Insanely Funny
In 'Your Biggest Fan,' Jeremy Rosenholtz depicts a virtual relationship with, well ... you know who
The word “fan” is a light-hearted, even affectionate, term one applies to a love of particular people, places and practices. But it derives from “fanatic,” one with much darker overtones. The line between them can sometimes be thin. And in Your Biggest Fan, debut novelist Jeremy Rosenholtz deftly explores that border.
The fandom in question is the music of Taylor Swift. The twist—and this tale is twisted—takes the form of a 53-year-old married father of three and high school teacher who narrates his fictive memoir with a combination of extraordinary cultural insight, self-awareness, and pure madness. There’s lots of room for creepiness here, but it’s to Rosenholtz’s credit that he manages to construct this story with laugh-out-loud comic flair.
Your Biggest Fan is an epistolary novel consisting of three letters. The first is an unabashed paean to Tay-Tay centering on the narrator’s obsession with ever-more elaborate playlists like “TS Songs that Feature the Word ‘Tuesday’” or “TS Song that May or May Not be Humorous in and of Themselves, but Make Passing Reference to Laughter and/or Jokes.” (His tendency to pontificate to his tween daughters leads the eldest to call him a “motherfucking mansplainer”; he winces at her profanity but approves of her incipient feminism.) The second letter uses Swift’s Eras Tour as a vehicle for exploring the eras of his own life in a fractured set of reminiscences that glide between his childhood and middle age. (There’s a hilarious scene involving a stoner session with a would-be college girlfriend involving married names of Walker, Texas Ranger, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, and Ace-Ventura, Pet Detective.) And the third letter is set amid a shadowy therapeutic environment in which the narrator seeks an endorsement from the mother-of-all influencers. (“Go ahead and damn us with faint praise if you must,” he writes from a splintered narrative perspective.)
Amid the somewhat frenetic quality of the novel is an affirmation of the postmodern literary project—and a compelling assertion that Swift is actually a quintessential embodiment of its best possibilities. So it is that our narrator draws deft connections between the intertextuality of Goodnight Moon, poststructuralist theory, and Swift songs like “Hey Stephen” and “Our Song” whose cleverness is matched by their emotional power. Your Biggest Fan is chock-full of obvious and subtle literary references that range from the poetry of Emily Dickinson to the fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky, with a comically foolish denouement that evokes Crime and Punishment.
The novel also showcases a savvy grounded intimacy in its depiction of high school life, like this wry description of a favorite student:
You never roll your eyes when I assign a quiz, struggle to stay awake, take overly long bathroom breaks so you can meet up with friends from other classes in the hallway, IM your friends or shop for prom dresses while pretending to take notes, play footsie with the boy or girl sitting at the desk next to you, make inside jokes during class discussions that everyone seems to understand but me, or smile at me politely and respectfully throughout class but go immediately afterwards to the Assistant Head of School—a man who rarely, if ever, smiles at me himself—to lodge a frivolous complaint that nevertheless makes its way into my permanent record.”
The novel lurches to a seriocomic climax that then interrogates its own conventions. In the end, though, what stands out is its playfulness. Your Biggest Fan is a tour de force in depicting the essence of fandom: the quest to make meaning against the existential challenge of everyday life.