When I was nineteen, I heard a One Direction song for the first time, and it ruined my life. This is how girls on the internet usually put it, and I like the way it sounds. If the world ends tomorrow, we say over and over, just let One Direction know that they ruined our lives and we’ll see them in hell. On the band’s tenth anniversary, one woman chastised her followers amid a day of festivity, writing, “stop celebrating … grow up if they didn’t ruin you, you did it wrong.”1
Some people will explain exactly what they mean: they’ve achieved utter and irrevocable financial precarity by designating an outsized share of their income to concert tickets, overpriced T-shirts, and collectible photo books, or they’ve become incomprehensible to their friends and family because of the degree to which they speak and think in fandom references and memes. They didn’t use spoons for three years because Liam Payne said he was afraid of them. They put a space before every piece of punctuation because of Niall Horan’s baffling insistence on doing that. The only time they feel their brains flooded with serotonin is when they watch videos, as one fan put it, “about a stupid boyband that isn’t even together anymore.”2
Fans also know that this makes them a joke to some and an enrichment opportunity to others. The fully commercialized internet is built on an understanding of identity in which each of our characteristics is one that advertisers would be incentivized to track. Google and Facebook and their thousands of customers are probably equally or more interested in my affection for a pop star as they are in my coastal loyalties or the finances of my parents—though only insofar as it pertains to how I might spend my money and what I’ll pause to look at for a while. This organizing principle of the internet cheapens all types of identity, reducing our lives in all their strangeness to a series of boxes to check and levers to pull before serving a targeted advertisement. But individually, we know that it’s not so simple. When I say One Direction ruined my life, what I’m saying first and foremost is that they made my life much more difficult to explain. One Direction ruined my life. The word “ruined” expresses the indignity of love, and how it can careen us offtrack even under the best of circumstances. It’s a satisfying and dramatic replacement for more feeble words like “changed” or “improved.” To say that One Direction has ruined your life implies that they’ve had a greater impact than you would have chosen, even if you don’t sincerely regret how things ended up.
Other times, I’ll say it was Tumblr that ruined my life. The site was the home and incubator for fandom in the early 2010s, complementing its role as an identity accelerant—it provided images that gave form to the ideas that young people were having about themselves, as well as words that helped them describe burning feelings that might otherwise only smolder, or take much longer to catch light. Teenagers like me, who had come to the site to look at pretty things and collect interesting phrases, could often find themselves caught up in what the researcher Alexander Cho has referred to as the “cascading dynamic” of the timeline, then wind up somewhere completely unexpected.3 In my mother’s time, a would-be pop fan might hear a song serendipitously on the radio or on a friend’s record player but would still have to actively seek out and pay for the physical media or concert tickets necessary to grow and sustain their affection. One Direction fans, telling their origin stories, typically start somewhere else: a YouTube video, which led to a rabbit hole full of more clips or a Tumblr dashboard mysteriously filling up with GIFs of boys they didn’t recognize, which were so fun to watch that they could only dream of understanding their context. They recall becoming a fan in the course of a single breathless evening, entirely by accident, in one tab. “I was probably twelve or thirteen,” Megan McNeeley, a One Direction fan from Cleveland told me. “We were just on YouTube watching random videos and in the suggested videos we saw one of their X Factor clips, so we clicked on it, and then we clicked on another one, and then we clicked on another one. We saw the ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ video together, and right away we were like, ‘This one’s my favorite, I want this one.’ That was the start of it. It was just a night watching YouTube, and gradually I was like, Oh no, they’re the best thing that has ever happened.”4
The “video diaries,” a collection of blurry phone-camera videos taken on a set of dimly lit stairs while One Direction was on The X Factor, will come up eighty times if you ask one hundred random people how they fell in love with the band. These videos are just typical behind-the-scenes content, clearly an obligation that the band giggled and roughhoused through, and the source of some of the fandom’s earliest memes, most of which are as unfunny as a nuclear family’s inside jokes. (Louis says, “I like girls who eat carrots” in one, which somehow became a whole thing. He loves carrots!) “You’ve probably heard this a million times,” Chiara Mueller, a fan from Germany stated. “I went on YouTube, and I went down a deep spiral of One Direction videos.”5 “They did those videos on the staircase, and then there was so much about them on the internet,” Ashlynne Arnett, a fan from Kentucky, told me. “I just took an interest in them because that information was available, and of course Harry Styles is Harry Styles, and why not? I was curious. I wanted to know so much about them.”6 Jacob Gaspar, the fan from Ohio who told me that some people think his fandom is an ironic joke, said that he was “instantly hooked” after his sister showed him the X Factor diaries. “I thought they were the funniest people I’d ever seen in my entire life,” he told me. “Then she played me ‘What Makes You Beautiful,’ and I was like, That’s fire, that’s a fantastic song.”7 These basically content-less stories are timeless, even though the mechanisms are modern—the experience of becoming a fan has never been easy to describe. Though social media popularized the idea of stan as an identity category, as well as the word “stan” itself, it hasn’t clarified how a person transforms from “regular” to “stan.” The commercial apparatus of the internet is interested only in whether I love One Direction, and not how or why I came to, a question around which there still is—and now I’m not only speaking for myself—plenty of mystery.
