moved on. The gift that she continues to give us is to not pretend that she's moved on. Because what does it mean to move on? Does it mean you don't remember it? Does it mean you never think about it?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yeah. What does forgive and forget mean, really?

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Like, we are formed from all of these experiences. Experiences. And I'm so grateful to have somebody who doesn't say that you're. That when you are young these things happen to you. And now you've moved on. And aren't those things hilarious? No, they are what built you. They are what led to the next thing. To the next thing. To the next thing. Which is now.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Actually, I really wanted to talk about those two songs vis a vis your work specifically, which is that obviously Dear John is a story about. Oh yeah. About the. There's a very new trauma kind of thing in terms of, you know, how old she is and how far out she is from when it happened. I think it came out when she was like 20, 21. And she was 19 when it happened. Very specifically 19. And then would have, could have, should have comes out, however many years later at the very end of the Midnights album as a bonus track. And I'm so fascinated by the idea, as you just said, what is it? To move on. And for me, that is so much a song about. You know, it's all about this. This very, very gothic imagery of being kind of this like walking undead thing, almost. This person who's still like living in their trauma. And like so much of your novels, comes back to this thing of people who just cannot move on from their trauma. And not in the sense that they have bad memories or bad coping mechanisms. It's that they're still living it every day.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I mean, I guess I don't think anybody ever moves on from anything. And I really have gotten to my age, shocked to find out that if I am being the Taylor Swift of my own life and telling a story of the world through my experience, because I don't think my experiences are so different from anyone else's. I think I'm generally a basic. And I think that I am. That every emotion I have is not breaking any ground. I think I'm exact. I think the reason we all love Taylor Swift is cause we're all exactly the same. I think evolutionarily we're built to bond, not to separate. She says a week before the worst election in the world.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I wasn't gonna find out.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

But I do also want to say that I wish I had known that for some reason the value, the moral value of moving on and getting over things had been instilled in me. But why? Why? Like, why, in addition to trying to get through hard things in my life, was it also marketed to me, the idea that I am. That I should at least be pretending that I've moved on. Imagine all the energy that I have wasted on pretending that I'm over things that I'm not. Is really a lot of energy. That's what's killing me, the pretending I'm over anything. And these things don't take up the same amount of space in my life. But you are supposed to pretend that the things that happened to you as a child don't matter anymore. You fully are supposed to pretend that. You're supposed to pretend that something somebody said to you ten years ago is not still something they said to you. If you haven't addressed it, if you haven't moved on from it, or it's something cruel that someone did. What if embracing all the things that happened to us along the way was normalized? What if we didn't have to pretend that we weren't still bothered by the things that bothered us? I don't know. That sounds. I'M not advocating walking around talking about it all the time. I'm advocating not pretending that it doesn't sometimes come up or that you weren't formed of it or that every time you have a fight with your. Like, every time you have a fight with your spouse, it is not because of something historic.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

You know, every time I have a fight with my spouse, it comes back to family placements. Really, it always. Because he's an eldest child and I'm a youngest child. And there is always something in that is talking to each other all the.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Time, like his entitlement.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Your. Your feeling like I'm being babied or whatever. And. And it annoys me that we're like, you know, 34 and 38 and, like, have a home and a dog and like, we're still talking about what it was like to grow up in our mutual homes, which are two countries apart.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Like, it's like, so fucking stupid. But maybe it isn't. Maybe it's, like, wonderful to know each other so well.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yeah, I'm doing it again.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I'm doing it again.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yeah. Hey, remember?

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

And also, like, why do we stay married? Why do we stay married once we realize, especially as women, that we don't need husbands to own property? Like, when I was born, a woman couldn't in America get a credit card without her husband's signature.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Isn't it the anniversary of that today? Is it some American person I follow was like, it's 50 years today or something.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Really?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Well, I'm not 50, so I don't know.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

As in since it was legalized, since.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

So maybe it's like, I'm a year short. So I think about that all the time. And I think, like, why do we stay? Well, it's because it's really nice to have someone as our witness. But why should that witnessing start at the age of 30, for example, like, which is the year I got married? Why shouldn't it start from everything I've explained up till then, which is, this is my whole entire bag of problems. This. It's yours now. Share it with me.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

It's really nice. And. And that thing of, like, when someone is mean to your spouse, you know that they're being mean to the fat kid your spouse used to be.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Yeah.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

And you know that person so well, even though you never met them and all you want to do is go back in time and protect them.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I know. You just want to kill them.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

You just want to kill them, which is one of the things that's making Me very excited about the idea of having kids is the idea I can finally protect the fat kid my husband used to be.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

You could, but you have to. Like, the thing about having kids is you have to watch it happen.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I know. That's even worse.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

It's so much worse than you think. It's rewarding, don't get me wrong. But to watch those parts of it is excruciating.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Okay, maybe I'm not looking forward to it.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Yeah, maybe. I mean, you should look forward to it.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

We are a full half hour over time. But I can't let you go until we talk about it all too well.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

We can't. For 10 minutes. For 10 full minutes. Okay.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

What's left?

