Loving Out Loud: A Pop-Star Romance *****
Anne Trowbridge writes one for the Swifties
Why does fan culture exist and what is its role in perpetuating a capitalist society? These are the kinds of questions that keep me excited. I’ve always been weirdly fascinated, obsessed even with the concept of the fangirl. As a writer, I have long wanted to write a story about it. Maybe I will someday. For now, I’m contentedly consuming a story about it—as a reader, that is. Consuming, that’s the operative word. Consumption lies at the heart of fan culture, does it not? The writer Anne Trowbridge puts the hunger of the heart right at the crux of her latest Kindle Vella story. In Facebook Messenger, she told me that Taylor Swift (object) and the Swiftie (consumer) are what inspired this one. I sat down to read the free episodes.
Kindle Vella makes ten episodes freely accessible to readers; after ten, you pay in tokens to keep reading. When Amazon first unveiled its Vella experiment in 2021, free episodes were limited to three and first-time readers then got 200 free tokens to keep reading. Now readers get ten free episodes, but no free tokens. As I reader, I think it’s a better strategy to hook me with more freebie episodes, and for a writer like Trowbridge there is no drawback to the increased giveaway. Anyone who has read one of her stories before knows that her stories are like Doritos—there’s a party in every bite.
Trowbridge always has a theme. Each story in her Cruz to Love trilogy had one: Book 1, about agoraphobic Max, was billed a Hidden Identity romance, where Max was kind of like an internet age Cyrano de Bergerac, minus the crazy nose. Book 2, about Max’s older brother, was “friends to lovers,” and forthcoming Book 3, about the oldest brother, is “enemies to lovers,” and so on. Get the idea? Even her standalone books emphasize tropes, for example, the “second chance” device in The Honeymoon. All of these tales began in Vella, and most are now fully published novels, readable as ebooks and paperbacks, and sold through Amazon. The latest, Loving Out Loud, is still being rolled out one episode at a time in Kindle Vella—Loving Out Loud: A Pop-Star Romance.
Have you ever read a Taylor Swift fanfic? No, me either. Did you even know that such a thing existed? No, me either, until I googled it before starting to write this review. After reading about Trowbridge’s Taylor-inspired heroine, I found myself curious about kindred-spirited stories. That google search just confirmed what I basically already knew—that Taylor mania truly touches everything in this world. There is a whole category at Goodreads for books (61, at current count) that “either mention Taylor Swift positively or were inspired in some way by Taylor Swift.” I think it says as much about Taylor as it says about us. We all want to be young and beautiful, and adored. Most of us don’t get to sing before overflowing audiences in the largest stadiums in the world. Some of us aren’t even brave enough to risk singing in the shower, lest someone walks by the bathroom door and fails or heartlessly neglects to conceal bemusement. Yet don’t we all harbor some version of the pop star fantasy? What’s that about? I firmly believe it’s more than just wanting to sing. If all you want to do is sing, sing. But if your dream is to be a rock star, there must be an underlying desire. We all want attention to some degree, and yet are simultaneously terrified of it. Taylor Swift personifies the contradictory thirst within us. She is both adored and pilloried to extreme degrees. She is harassed, she is pitied. She is loved, she is envied. She is popular, but also…lonely, and singular. She is in front of every eye, without privacy, but also isolated to the extremest extent. Trowbridge writes in the voice of her main character in Loving Out Loud, “The truth is that what I actually am becoming is less trusting, which makes me hold myself back to some extent, even within my closest circle sometimes. Me holding back and everyone around me feeling intimidated has created a separation between me and the rest of the world. There’s a moat around my metaphorical castle. And trust me here, empty castles surrounded by moats are lonely.”
The story arc focuses on both the pop star, Willow Gray, and her fans, the Graysies. I love how Trowbridge presents the Graysies—anonymous behind their Willow-obsessed handles, in stark contrast to the fully exploited prey. Trowbridge conveys, too, a surprising but believable reciprocation. Willow, at least as intrigued by her fans as they are absolutely obsessed with her, plays the sly fox, tempting the hunt with her skillfully sprayed scent.
Questions abound. Can two ambitious, career-obsessed celebrities ever have enough down time and personal space to get to know each other? Can “real” and “Hollywood real” coexist? Can they even meet, or are they stuck in a parallel, never-intersecting trajectory? These two parallel streams are represented respectively by Willow (Hollywood real) and by Ben, who sits squarely in the real-real corner. The first ten episodes alternate, in two’s, between Willow’s POV and Ben’s POV—between the billionaire megastar whose life is hyper-restrained by security and scheduling, and the economically-challenged working man whose life is hyper-restrained by survival imperatives of another stamp. Willow can’t escape the bubble that fame has created. Ben cannot break the constraints that developed from factors beyond his control.
It’s been done before, this trope—the superstar and the plebeian. The film Notting Hill (Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant) springs to mind. Royal fairy tales usually have an element of the prince-and-the-commoner theme. Check The Prince & Me—starring Luke Mably and Julia Stiles. Even in real life, we have the Prince William-Kate Middleton matchup, so intriguing because Kate, unlike William’s mother, was not born into the aristocracy; and then there’s Prince Harry and the actress Meghan Markle, a sort of modern-day, blogosphere/social-media-activist twist on Grace Kelly of Monaco. It’s the trope of two seemingly incompatible realities, of love finding its way across the moat, and succeeding in spite of…alligators? Paparazzi? Whatever might get in the way?
I guess it all boils down to our dreams of somehow breaking our own chains. What holds us back? What keeps us from reaching for the stars?
Interested? I am! I give it five stars.