In the mid-1990s, the cultural historian Daniel Cavicchi spent three years interviewing Bruce Springsteen fans about where their love of Bruce had come from and how it had colored their lives. The resulting book, Tramps Like Us, published in 1998, is maybe the most thorough ethnography ever published about a single fandom. Cavicchi was particularly interested in “becoming a fan” stories and published many of them in full—some are hundreds of words long. He outlines two broad categories: the “gradual” transformation, in which devotional feelings work their way slowly into people’s lives, and the “sudden” transformation, which involves a mystical change that seems to come out of nowhere. “One morning I woke up and I was a fan,” said a woman named Laurie, who was thirteen years old in 1985 and had previously been bored by Springsteen. She’d made fun of his “I’m on Fire” music video whenever she saw it on TV. “I can’t even begin to explain what happened because I don’t know,” she told Cavicchi. She borrowed her brother’s copy of Born in the USA and listened to it over and over, then she borrowed all the other albums and memorized them. She said it must have been “predestined” that she would become a fan. “One minute I didn’t care who he was and the next he was the most important thing in my life.”8
The stories he collected were familiar to me, as a daughter of a Springsteen household. My mother was born in 1965 in Western New York, grew up on a dairy farm, and met my dad in a high school math class. (She’d first sat at the kitchen table with my grandmother and picked him out of the yearbook, noting his biceps.) For as long as I had known her, she’d been obsessed with Bruce Springsteen, and considered her fandom a cornerstone of her personality and life story. “I can tell you exactly when I became a fan of Bruce Springsteen,” she told me over the phone one night. “I was sadly a late bloomer.” She was nineteen, and she, like much of the country, fell for Bruce with the release of Born in the USA in 1984. The first concert of his that she attended was with my dad at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, New York, about eighty-five miles from our hometown. “He was adorable, I’m not gonna lie,” she said. “He was super exciting to watch onstage because he was having a blast. I fell in love and I just never left him.” She started to say that it was a religious experience but then decided that was corny and ordered me not to include any quotes about it. “But that was it,” she said. “I was done. There wasn’t anybody else who has ever made me feel that way about their music.” Cavicchi would label this a “self-surrender story,” a category he created for the stories he’d been told that involved an easily recallable moment in which “indifference or negativity is radically altered.”9 These stories often read like accounts of religious epiphanies, and some of the fans who were telling them were, like my mother, almost embarrassed by their inability to describe the feeling without sounding extreme—it just seemed to swoop down out of nowhere in the same manner as romantic love or religious conversion. There was a before and an after, turning on a moment of transition from an old point of view, “dominated by ignorance and disenchantment,” to a dramatically different one, “filled with energy and insight.”10
What does it even mean to be a fan? Cavicchi was frustrated in his attempts to find evidence of the word’s evolution, though he noted that many scholars agree on a similar starting point. “The generally accepted origin is ‘fanatic,’ from the Latin fanaticus, meaning a religious and later a political zealot,” he wrote in a 2014 essay. The word “fanatic” was used by American sports journalists in the late 1800s to mock baseball spectators, but the English were also using the term “the fancy” to refer to people who enjoyed spectator sports like boxing and pigeon racing, and it’s unclear which one “fan” may have been abbreviated from, if either. He also pointed out that the practices we associate with fandom—collecting, cheering, following, fixating, celebrating, memorizing—were the habits of many people before anyone would have been called a “fan.” There were “buffs” and “connoisseurs” and “devotees” and “maniacs,” all of whom did certain things that some would count as fan activities. The whole chronology was a mess, he acknowledged: “Do the religious-minded ‘music lovers’ of 1850s urban concert culture or the unruly ‘kranks’ of post‒Civil War baseball count as fans? Probably. But what about the weeping readers of Charlotte Temple in the 1830s?”11 Today, it is even less clear what “fan” really means. The people in charge of entertainment properties or consumer brands consider anybody who pays money for the thing they produce a fan. In everyday speech, we say someone is a “fan” of anything they like, no matter to what degree. Coca-Cola refers to people who buy Coca-Cola as fans of Coca-Cola. During an average bit of small talk, I might refer to myself as a fan of shallots or not a fan of bell peppers.