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

So your podcast, compatre Michael Barbaro, who hosts to the Daily at the New York Times. We were texting about it the other day. What makes all too well, why can you listen to it a million times? Why do you. Why can you not listen to only part of it? Why is it like, why is it so good? And what we came up with was that the level of detail, the specificity about this particular relationship allows you to picture her relationship and frees you to graft your own relationship that went that wrong onto that relationship. Because she is not trying to tell you about your relationship. She is telling you about hers. And the parts of you that want to relate to somebody find something at every turn, from dancing in the refrigerator light to you never go. I mean, the complicated idea in when he says, if we were closer in age, it would have been fine. And it made me want to like that. You don't even need to explain that. It made me want to die. It should have been a nice thing. He was saying, listen, if we were closer in age, maybe it would have been fine. It lets everyone off the hook, but it makes her want to die. And I understand that like, that, oh, this I was unfixable from the beginning.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

And yet you pursued it anyway.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

And also this great sin of this sort of imposed shame he seems to have over being with someone so much younger, that, like, if you actually think about him on the day of her 21st birthday, thinking about whether or not, like, is it that he can't bring himself to go to his girlfriend's 21st birthday because it will acknowledge that she's 21 and he will be so much older in the room than everyone else, and she won't be able. Like, no one will be able to bear it. And you look at it, and you look at that movie she made about It. And now you just have this sort of. Sadie Sink has this pathway to my tears. I look at her as my avatar of the horrible breakups that I've had. What are your all too well thoughts?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Oh, God. I mean.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

And also. Wait one second, I'm saying one more thing. And then the imagery at the end with the. I still remember the first fall of like to go back to that. To go back to the sort of visceral sensory reminders of the thing that every year there will be a first fall of snow and every year I will remember that that was a good time for us. I can't bear it. Sorry. Now you can talk. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

The thing about. No, please don't be. So this is a safe place for feelings, for very strong feelings. I mean, the thing what really strikes me is that this was a song that was an album track, that was a regular song amount of time and. And people loved it or they liked it. They liked it. And I remember one of the first times where I walked up to liking that, walked up to being interested in Taylor Swift before I was truly obsessed, was watching that Grammys performance when she's in that beautiful pink dress with that sort of long bob playing the piano. And I saw the performance, I was like, well, she's a God. Obviously she's a God. But then when it sort of. She released that 10 minute version and it went from being a song everyone loved to a really important moment, certainly for my generation, because I am still of an age where I'm going to club nights where they play six hours of Taylor Swift music and every time that song comes on, it's so fun.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I would love to go to that club. Can I go there?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yes.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Can you take me there?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

It's called Swiftgeddon.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

No, it isn't. Oh my God. Where is it?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

It really does feel like the end of the world.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I'm supposed to be at Southbank tonight, but I think I might. Is that. I'm sorry, but I have to cancel. I have to cancel South Bank. That's okay. My publicist gave me the thumbs up.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I mean, you should. If you're in London for a few days, there might be one on. You never know, you could make a gift. But what comes when you look around that room and every single woman in there is holding hands.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I know.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

And screaming all 10 minutes. And I think what it is for me, not only is it a beautiful song with amazing lyrics that I think about all the time, it's that it is a kind of like. It's like it. It affirms intensity.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Yeah.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

And informs you being intense about something. And again, to go back to what we're saying at the beginning of this podcast about like how ashamed you were made to feel intense about things and specifically how ashamed you were made to feel intense about a relationship that maybe didn't even last that long.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Right.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

That could have. Maybe it was six months here or whatever. And he never even called it official. But you were there and you were present for every moment. Moment. And like the whole. The moment of like I. I kept you like a. What is it?

