What Do Taylor Swift and Sylvia Plath Have in Common?

The problem with intellectual fashion is that you can fall out of it so easily. For Maggie Nelson—whose much-praised 2015 memoir, The Argonauts, captured a particular flavor of highly personal/political writing in the mid-2010s—such shifts must be disorienting. In The Argonauts, Nelson wrote in detail about her relationship with a transgender man at a time when the topic was relatively unexplored in literary nonfiction. The book also recounted Nelson’s struggles to conceive a child using in vitro fertilization and the birth of her son at a time when highbrow books about writers reconciling art with motherhood—Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, Rachel Cusk’s Transit—were the rage. Nelson was frank, idealistic, and decidedly earnest, a trait she shared with, say, Lin-Manuel Miranda, a figure adulated during the same period who suddenly and drastically became cringe as the Obama years lurched into the Trump era.