Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: A Celebration of Taylor Swift's Musical Journey, Cultural Impact, and Reinvention of Pop Music for Swifties by a Swiftie

Throughout Heartbreak, Sheffield seeks to pinpoint who Taylor Swift is—a task he ultimately concedes is impossible given that her public pop persona is fundamentally built on paradox. This argument is summed up by his early remark, “she’s become the star who embodies pop music in all its maddening contradictions and cultural riddles” (2). Some of these paradoxes are embodied in her early song “The Archer,” in which she portrays herself as—in Sheffield’s words “full of secrets everybody already knows” (70). Swift portrays herself as an open book—detailing her personal life endlessly in songs, often in coded messages to be deciphered by her most dedicated fans—but the “real” Swift remains hidden behind the performance. Across any given album—to say nothing of the span of her career—Swift sings from many perspectives that often contradict each other. Sheffield notes that while the speakers of Swift’s songs are often fictional characters, each nonetheless represents a facet of their author’s identity. He does not concern himself with whether these paradoxes reflect who Swift is in her personal life, since the book is much more concerned with Swift’s cultural impact. For the rest of Heartbreak, Sheffield addresses the tiny paradoxes that are sprinkled throughout Swift’s discography and that, together, create the larger paradoxical persona.