The word “fan” is now synonymous with consumer loyalty; you could be forgiven for considering it a marketing word. Words like “stan” and, especially, words like “trash”—which started in early web fandom, faded out, and were revived on Tumblr in the mid-2010s, just as the commercialization of fans was reaching a new peak—are aggressively useless for marketing purposes, giving them their charm.12 They signal derangement and depravity and they welcome confusion and disgust. To be One Direction trash is to be the type of fan who is devoted beyond the stereotype of asking Mom to buy a lunch box with Zayn Malik’s face on it, or to put up the extra cash for VIP tickets at some arena sponsored by a car company. Trash is gross. One Direction trash make weird jokes tinged with sex and violence, and though they recognize the fact that they’ve been seduced by a commercial product, they don’t care, nor do they respect its sanctity. They belong to a collective—a landfill of trash, a world of trash, heaping with loyalists to the biggest boy band in history. One Direction ruined their lives.
The One Direction trash openly complain about the demands that the band places on their time or on their wallets. Years into the band’s “hiatus,” every time a solo member of the band announces a tour or a new line of merch, Twitter becomes a chorus of jokes about blowing through rent money, or signing up for a new credit card, or skipping class and work to wait in a digital Ticketmaster queue undisturbed, or writing an elaborate PowerPoint presentation for parents who will need to be persuaded to fund a bus trip to the nearest major city. That being a fan interferes with a person’s ability to be financially responsible or perform some of the more mundane tasks of adult life is part of what makes it fun, but it’s also a source of conflict. Women who indulge in frivolities like One Direction concert tickets are often seen as spoiled teenagers (wasting their parents’ money), or irresponsible adults (refusing to put that cash in a savings account), or inappropriately self-interested parents (who should be spending everything on their children). And the financial imperative of fandom is not just a personal strain; it also leaves the impassioned open to exploitation. It turns a core piece of a person’s identity into something that can be bought and sold. Calling yourself “trash” is a way of accepting all of these external characterizations, as well as pointing out that they don’t matter.
“There’s an inherent contradiction in fandom, and it’s one that everyone lives with,” says Henry Jenkins, a media scholar at the University of Southern California who is known as the father of fandom studies because of his 1992 book Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. “At one level, fans are ideal consumers,” he told me. “They’re deeply invested in the performer and they’ll buy all kinds of merchandise related to that performer. But fans reject the basic relationship that is set up by the industry. They’re always trying to push beyond the basic exchange of money. The entertainment industry is a tool or mechanism for fandom, but it’s not what fandom is.”13 Fans intuitively understand the difference between the official product and their highly personal use of it. They might call themselves One Direction trash to accentuate this distinction outwardly, but individually it’s very obvious. Personally, the moments when I’ve spent money on One Direction do not stand out as important ones—the first One Direction T-shirt I bought at Heinz Field was very ugly, I felt. I’ve since lost it. Who cares? Much more important was a moment at a rooftop party in Brooklyn in 2019, when I was suffering from the typical emotional trauma of being perpetually on Tinder, and was surprised to find out that the host had slipped “Best Song Ever” into the Spotify queue just for me, as well as to discover that I still remembered a bit of the music video choreography I’d memorized in a college dorm room six years before. Would I have started dancing to anything that day otherwise? Probably not!
In his 1987 book Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s, the journalist Dave Marsh described the commercial hysteria around Springsteen’s 1984 to 1985 U.S. stadium tour. Tickets had to be purchased over the phone at the time, so the late summer and early fall of 1984 was a season of phone systems crashing all the way down the East Coast. When tickets went on sale for a stadium show in Chicago, Marsh wrote, the phone companies had to power on the computer systems they usually used “to handle calls to towns hit by tornadoes.”14 Naturally, ticket scalpers were having the time of their lives. The tickets were so valuable, the possible profits so tempting, that local cops were even accused of participating. New Jersey Bell suspended five employees for “wire-jumping,” bypassing busy phone lines to buy their own tickets, and the state assigned undercover police to stop scalpers around the Meadowlands Sports Complex outside New York City. But none of this has anything to do with fandom, really. Marsh also recalls a conversation he had with Springsteen about the marketing for one of his tours, which had enraged him to the point of ripping down his own posters. “Springsteen believed deeply in the inherent worth and dignity of popular music and in his own responsibility to its traditions, which he was convinced had saved him from a life of frustration and fury,” Marsh wrote.
