Over the past day, reports have surfaced that Taylor Swift is gearing up to release her debut novel, supposedly once The Eras Tour is over. Swift herself hasn’t publicly mentioned anything about this, so what’s going on here?
Is Taylor Swift Releasing A Novel?
The Sun reports Swift has filed a new trademark for a book titled A Girl Called Girl, which she wrote as a teenager. The publication adds, “The new trademark covers merchandise for the book, as well as audio versions, which makes it seem like Taylor is finally gearing up to release it to the world.”
Worth noting, as outlined by the United States Patent And Trademark Office (USPTO), is that in order to keep a trademark registration active, there are documents that must be filed at certain intervals after the initial registration. The Sun notes Swift first secured a trademark for the book in 2015; As part of keeping a trademark active, there is paperwork that needs to be filed “between the ninth and 10th years after the registration date,” per the USPTO.
Given that it’s now been nine years since 2015, it’s possible that Swift is simply following the proper steps to keep her trademark alive, as opposed to actively moving towards a release for the book.
Previous public mentions of the book refer to it by a slightly different title than mentioned in the new report: A Girl Named Girl
In a 2012 interview with Vogue, she spoke about the book, saying:
“We lived on this basin where all this magical stuff would happen. One time a dolphin swam into our basin. We had this family of otters that would live on our dock at night. We’d turn the light on and you’d see them, you know, hanging out, just being otters. And then one summer, there was a shark that washed up on our dock. I ended up writing a novel that summer because I wouldn’t go in the water. I locked myself in the den and wrote a book. When I was 14 [laughs]. Because of a shark!”
In 2013, she said in an interview:
“All my friends were back in Pennsylvania and so I had nothing to do. I had this epiphany; I’m going to be a novelist and I’m gonna write novels and that’s gonna be my career path. […] I would write different chapters of this book and send them back to my friends and I’d write them into the book under different names but totally describe their personalities. It was a really fun way to spend the summer. […]
You can convey a thought or a story or completely describe a character or a situation through words and the whole process of editing and re-editing and rethinking and imagining. I think that that’s what I loved about writing the novel and that’s what I love about poetry and songwriting.”
Then, in a 2015 interview feature with Swift for GQ, Chuck Klosterman wrote:
“We chat a little about Ryan Adams and a little about books. Swift mentions that she wrote a non-autobiographical novel when she was 14, titled A Girl Named Girl, and that her parents still have it. I ask her what it was about, assuming she will laugh. But her memory of the plot is remarkably detailed. (It’s about a mother who wants a son but instead has a girl.)”
More recently, there was a theory that Swift secretly wrote a novel called Argylle, which was adapted into the 2024 movie of the same name. The film’s director, Matthew Vaughn, shut that rumor down, though, saying, “I’m not a big internet guy, and it was actually my daughter who came up to me — this is the power of celebrity and the internet — and said, ‘You never told me Taylor wrote the book!’ And I’m looking at her going, ‘What are you talking about, Taylor Swift wrote the book? She didn’t write the book!’ And I was laughing because I was like, ‘It’s not true! She didn’t write the book!’ But my daughter was convinced of it.”