My Winter of Harry Styles
“Why am I obsessed with a pop star?” — and why that’s the wrong question
What am I now?
It is 2:42 AM and the questions I am asking myself are: Does he ever look at these fan accounts? Does he recognize himself? Is it lonely being adored? Would he be disappointed to learn I’m scrolling? Would I be disappointed to learn he’s sleeping, like so many sensible humans? Am I part of the problem? Is there a problem?
I decide to put my phone down at 2:45 AM. When that minute goes by un-noted, I tell myself 3:00 AM, then 3:20 AM. Why can’t I stop? Why does this feel urgent? Why am I wasting my hours; why do I care; what am I now?
In the morning, my roommate Grace sits barefoot in the living room, reading a book and listening to the last stutters of the coffee maker.
“What’s wrong with me?” I ask her, collapsing onto the couch. I’ve stayed up nearly the entire night, my search results devolving from reputable music reviews to amateur fan compilations and low-res, lowbrow conspiracy accounts. Grace is a therapist and knows my questions are rarely rhetorical. Over the previous few weeks, these morning debriefs have become pattern enough that I don’t need to tell her how my night has gone.
“I’ve been there,” she smiles, putting down her book. “It’s been years, but I’ve been there. I really feel your pain.” I shake my head, half amused, half annoyed at the absurdity of the circumstances I’ve found myself in.
“Have you seen the one where the interviewer asks him if he’s ever been in love and he says no and then changes his mind and says, ‘my mummy’?” I ask, and she nods.
“Have you seen the one where he’s holding all the children?” I ask, and she indulges me — we sit close on the couch and spend three and a half minutes watching photos flash by under a tacky stock track meant to trigger emotion. It works. By the end, Grace has her hand over her heart and I am once again questioning my sanity.
“It’s all I think about,” I tell her as I pour us each a mug of coffee. “Literally, all I think about. I’m a grown woman with an interesting life. What’s wrong with me?”
I know this thing in me — the all-consuming, insomnia-inducing need to excavate, to aggregate, to understand — extends further back than that.
Grace wonders whether this new obsession might be a reaction against a recent love interest who was dismissive of pop culture and for whom I muted that side of myself for many years. It’s a sensible explanation, and I’d like to have somewhere to point other than my own mind, but I know this thing in me — the all-consuming, insomnia-inducing need to excavate, to aggregate, to understand — extends further back than that.
I’ve suffered this type of fandom only once in my thirty years. It started before I had access to search engines or social media, before my family even owned a computer. Instead, skinny-limbed and curious, I passed afternoons studying Beatles albums pulled from the back of my dad’s closet.
I learned to read while staring at lyrics printed in tiny columns on twin LPs. On the red album — its words simpler to sound out: hand, help, beep — the boys in the band are young, giddy, John leaning over the balcony with an eager grin. Their faces are shaved smooth. On the blue album, the boys are in the same place but their hair has grown long, their smiles are subdued. John’s hands are placed one atop the other, mimicking his previous pose, but beneath his beard and round wire glasses, his expression is serious.
Those sunny-eyed boys were the only pop stars I cared about — the only pop stars I’d ever care about, I thought.
As a pre-teen, while my peers were taping torn out magazine posters of ‘N Sync and O-Town into their lockers, I was retreating to a room wallpapered with years of collected calendar pages, the same photos I’d been staring at since I was five-years-old. Those sunny-eyed boys were the only pop stars I cared about — the only pop stars I’d ever care about, I thought. From every wall they kept me company, wrestling each other in a pool or brandishing boater hats in silly striped costumes or crowding out of a sunroof, arms thrown over each other’s shoulders.
When I realized, and gradually came to accept, that I would never be a young adult at the same time as the Beatles, it was a small death.
Aside from an enduring, albeit ebbing, fascination with the Fab Four, I’ve never cared much about celebrity. I grew up fairly sheltered from pop culture, and as an adult with a career in film production have since worked in relatively close proximity to the fabulous and famous. I understand that they’re just people. If anything it seems like a drag, living so publicly. It’s hard enough to sleep in the mirrored halls of my insecurities, without witness. The thought of a camera waiting to catch me bleary-eyed in my blessed normalcy is unnerving. Who cares? I used to think, eyeing salacious magazine headlines in the grocery line. Why can’t we just leave these poor people alone?