“A businesslike attitude toward that sort of thing is not appropriate,” he remembered Springsteen telling him. “I want our band to deliver something you can’t buy.”15
In the spring of 2019, a Taylor Swift parody news account called @LegitTayUpdates tweeted an explanation to its followers for a recent absence.16 “As most of you know, I haven’t been very active in the past couple of months because I was in prison,” she wrote. But everything was resolved and new Taylor Swift updates would be coming soon. When one of @LegitTayUpdates’ followers asked her how she had wound up in prison, she responded glibly, “I refused to join the IDF lmao.” (Service in the Israel Defense Forces is compulsory for citizens over the age of eighteen.)
The three-tweet story went viral, and @LegitTayUpdates was interviewed anonymously by a slew of publications, including both Vogue and the democratic socialist quarterly Jacobin. To the latter, she joked about how Swift had “scammed” white Republican fans by collecting their money for years and then declaring herself a Democrat. She also corrected the record, saying that many Swift fans are LGBTQ or people of color, despite the media’s fixation on white teenage girls, and that a politically minded Swiftie is not the anomaly that her press cycle was making it out to be. “I think the smartest people I know are Taylor Swift fans, to be honest,” she said. @LegitTayUpdates became one of the most beloved figures of 2019 internet culture, and admirers called her “timeless” and “iconic” and “influential,” as well as “the only person” who did anything good all year. In January 2020, when it seemed as though the United States might start a war against Iran, there were more tweets: Americans might protest by dodging any potential draft, like that one Taylor Swift fan, a hero. @LegitTayUpdates received some backlash from pro-Israel factions of the internet, but took them in stride, announcing, “I never thought I’d see the day [my] main enemy would be Zionists but Tayliberal Swift really did bless me I guess!”17
She seemed to enjoy the attention and to revel in the opportunity to surprise people with what registered as an unlikely combination of identities: superfan of Taylor Swift and objector to occupation. Sometime later, her account disappeared—for unknown reasons—but admirers kept wondering after her. They hoped that Twitter hadn’t “censored” such an indelible figure. (In 2021, another Taylor Swift stan claimed that @LegitTayUpdates had left Israel and gotten tired of Stan Twitter; according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the account was suspended from Twitter sometime between May and July 2019.)
I like this story because it reminds me that all combinations of identity are equally unlikely, and we can only be experts in our own. Some of the stigma of fandom comes not from cruelty or genuine disdain but from that simple fact—almost everyone is too complicated to be quickly understood. Abby Armada, the woman who accidentally bit into a glow stick at a One Direction concert, told me she came to the fandom through fanfiction. Then she started watching a bunch of YouTube videos. Then she went to a few shows. Then an old friend who was living in Puerto Rico went through a bad breakup and they both flew to Miami on a whim, for thirty-six hours, for the last stop of One Direction’s 2014 tour. All of this happened shortly after Abby got married, and so it confused her new husband. “My husband got jealous. Isn’t that crazy? I think because he didn’t get it,” she told me. “We had straight-up fights about it.”18 Looking back at the other fandoms she’d been part of, she could see that it was a pattern. When she was a kid and her mom was really sick, she’d become devoted to Hanson. When she first moved to New York in her midtwenties and didn’t know anyone, she’d gotten really into the Sherlock fandom. “I think I was just coping with being an adult and having this weird change happen,” she said.
After she figured this out, she explained it to her husband. “I told him, ‘I feel like I lost a part of myself, not because I’m married to you, but because I’m going through a life transition. I’m not trying to replace you with Liam Payne or Harry Styles, I’m just trying to cope.’” She’s aware that people find it goofy or even abnormal for a woman her age to be invested in a boy band—a boy band that, I’ll say it again, does not even exist anymore. She’s also aware that some people are jealous of her ability to talk so openly about something she really cares about. “I’m a thirty-three-year-old woman, I just don’t give a fuck anymore,” she told me. “I know there are things I like. I want to talk about them and go have a good time. I’m a millennial and I’m going to die.”
