Heartbreak Is the National Anthem – A Swiftian Labyrinth Through Rob Sheffield’s Mind

I came to this book like a man wandering into an alien temple, armed with nothing but a rusty machete of heavy metal bias and the flimsy flashlight of knowledge gleaned from my three young nieces. Taylor Swift: the name conjures stadiums packed with unhinged devotion, capitalist machinations that would make Wall Street blush, and a seemingly bottomless catalog of hits that I have somehow managed to avoid despite being surrounded by pop culture my entire life. But Rob Sheffield, now that’s a name I trust. A writer with a scalpel-sharp wit and the ability to turn a three-minute pop song into the stuff of literary legend. Could he pull off a book about Swift that would illuminate this incomprehensible, billion-dollar cultural tsunami for a guy who usually writes about Norwegian black metal bands that sound like they were recorded inside a wind tunnel filled with wolves?

The answer is: sort of.

Heartbreak Is the National Anthem is not so much a biography of Swift as it is a fever dream of Sheffield’s experiences with her music and career. He zigzags through her discography, her stadium tours, her feuds, and her astonishing ability to turn the world’s biggest pop machine into a deeply personal confessional. But here’s the thing: Sheffield is at his best when he’s writing about what music means to people—how it embeds itself into memory, how it stitches together the timelines of our lives. And when he leans into this, when he writes about how a Taylor Swift song can gut-punch you in an unexpected moment of grief or joy, the book sings. It’s Sheffield in his purest form.

But the rest? A swirling, chaotic attempt to balance fandom, criticism, and breathless adoration that doesn’t quite land. Sheffield tries to write as a Swiftie, mimicking the vernacular of stan culture, but instead of pulling me in, it felt forced, like a veteran rock critic slapping on a sequined jacket and trying to blend into the Swiftie pit. The deeper, analytical work—Swift’s impact on pop music, the industry, or the uncomfortable realities of her ruthless business empire—barely gets touched. Her increasingly insatiable drive for money, her ticket-pricing chaos, the endless merch churn? Mentioned in passing, shrugged off as part of the game. For an artist of Swift’s magnitude, that feels like a glaring omission.

The best version of this book would have been Sheffield simply embracing what he does best: telling his Taylor Swift story, from the perspective of a pop scholar, an outsider looking in, an awestruck observer rather than a forced participant. As it stands, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem is a lively, deeply affectionate, but frustratingly surface-level tribute. It’ll satisfy Swifties looking for a warm embrace, but for those of us trying to truly understand Swift’s cultural dominance, the search continues.