But halfway through 2019, during the long, lazy summer months, something switched on in me. While attempting to distract myself from a break-up, I became briefly, inexplicably fixated on the Jonas Brothers. I’d never thought about the group before, couldn’t name all three of the brothers or confidently assert that there were three. And then, all of a sudden, I was spending every spare moment reading and watching and listening to anything I could find, shirking social obligations and taking long breaks at work to further my research until I had slow-clicked down the digital sidewalk outside every house the brothers had ever lived in.
As with the Beatles, it was not a crush, per se. I did not want to date the members of the band. I just wanted to understand.
One day during this phase, Grace glanced over my shoulder at the impossible number of tabs I had open on my computer in my pursuit.
“Just wait until you learn about Harry Styles,” she said.
“Which one is he?” I asked, and she shook her head.
“Oh god. You’re going to lose your mind.”
After Harry Styles’ Fine Line album was released in mid-December 2019, I pulled up the seventh season of The X-Factor, aired in 2010, and spent hours watching the bootlegged footage. In it, Harry and four others are unexpectedly rescued from a large pool of eliminated solo singers and shoved together into a boy band that would become the global sensation One Direction. Prior to that viewing, I couldn’t name any of their songs.
“I’m sixteen, I’m from Holmes Chapel in Cheshire,” says a curly haired Harry in a lilting accent before his audition. “It’s quite picturesque,” he adds, taking his time, a flourish of faux sophistication. He’s wearing a thin green scarf, the same color as his eyes, draped casually over a grey cardigan. He does not seem nervous. On the contrary, he seems amused, as though he is in on some joke, if only with himself, flashing cartoonishly wide eyes at the camera when his mother kisses him good luck.
Young Harry concludes his twenty-eight second performance with a playful bow and, sitting in my bed, I recognized his smirk. It was the same one I’d already seen in videos of his solo career, the self-effacing look he still lets slip when he’s aware of putting on a good show, an off-stage shyness glinting through his devil-may-care stage presence.
I typed “Holmes Chapel” into my search bar. If I was going to succumb to the gravity of this rabbit hole, and I could tell that I was, I might as well start at the beginning. I scrolled through many pages of image results, then clicked the map and zoomed out to see that his hometown is closer to Liverpool than to London. Harry never went to London before moving there, I learned, a few minutes into a more recent interview in another tab.
“London was where the rich kids went shopping on the weekend,” he explains, sitting with a view of a Malibu sun setting over the ocean. It’s the least revealing part of the conversation. Still, I re-watched it multiple times, pausing to study the tattoos on his arms. He gesticulates with his hands. His nails are painted pink and green and he has a ring on nearly every finger.
I feel satisfied with this observation, but I also know that my interest is not — has never really been — about the music.
At two in the morning, I pulled up an article about the new album, Harry’s second since One Direction went on hiatus in 2016. I had six reviews queued in my browser, knowing I wouldn’t sleep until I’d read them all. I have no musical expertise whatsoever, but I like Fine Line. It is honest, in turn mournful and upbeat, easy to listen to on repeat. Its eighth track reminds me of a Revolver-era Beatles song. I feel satisfied with this observation, but I also know that my interest is not — has never really been — about the music.
The article I’d begun reading is more of a profile, well written and thorough, by a journalist who has known Harry for some time. Halfway through, he speculates that track five may be referencing an ex-girlfriend, Kendall. I rolled my eyes for no one and scanned quickly through the rest of the text, which had lost all credibility despite its firsthand account; by that hour of the night, even I knew track five is not about Kendall.
Girl almighty
The first theory I developed to explain away this improbable preoccupation was that it wasn’t about Harry Styles at all. Recalling my childhood bedroom, my theory was that I was interested in the construct of a boy band — the fact that the members are, when they start out, only boys.
I was trying to understand what we do to the people we choose as our gods, and how one copes with that kind of pressure and pervasive public scrutiny.
I was interested in the surreality of fame and how suddenly it submerges, and the friendships that form and fracture inside that isolation, and the quick crumble of innocence, and the shadow of resentment that comes periodically to dim the boys’ eyes. I was trying to understand what we do to the people we choose as our gods, and how one copes with that kind of pressure and pervasive public scrutiny. At least that’s what I told myself. This inquiry seemed intellectual enough, and in line with my prior obsession.
In 2014, while One Direction was preparing to tour the sold-out stadiums of the world, I was passing a lonely winter standing outside of John Lennon’s Greenwich Village apartment, gazing into the windows of its unremarkable off-white exterior. He had purchased the apartment with Yoko Ono the year after the band’s break-up, and though they only lived in it briefly, their quiet existence on Bank Street enchanted me. The snow disguised the street so that, in the right light, it seemed unchanged, as though John might walk out at any moment, tightening his scarf and fumbling his keys.