When Cavicchi wrote his book, it was still up for serious debate whether the adoration of a pop star turned a person into an idiot. The cultural anxiety around popular culture at the time—which has relaxed now, even if it hasn’t totally disappeared—was that it was a homogenizing force that turned every participant into a mindless consumer. But in speaking to hundreds of fans, Cavicchi found something different. These people were exploiting the ultra-popular things they loved in order to become more completely themselves. “Springsteen fans’ conscious discussions of self making do not indicate that popular culture is shaping their identity but rather that they are shaping their identity with popular culture,” he wrote. “The importance of fandom for personal identity is not so much about the disorder caused by the mass media as it is about the order found in devotion.”19
Previous generations of women would not be so public about their fandom as Abby or @LegitTayUpdates, or even the pseudonymous powerhouses of One Direction Tumblr. Until recently, a lot of fandom—especially for women who were no longer in their teens—was a stay-at-home secret. For example, on the cover of Janice Radway’s 1984 book about women fans of romance novels, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, a woman with big hair and a red sweater sits curled up alone on a floral couch in front of matching floral drapes, with a pile of children’s toys visible behind her shoulder. She’s reading a novel, which has an illustration on the cover of a man kissing a woman’s neck, but she’s doing so covertly, alone in the middle of the day. Radway’s book was about secrecy, but she was also one of the first scholars to suggest that fandom could be studied without pulling it out of the context of daily domestic life. Daily domestic life was, in fact, what motivated some kinds of fandom, she discovered. The women Radway interviewed articulated their disappointments with the artistic limits of the novels they loved, but they made the case for enjoying them as an indulgence and as a distraction from the sharper disappointments of the real world. They used the books “to diversify the pace and character of their habitual existence,” she wrote.20 In previous studies of the plight of the housewife, women reported feeling lonely and isolated, and described their social roles as ones that precluded the pursuit of self-interest or personal pleasure. Some of the women in Radway’s study were remarkably frank: “I especially like to read when I’m depressed,” one told her.21
These women read romance novels, typically, in near total secrecy—most of them didn’t make public declarations of their fandom, and many of them talked about being careful not to read when their husbands were around. (One woman told Radway that her husband wouldn’t let her read anything after he was ready to go to bed, but she would sometimes take a full day off from housework to read, as a “very special treat.”) Radway was careful to define what her subjects meant when they said reading was an “escape.” They were using the term two different ways, she wrote. “Literally, to describe the act of denying the present, which they believe they accomplish each time they begin to read a book and are drawn into its story,” but then also in a broader, more figurative sense, “to give substance to the somewhat vague but nonetheless intense sense of relief they experience by identifying with a heroine whose life does not resemble their own in certain crucial aspects.”22
Two decades later, the researcher Laura Vroomen profiled Kate Bush fans—a very different cohort of women who often identified as feminists. She interviewed women in their late twenties and early thirties, noting that while there had already been many studies about teenage girl fandom, there was a dearth of research into the role that fandom might play later in a person’s life. What she found was that women who admired Kate Bush for her feminism and her independence “were not always able to translate this into powerful positions in their own lives.” They talked about listening to Bush’s music when boyfriends or husbands weren’t home or were occupied by something else in another room. “Kate Bush is what I’ll put on when I’m alone in the house. And I’ve got some time,” one told her. They talked about resenting the men in their lives for not understanding, but they only rarely mentioned rebelling against the arrangement. “An ex-boyfriend was jealous of how, when I got sad, I wouldn’t indulge in it with him, I would go and drink or listen to Kate and dance around my room until it’s completely gone,” one woman said. “I’d be sort of singing out of tune at the top of my voice, like [the song ‘Cloudbusting’] or whatever, and then walk back in the room and I’d feel great and I could see that he was like numb.”
For decades, scholars had been debating whether popular culture made a person into a rebel or an acquiescent. Vroomen was interested in the way lifelong Kate Bush fandom showed a middle way: neither “spectacular resistance” nor resignation to “being dull and trapped.” While they were self-proclaimed feminists, many of the fans she spoke to took care to differentiate themselves from other women, who were usually young and silly and devoted in the wrong way to the wrong things. They didn’t always call themselves “fans,” even, because of the frivolous connotations they thought the word carried. Still, they copped to allowing the music of one woman to inform their identity over the course of their lives. Adult fandom, Vroomen argued, could not be chalked up to nostalgia or lingering loyalty—it was significant and specific to a new phase of life.23
Today, women still have complicated feelings about making their fandom public. Angela Gibbs, a mother from Alberta, Canada, told me that she avoids talking about her love of One Direction with anybody except her teenage daughter, Olivia. She fell for them while watching TV late one night, maybe three in the morning. The next day, she woke up her daughter—nine years old at the time—and they drove thirty-five minutes to Calgary, the nearest city, to buy a copy of One Direction’s first CD. After listening to it on the drive back, they went on YouTube to watch the videos and figure out which voice was which. The band immediately became a shared passion. At the first concert they flew to Vancouver to see, Olivia was so exhausted from all the excitement that she fell asleep in the middle of the show, her mother remembered. Years later, during the band’s last tour, Angela pretended that there wasn’t spare money to go this time, and they’d have to miss it. “I was so good,” she said and laughed, recalling her acting performance.24 But of course, she’d really managed second-row floor seats and a hotel room in Toronto, and it ended up being one of the best nights of their lives. She doesn’t have any good photos of it because she was shaking too much to focus the camera. “We sat there after the concert, and we actually had to sit there and just be for a moment because it was so overwhelming,” she said. “I can’t believe that’s over. I can’t believe that happened. We hugged and we cried, and we laughed, and we just talked and talked and talked.”
