Sunday journalling prompt

On teenage fandom and its long tail

Hello, 

After writing Friday’s newsletter - about my relationship to my teenage literary heroine, Sylvia Plath - I got thinking about these formative relationships we have with cultural figures. They are so very intense, aren’t they, these devotions that overtake us while we’re still trying to imagine who we are?

I went to school with a girl who took these attachments to an extreme. She was a true believer, a supreme fan who graduated through standing outside stage doors to catch a glimpse of Madonna, to seeking contact with the famous women she idolised. There was a time when she was in correspondence with Tori Amos, and she also befriended Kate Bush’s father in the hope of meeting his daughter one day. I sometimes felt that her fandom was an end in itself, the act of adoration and pursuit compelling her forward more than the stars themselves. Like all of us, she was trying to figure out who she might become, and this was her way to explore it. In the absence of a guidebook, she was looking for patterns to live by.