As luck would have it, I’d been placed on a project at work that was focused on the Beatles. My job was to learn everything there was to learn, and I did, or already knew it. It came back with barely any dust — each boy’s backstory, and how the band had come together, and who had written every song and why, and the various influences of each era, and the many catalysts for their eventual separation.
As a girl growing up in the ’90s on an island in the Pacific Northwest, the concepts that contained the Beatles — 1960s! England! — were abstract and foreign. The idea that the larger-than-life idols of my youth had lived real lives in real apartments on real city blocks, so real that I could stroll right up to them, required a reorganization of space and time that I was still sorting out. Bank Street was near enough to my office that visiting John’s apartment became a midday routine, a pilgrimage, almost a compulsion. As I walked up Hudson Street, I’d listen to John’s albums from those years, trying to feel what he might have felt on those same sidewalks, trying to internalize the brilliance, the brokenness.
For countless obvious reasons, One Direction is not the Beatles, starting with the fact that the members and various masterminds of One Direction were born into a world with the Beatles, and the members of the Beatles were not. But one difference between the original boy band and its twenty-first century descendant is the sheer quantity of access.
In the four decades between the break-up of the Beatles and the televised cobbling together of One Direction, cameras became ubiquitous. Content capture is now nonstop and never-ending, more often than not in the hands of the layperson. Every stranger can morph in a moment into paparazzi, and the tabloids, easy enough to resist and even roll eyes at on the rack, have shifted into the shadows of social media — accessible, unmonitored, and, importantly, effortless to consume with at least the illusion of invisibility.
I discovered these images while trying to understand why so many people care, fully aware that beneath the guise of my neutral intrigue and harmless inquiry, I too had come to care; I was doing the same thing.
On many nights during those first months of 2020, I pulled out my phone and with barely any effort could see snippets of what Harry had done that day, despite how private he is. Here he is nursing a cold in an airport. There he is flashing a peace sign with a fan. Here he is at the boxing gym, and look, he’s grown a beard. I discovered these images while trying to understand why so many people care, fully aware that beneath the guise of my neutral intrigue and harmless inquiry, I too had come to care; I was doing the same thing.
In a sense, the blank canvas of celebrity onto which we have so long projected our fantasies has begun to fill, the malleability of our idols becoming more rigid with the increased revelation of their realities. But there is also now almost endless content from which to spin and validate any story our sodden hearts might be seeking. So long as you know what you’re looking for in One Direction, you can find it, as evidenced by the extent of the “shipping” of the band members.
The most widespread conspiracy — a la “Paul is dead” but augmented by the infinite abyss of the internet — posits that Harry and another member, Louis, were secretly in love, their relationship suppressed by money-hungry management. But if you want to believe that Niall and Harry were in love, you can find that footage. If you want to believe that Zayn and Harry were in love, you can find that footage. Zayn and Louis? Liam and Niall? Check. There are photos and videos forever and from every angle, easy to take out of context or manipulate before re-posting for so many nameless fans. Accounts exist to prop up and prove every argument; you can find anything you need.
As I analyzed these accounts into the night, social media handles growing increasingly strange and specific as my algorithm culled out all pre-existing interests, a new theory developed. My obsession was not, I decided, about boy bands or about Harry Styles. What I really wanted was to understand the mysterious moderators behind these fan accounts, so much so that one night I crafted a survey to inquire about who they are, and what age, and how these accounts effect their lives, and what motivates them, and what it is like to truly be inside of this community.
I stopped myself short of actually messaging it to anyone, but I never stopped wondering about the exuberance of these fans, sensing that for them, too, it wasn’t just about the talent or charisma or changing hairstyles of the boys. And before long, judgment regarding what seemed to be an unproductive, delusional devotion began to feel almost like jealousy. It felt like these fans — mostly girls, I presumed — had something I didn’t have. So I re-calibrated.
Perhaps, in the wake of my thirtieth birthday, what I was really trying to do in the middle of the night was reclaim the unapologetic enthusiasm of youth.