The morning we spoke, years later, Harry Styles had just released the first single from his second solo album. Olivia was still sleeping. “My god, child, wake up!” Angela said in a showily strained voice, then laughed. “I want to play it for her. I can’t wait. I just get so excited about it.” As her daughter gets older, she’s developing new interests and becoming her own person, but One Direction is something Angela and Olivia can still talk about. It ties them back to that time when they were so close. Angela’s friends and coworkers don’t understand any of it. They tease her about being a grown woman who loves a boy band, or they simply roll their eyes when she talks about it. “I am not the kind of person to be consistently hitting myself in the head with a hammer. You learn not to bring it up,” she told me. “It hurts my feelings when my coworkers or friends make fun of me … whatever. So I just don’t talk about it, which is hurtful in and of itself.”
The adult fans of One Direction I met during the research for this book all told me the same thing: they don’t talk about fandom with people who are going to make fun of it, so for the most part, it’s easier to talk about it with other women on the internet. Liz Harvatine, a fan from Los Angeles who’s in her early forties, does this mostly in a Slack server called “1D for Olds.” One day, I called her and she told me how she became a fan of Harry Styles. Someone on the internet had pointed out that a character in the Rainbow Rowell novel Carry On was dressed like Styles, so Harvatine looked him up out of curiosity. “I was feeling quite depressed and for whatever reason I gave myself permission to lay in bed all day,” she said. She started watching videos. “I exhausted all of the solo stuff, so I was like, okay, now I’m going to watch video interviews of One Direction and I have to listen to the songs and I just added more and more until I found myself in the condition I am now, which is just, you know, ridiculous.”25
She was added to the Slack group after another member stumbled across the Harry Styles–themed quilt she’d made for a local quilting contest and posted on Instagram. That moment was a big deal for her because she’d previously heard rumors of the group’s existence but had no idea how to go about joining. It was a little bit magical, she told me, “to be invited to a group that was previously known to me but completely invisible,” and especially “to be in a space where you know everyone is an adult and you can act like an idiot about cute boys and their music.” I knew exactly what she meant because I, too, had read about and heard about the Slack server but couldn’t figure out how to get in until I learned, by chance, that another woman at the company I worked for was already part of it. When I talked to Harvatine, I was sneaking time away from my desk and sitting on a bench outside my Manhattan office. We talked over each other, and spoke in shorthand, though we’d never met. We were grown women, laughing about how a boy band had ruined our lives. “If people are instantly turning up their noses … I know who those people are,” she said. “They don’t get any of this side of me because they don’t deserve it.”
My mom has seen Bruce Springsteen in concert “around ten times,” in Syracuse, Buffalo, Rochester, and New York City. She saw him on Broadway after entering the ticket lottery every day for weeks; she dropped what she was doing and took the eight-hour Amtrak ride down to New York without blinking. She took me and my sisters to see him in Rochester in 2012—the Wrecking Ball tour—right after she finished chemotherapy for breast cancer. “Taking you girls was really exciting for me. That concert had a lot of meaning,” she said. “That was the end of my chemo, that was wanting you to love him like I did.” When all four of us were kids and she was a stay-at-home mom, she still went to see Springsteen every chance she got. “Those years were kind of a blur,” she told me. “But those nights I was able to see him were always special. Rejuvenating, I guess.”