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Kept you like a secret and you can't. I kept. No, you kept me like a secret and I kept you like an oath.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Of like being some. Like that's too much for me. And then I. It's so strange because it's song. Everyone knows it's about Jake Gyllenhaal and Taylor Swift in a very specific moment. But then I look around this, like in this packed out club in East London and every woman is just transported to that moment where they were this as well. And like we're all getting this moment, this window to be as intense as we possibly can be. And Even it being 10 minutes at all is the most intense thing in the world.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Right. It's like it was. It had to fill its tank of emotion. It couldn't be two and a half minutes. It's so funny to think like that someone imposed two and a half minutes on songs and we're three and a half minutes and this was like, nope, it's gonna be 10 minutes. I am sorry. The last time that happened was like a 12 minute. This is the end from the Doors where they're just sort of like drift off and you don't hear anything for a while. But it's so impactful. It's so beautiful. It reminds me also like, I think the same effect is had in the bridge in out of the woods that like out of the woods has a bridge. Remember when we hit the brakes too soon, 20 sitchins, that hospital room. You have no idea what she's talking about. But this also happened to you in some sense. And she paints such a visceral picture that you go into another trance about the someone. I think it was a funny tweet of. It's a good thing she doesn't play out of the woods on the ERAS tour so that all of these young people don't have to look at their mothers and their haunted eyes as they sing the out of the woods. Bridge. Clearly not thinking about that child's father. Clearly thinking about someone else.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Oh, my gosh. What an intense journey. It was amazing. I don't even know what it means completely to say the monsters turned out to. To be just trees, but I know that, like, everything but the snow on the hospital room. And just. I can feel myself sitting in someone's hospital room and watching the sun come up and realizing we're not in love anymore. And that never happened to me.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

And I was looking. I know. And like. And who left? Who was getting the stitches? It's unclear who was getting the stitches, who left. But the monsters turned out to be just trees. Is like the sort of, like, oldest. Are those. Look, I think they're monsters outside. No, they're just trees. Like, to take that image from childhood, to impose it into this hospital, like, I don't even have words for it. I can't get my head around it.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Especially as younger women when we have men who we feel like too intensely about and making these sort of excuses for their mental stuff that they're doing to us. Being like, well, he finds it hard to commit, and he's got a thing with his dad, and it's all very mysterious and cloudy and we're built to.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Be fascinated by it.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

And then, like, the sun comes up and you're like, oh, you're just a guy, and this isn't right.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Right.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

This isn't working.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Right. Or that's not how I ever saw. The sun came up and you were looking at me. Like, the sun came up and you were looking at me. Is she's okay. This is what I've painted. She's asleep in a chair next to the hospital bed. He's getting the stitches. She wakes up thinking they're going to continue their usual fight, but he's looking at her, and they live to fight another day. Oh, like, out of the woods is all about the intense moments of a relationship in which you. Cause until you've locked down the relationship in something like marriage, moving in some sort of commitment, you're always on a little bit of a shaky ground. Are we a thing? Are we. Are we still fighting? Like, is this going to go? And out of the woods is really about looking for the moment where I can feel safe and never finding it and still like. And not yet knowing that in a solid relationship, there are no moments like that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Well, that's been all your songs.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I think that's all my songs. Oh, my God. But I have to Say, I've been on a book tour, and I now understand that I should only have been talking about Taylor Swift instead of my book, which perhaps the listener should read.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Well, listen, I have talked about your book quite extensively on this podcast. Thank you for that, and I truly mean it. It was my favorite book I have read this year.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Really?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

This is very embarrassing. I really think that you were one of the great prose stylists alive.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Oh, my God, don't be. I'm embarrassed. Thank you.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

No, I loved it so, so much. And not like, I think. I mean, we don't have time for this, but I just want to tell you why I loved it.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Thank you. Thank you. I'll make time for that. I'm a writer, first of all.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I think I came off a long string of reading a lot of popular fiction books or contemporary literature that everyone was super nice in, and I was getting really sick of it because to me, I think, like, books are the place where you go to be alone with your terrible thoughts.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Exactly. That's what I think. I can't understand the conversations about likable characters. Like, I don't get any of that. What do you mean? Everyone's likable. That's not what I want to read about. Like, I like you, you like me. Why would we read for that?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

The amount of modern novels now that have, like, a character who's having a little bit of an interesting time, and then they sort of forget to call their friend on their birthday, and then they all have an intervention about how the friend is being bad. I'm like, what the fuck? Like, this is the most intimate artistic experience a person can have. It is 400 pages of, like, delicate communion with just, like, thoughts. And it's like, we should be able to put the gross stuff in there. And, like, I. You know, I grew up on, like, Virginia Andrews and, like, people like brothers and sisters fucking in an attic. Like, I. I need that.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I just want the most disgusting thing that nobody could see me reading.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Isn't that why we're into books?

