Dear reader,
Olivia Rodrigo and Guts received six Grammy nominations today, and I wrote an essay about it for Time. It’s my favorite piece of nonfiction that I’ve written this year:
I avoided most of the critical coverage leading up to the September release of Olivia Rodrigo’s sophomore album Guts, in part because I found it preemptively exhausting. I could already predict the shape of the discourse. Would she live up to expectations? Was “Driver’s License” a singular, unrepeatable moment of viral success? Would anything come close to the hilarious and addictively singable “Good 4 U?” When would her affect of exaggerated teenage angst get tiresome? Was she only a one hit wonder? Kill me!
But of course my wariness was always about my own anxieties. I wrote my first novel, The Poppy War, when I was 19; it hit shelves days before I graduated college. I’ve experienced my share of media coverage more interested in my age than my artistry and heard all the skepticism that someone so young could have anything meaningful to say. I’ve tasted the highs of success much earlier than I thought I deserved. And I’ve sat down terrified and bewildered before the accusing blank page of a new manuscript, wondering if all that came before was lightning in a bottle that I’ll never capture again.
The apex of your career has to occur sooner or later—but what if it’s already come and gone? What if I am never as funny, sympathetic, or attractive as I was several years ago? What if next year if I’m not even nominated for an award I won when I was younger? What if the most interesting thing about me is, in fact, my youth? Rodrigo’s “Teenage Dream” (the true thesis statement of this album) articulates the problem with painful precision: “They all say that it gets better/It gets better, but what if I don’t?”
Rodrigo gets it. For anyone in our youth-obsessed world, it’s terrifying to consider that the highest highs of your life may already be behind you. For artists, it’s even more terrifying to consider whether your relationship with your craft has been fundamentally corrupted by exposure and success. What if you can’t replicate the conditions under which you did your best work? What if we only get so much creative inspiration allotted to us our lifetimes, and I’ve used mine up in one go? There’s an old saying that mathematicians do their most groundbreaking research when they’re in their 20s. Athletes have a brief window in which their bodies can withstand the battery it takes to train and compete. Physical beauty, particularly that of women, is understood to “fade” once the first wrinkle appears. But then what on earth do you do with the rest of your life? Twiddle your thumbs? Show up to awards ceremonies and clap for everyone else? Have they already gotten all the best parts of us? Will we spend all the rest of our years wishing we could go back?
You can read the rest over at Time :)
What do you think? What are your favorite creative works that deal with prodigies, aging, and peaking too early? As this essay makes clear, I loved Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You.
Love,
Rebecca
This was such a wonderful read! It made me realize so so so much about myself, in all honesty. I enjoyed slowly analyzing the lines, because they touched me so much. 😭🙏
I hear this Kuang chick is really broad minded