As a kid, I memorized the lyrics to “Thunder Road” to make my mother happy. I knew she loved Bruce Springsteen, but I didn’t really understand why. I even resented it a little bit. I remember one summer afternoon when I was very young, we spent a few hours working in the community garden behind the church, then drove the vegetables to a food pantry in the nearby city. As usual, I’d probably spent the whole time heavy-sighing and stealing sugar snap peas (eating them in one bite, unwashed). In the minivan, a sticky heat and the smell of rotting fruit put a whine behind my eyes that made it hard to see straight. I remember feeling nauseous, bitter, wanting to cry, when she rolled the windows down and turned up “Jersey Girl,” draping her wrist on the crusty rubber coming out of the car door. The song has a line about dropping your “little brat” off at her grandmother’s for the night, and even though I wouldn’t have been able to put it into words, I’m sure I could sense that she was somewhere else when she was listening to it.
When I try to demonstrate how fandom has worked in my life, I always use the same example: Harry Styles has a song that’s kind of about abortion.26 The song is called “Kiwi”—I do not know why—and it’s a song about a woman who chain-smokes “cheap” cigarettes. She is also described, somewhat unfortunately, as “hard liquor mixed with a bit of intellect,” and “such a pretty face on a pretty neck.” The chorus is “I’m having your baby / It’s none of your business.” It’s not clear if Harry Styles is saying this in character as a woman he is dating, which would kind of make sense, or if he’s saying this in character as himself—maybe a joke about how much fanfiction has been written about him in which he is pregnant. The song is archetypal rock ’n’ roll, lots of obtuse references that seem to be to cocaine and weed, and lots of guitar played in a screechy, dramatic fashion. “I’m gonna pay for this!” Styles—now in character as a sort of confusing type of guy—says a few times. Maybe he means he’ll regret some of his actions vis-à-vis drug use; maybe he means he will be subsidizing a routine medical procedure. Who knows?
The song came out in 2017, and in 2018 I accidentally got pregnant. This was sort of an interesting scenario because my boyfriend at the time wasn’t really in love with me the way I was in love with him, and being pregnant by accident even for a few days made me very sad. It’s not that I thought I would like to give birth to his baby at twenty-four years old, or that I wanted to have any babies ever, but what I distinctly didn’t enjoy was the way it made our undeniable lack of a long-term future feel immediately real. Of course I would get an abortion; of course we would be together for a little while longer; and then, of course, the rest of our lives would unfold separately. I found out that I was pregnant on a Thursday and then I had two margaritas; I made an appointment for an abortion the following Tuesday and spent a few days in a funny little haze. I journaled. I drank at a German bar and watched soccer. I attended a dinner party in honor of the anniversary of a Lorde album. I sliced, fried, and ate an entire eggplant. I went to a scary movie by myself and sobbed through the whole thing—I had to hold my hand over my mouth so that the rest of the audience wouldn’t think I was making noises just to be freaky.
And I listened to “Kiwi.” I listened to it while I walked to meet an editor for coffee, minutes after taking a second pregnancy test in the bathroom of a famous diner. I listened to it after I called my boss and told her I was taking the rest of the day off. I listened to it while I sat on the couch and touched my boobs and ate a hamburger. I listened to it in my bedroom while I drank red wine and imagined texting my sisters. I listened to it while I wandered, sweating, up and down Eastern Parkway in cutoff shorts, waiting for my boyfriend to get back from the beach so I could tell him what all had gone on. And I kept listening to “Kiwi.” I listened to it on the train on Tuesday morning, tapping a foot, swaying in oversized jean shorts. “I’m having your baby! It’s none of your business!” On the walk through Soho, with the early-morning sun making my armpits dampen under my sweatshirt. During the wait outside the Planned Parenthood building, across the street from a modest knot of protestors. On repeat. My boyfriend showed up twenty minutes after the time I’d asked him to be there, and he did not ask me how I was paying for anything, but he did bring me an apple and an off-brand Fig Newton. I cried because he was late, and I listened to the song again in each of the four waiting rooms I spent time in that day. I don’t remember if he said he was sorry, but seeing as he sat there for six hours and didn’t eat the apple or the off-brand Fig Newton, I just assumed he cared about me a lot.