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Like, that's why it's a book. That's why. And not a T shirt you wear, right?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Or, like, a song you play when your friends are over. And, like, just reading about these awful people was just so beautiful and scrumptious. I just, like, didn't want to eat it all, all the time. But then on another level, I'm somebody who's, like, always worrying about, this is the. This is the Taylor Swift look alike in me. Always worrying about what's Gonna become of me. And like, particularly this kind of the millennial novelist arms race.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

That's amazing.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

It's tough out here for us, Matt. It is. But there's a lot of us.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Write a disgusting book.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I think I will.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

You will.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

But I think as well.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Send it to me. I'll endorse it. I'll endorse your disgusting book. Because I'm worried that people are going to think that everyone is supposed to be plucky. I'm worried about that.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I'm reaching this point where I'm aging out of plucky. And that's fine. I'm happy about that because I would like to age into disgusting.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Age into disgusting. Were from where you started in that attic. In that attic that they were stuck in. What else are you gonna do but have sex with your siblings?

[Karen O'Donoghue]

You're coming of age, you two. Corey's dead.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I think about that book four times a day.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yeah, Every day. Every day. We got an episode on it. It's one of our many non Taylor Swift episodes. But I also. When I was reading it, and it's. It's. And, like, it felt like a Dickens book to me because there was so many, like, in the sense that, like, Dickens was writing. It was almost like you were writing for a serialized audience. And you're like, I don't totally have an update on Beamer this week, so I'm gonna give you, like, a long saga about this guy who was falsely selling tombstones. Jewish. Jewish burial plots.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

While I was. While I'm here. I need you to know.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I need you to know about the burial plots. And I was like, more on the burial plots, please. And then I was. I had this real moment. And I hope you don't find this very weird or condescending or existentially horrible, but, like, I had this moment of being like, she's lived, like, 15 years more life than me, and she's. She's like, heard all these stories. I'm not saying that the burial shots was something you heard off someone, but it was all of this knowledge of, like, being in the world simply longer than I am. And I had this moment as a writer where I was like, I can't wait to know more stuff.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

That's such a good insight. I'm so glad for you to think that, because I keep thinking that. I keep thinking that. You know, it's funny, in Judaism, there's the Torah, which is the books of the five books of Moses, and then all the writings about it. But then there are books of Mysticism. And they say you're not allowed to learn them until you're 40, because only at 40 do you become wise. And I always thought that sucked and it couldn't be true. I always felt like I was wise. And then really, when I was turned 40, I understood how to take everything that I had seen and turn it into something. And at 41, I wrote my first novel. You're ahead of me. I was writing profiles. I was doing a good job at it. But the thing we're taught to fear, which is turning 40, just you wait. And you have heard, you have. Wait till what you've seen. Wait till your friends start getting divorced. Wait till everyone starts having children. Wait till everyone starts coming out of the closet. Wait till your siblings tell you that they've always hated you. Wait for all of it. And it is going to be the greatest gift you have where you just sit back and realize that all of your life has paid off. That's such a nice thing to say, but I always worry about young writers who cannot understand why a. They're not. I have a lot of young writers in my life who can't figure out why they're not more successful.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Really?

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Yeah. Well, we're very entitled and where and when and when success is going to start. And part of being a writer is knowing or not knowing that you have to watch everybody else, you know, become more and more and more successful on a very steady trajectory. And it's not really even if it happens. I mean, I was a successful magazine writer. But the thing you want to be in the world, I don't think can happen till you're 40, by the way. I think that's why Lena Dunham was so bewildering to people.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Yeah.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

That she actually had the thing so young. And the thing that comes at her is people not being able to take it.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Did you ever profile her?

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Never.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

God, I'd love to read that.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

I mean, Allison Davis wrote a great profile of her for New York magazine, but I never did. And then. And now I sort of know her. We have the same editor, and she is a benevolent, kind. She reaches out to tell me that she liked something. I think she is an incredible example of a person to have in the world. Someone who is so smart, who is so good at what she does and who has. Also an Internet native and has to live out in the world, metabolizing the world as she goes through it, which is a job I couldn't do at that age. Or she's older now, but, like, when she was that age.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

No. I'm totally obsessed with her. And she was one of the reasons I was like, maybe it's okay if I write a novel at 26.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

And yes, it is. My first novel was yes and yes. And then write another one. And then write another one. And write another one. Thank you for saying that about my book. I really. It means a lot to me.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I wanted to say to you for a long time, thank you.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Thank you.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

I'm really glad that, like, your publicist who I blasted on an episode where I was drunk, she arranged this.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

She's wonderful. She forgives all. She's a very forgiving.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

You know, I would feel ashamed of it. But at the end, God's here, and I've really. This has been a lovely afternoon.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

This has been really wonderful. I really appreciate you having me on. I love your podcast. I think you're wonderful. I can't. I can't wait to read more and hear more from you.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

Thank you, Daffy, so much.

[Taffy Burdesser-Akner]

Thank you.

[Karen O'Donoghue]

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[Karen O'Donoghue]

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