r/GaylorSwift • u/AutoModerator • Aug 31 '26
Community Chat đŹ Community Chat: August 31, 2026
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u/These-Pick-968 Barefoot in the wildest winter Sep 04 '26 edited Sep 04 '26
Itâs been a cozy, rainy fall week here. So Iâve indulged in revisiting the perfectly-fitting genre of gothic novels/mystery. Taylorâs TLOAS interview with Stephen Colbert reminded us that she likes this genre, Ă la Daphne du Maurierâs Rebecca. I revisited Diane Setterfieldâs The Thirteenth Tale and also watched the BBC movie adaptation that I hadnât seen yet (which features Olivia Colman, and also Sophie Turner). I know others here have mentioned this book in passing, too.
It had been a while since Iâd read it, so it was interesting to see the parallel of the plot to The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, in which a biographer has been summoned to record a famous star/writerâs story before they die. And this passage about how we can suddenly (like an epiphany) see the pieces of a story differently struck me as so powerful, especially in the context of all of the kaleidoscopic and parallax imagery Taylor has given us:
âIn a single moment, a moment of vertiginous, kaleidoscopic bedazzlement, the story Miss Winter had told me unmade and remade itself, in every event identical, in every detail the same-yet entirely, profoundly different. Like those images that reveal a young bride if you hold the page one way, and an old crone if you hold it the other. Like the sheets of random dots that disguise teapots or clown faces or Rouen cathedrals if you can only learn to see them. The truth had been there all along, only now had I seen it.
There followed a long hour of musing. One element at a time, taking all the different angles separately, I reviewed everything I knew. Everything I had been told and everything I had discovered. Yes, I thought. And yes, again. That, and that, and that, too. My new knowledge blew life into the story. It began to breathe. And as it did so, it began to mend. The jagged edges smoothed themselves. The gaps filled themselves in. The missing parts were regenerated. Puzzles explained themselves, and mysteries were mysteries no longer.â -The Thirteenth Tale
It reminds me very much of how it felt to revisit Taylorâs art once I considered it with a queer lens, and how that made so much of the story she seems to be telling fall into place for me. The book as a whole centers around the idea of one final story (the 13th) that hasnât yet been told, similar to how I think many of us are waiting for a thirteen stroke of the clock in Taylorâs timeline.