Three days later, I went to see Harry Styles at Madison Square Garden with my sister, who was nineteen at the time and in her second year of college. Before the concert, I took her to dinner in Koreatown and told her I’d had an abortion earlier in the week. I tried to say this in a way that conveyed exactly how I felt about it—it’s not a big deal, but I have some complicated feelings, and I’ll talk about them, but not in a weird way, and only if you have a true curiosity. I’m having your baby! It’s none of your business! Then she taught me how to use chopsticks. We had our palms read by a psychic who could not tell that we were sisters. The psychic said I would be going to California. We walked to Madison Square Garden and bought T-shirts with Harry Styles’s face on them. We waited for Harry Styles to sing, and when he did, we jumped up and down like two girls. A woman in the audience had a sign that said I’M WITH CHILD, and Harry Styles read it aloud from the stage. He asked her how pregnant she was, and she screamed back that she wasn’t pregnant. He said, “You’re holding a huge sign that says, ‘I’m with child.’” She screamed something else, and he said, “You’re trying? Well, we’re all trying.” It was hysterical to me. Very funny! I wasn’t with child either! I was a virgin at my first One Direction concert, I reminded my sister—I was a little drunk!—and now I was at a Harry Styles concert as an adult woman who’d just had an abortion, and that was funny, but also, I guessed, statistically likely to be a common experience.
I stomped my foot, and it was like sucking my thumb. I was marking time, I thought. Today, I’m twenty-four and in love and it doesn’t always feel good. Last year, I was lonely. Next year, I’ll be lonely again. These songs will sound right, even if they hit me differently. I felt almost entirely normal and almost exactly like myself. When I spoke to Daniel Cavicchi, it had been more than twenty years since he’d interviewed the Springsteen fans. I asked him what he remembered as the most common thread throughout their accounts of loving Bruce, and he told me: “It wasn’t strange and bizarre, it wasn’t twisting people up. I found that it was actually doing the opposite. It was helping people become less twisted, and to cope.”27 Whenever I hear “Kiwi,” I am back wandering around Brooklyn in an early summer heat, rehearsing my sentences with a straight face, getting ready to say “It’s okay” out loud. I’m back in the arena, taking videos of my sister. These kinds of memories are such small things, important only to me, the same way the specifics of my mother’s Bruce Springsteen fandom—sustained since the early 1980s as a grand gesture of solidarity not with New Jersey’s working-class men but with her teenage self—are important mostly to her.
When my mother talks about listening to “I’m on Fire” as a nineteen-year-old, I think I know what it was like, but it’s hard to imagine your mother as a person. My mother is my mother. My parents met in high school, and they were married well before the age I am now. That night on the phone, I asked her if she thinks about when Bruce Springsteen will die, and she started crying, so I did too. “I honestly can’t imagine a world without him in it,” she said. “It would make me feel even older than I already feel. It would be the end of my youth. Because even if he’s not running around onstage anymore, it’s in my head. When I see him, I’m nineteen.” How else do you get to be nineteen forever? Is there an easier way to do a quick check and remember who you are?
The boyfriend who was late to my abortion eventually broke up with me, obviously. It happened in a dramatic fashion on New Year’s Eve. I’d celebrated the beginning of the year in the freezing rain on a rooftop with a bunch of people he knew and I didn’t—he’d invited me to the party and then not shown up. As the hours had worn on, I’d had plenty of time to see what was coming, and when he finally arrived, fifteen minutes after midnight, he said something absurd to me in the street. Then we took a car back to my apartment and went to sleep, and on New Year’s Day we broke up some more. I cried straight through the following workday, and on into the weekend, and I went through a monthslong period of screaming at my mother every time we spoke on the phone. I’m unwell, I told her. I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t live inside my own head. I felt, because it had been so long since she’d dated anyone other than my dad, and because anyone she thought she loved in early high school probably didn’t even count, that she’d really robbed me of something. She had deliberately refused to have an experience that would make her useful to me now. I’d been a well-behaved teenager, and I’d never rebelled in the home. Never had so much as a sip of alcohol until college, never called my mom a bitch. Now, as an adult, I was drinking five nights a week, and I really felt a white-hot fury. I knew that this was embarrassing, but I couldn’t stop myself. If it weren’t for her, I would know what to do.
But then, drunk one night, in a cab going over the Manhattan Bridge, I asked a friend to play “I’m on Fire” for me on his phone. With one arm out the window of the car, I pictured my mother sitting alone, a teenager on a farm, woozy and terrified by whatever it was that kept her up at night, which I’ll never know about. What kind of pain did she dull with this song? I wondered. Can I do that now? I didn’t think so. But I had to admit that listening to those words—sheets soaking wet, freight train through the head, hey little girl—felt like sucking on a piece of ginger after the longest bus ride of all time. There was “a six-inch valley through the middle of my skull.” That was a classic enough feeling to be captured by a pop song, and classic enough for me and my mother both to feel it, decades apart. For a few moments, I let my head droop onto my own shoulder. Then I sat up and sang quietly along, and of course I knew every word, because that’s what my mother would expect of me.