If I was not, in fact, wandering for hours down the dim corridors of the internet for the sole purpose of scrutinizing the other people I encountered there, what was I doing? Perhaps, I speculated, my interest was connected to my decades-earlier interest in Beatlemania, when I would study taped footage of all those screaming girls who I never was but silently longed to be. Perhaps I was attempting, through Harry Styles’ young fanbase, to see what they saw so that I could be what they were, bursting open with unadulterated emotion. Perhaps, in the wake of my thirtieth birthday, what I was really trying to do in the middle of the night was reclaim the unapologetic enthusiasm of youth.
The One Direction fandom, I learned, is awash in coded language, adept at identifying clues in every lyric or social post or sidelong glance, and real or fabricated, I understood the appeal. What do any of us want more than to be in on something? If I’m deciphering all of this content correctly, what it’s trying to tell me is that I too can be exactly who I am, empowered by Harry’s vague but affecting endorsements of tolerance and the band’s winking approval — at least that’s what it felt like, at three in the morning.
Unwaveringly, Harry’s message has been the same: treat people with kindness. At some point, he abbreviated the directive to TPWK — another cipher. When the acronym crops up online, most will scroll on by. But if you know, you know. And in those moments, it feels like Harry is speaking directly to you. I wanted to be in on it, too.
Even so, I still mostly thought of myself as an interloper, a mere observer conducting research, until inevitably my moonlit addiction seeped into my actual life. Grace got me Harry Styles-themed lip gloss for Christmas, and it was mostly, but only mostly, a joke. Friends started asking about One Direction, and I would be multiple minutes into a deluge of newly discovered details before I grew self conscious, wondering why they’d asked, their eyes half-focused or gently mocking. Was this now the only way to engage me?
There is a common quip in the fan community about how outside friends, non-Directioners, are alienated by the super-fan mentality. The memes feature a candid photo framed to include two of the boys. The first boy is animated in a scream or mid-belt of a note above a caption that reads, me talking about 1D, while beside him the second boy stares stoically ahead above a caption that reads, my friends.
Alas, the fandom I had tried to infiltrate, in a casual and controlled way, had instead infiltrated me.
For a while, if anyone shrugged indifferently over Harry’s music, I felt my blood rush. If anyone challenged an opinion, I became defensive, dismissive. Why? Because I was preparing to protect him? Because I was realizing how entirely unoriginal my obsession was, an obsession that at first felt, in the context of my adult life, almost idiosyncratic? Because I knew I’d soon need to acknowledge my own delusions? Alas, the fandom I had tried to infiltrate, in a casual and controlled way, had instead infiltrated me.
Sign of the times
Why am I obsessed with Harry Styles? The question only amplified in the silence of winter nights. In the first weeks of the year, a new theory presented itself, so obvious and exonerating that I was flooded with relief.
This obsession wasn’t specific. It had nothing to do with anything; I would have fallen down any rabbit hole that opened for me. I was simply trying to escape the darkness of the news. And what could be more innocuous than a sweet boy band crooning catchy love songs and tousling each other’s hair? What time was simpler than the era preceding 2016, that fateful year that started with One Direction’s indefinite hiatus and ended with a reality television star as the president elect?
During the worst of my obsession, Australia was in flames. My friend in Iraq was suddenly living in a potential war zone. The president was maybe but probably not being impeached and democracy was maybe but probably not still our governing force. Though we weren’t paying attention yet, across the world a novel coronavirus had begun to spread. Everything felt ominous, and rightfully so. I spent days at my desk closing my eyes against the heat of tears. But in bed at night it felt alright again, as long as I kept scrolling.
[His music] acknowledges the underlying existential dread that we’re collectively contending with, while celebrating the reasons we should carry on anyway.
The first single that Harry released as a solo artist is a sweeping piano ballad that opens with the lyrics, “just stop your crying, it’s a sign of the times.” One of the reasons his music resonates is because it acknowledges the underlying existential dread that we’re collectively contending with, while celebrating the reasons we should carry on anyway. In “Treat People With Kindness,” the upbeat penultimate track on Fine Line, Harry and a chorus of happy back-up voices sing, with saccharine sincerity, about treating people kindly. So it’s somewhat jarring when midway through the song the tempo drops, the key changes, and Harry is suddenly somber.
“It’s just another day,” he sings, “and if our friends all pass away, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” Then he screams, and before anyone can analyze the nature of the scream, the music picks up again, and everyone is dancing.
In February 2014, photos leaked of Harry Styles on his twentieth birthday, sitting with Kendall in a car in the rain looking unenthused about the media intrusion. A week later, I boarded a cold bus to D.C. to attend an anniversary concert commemorating the Beatles’ first North American show at the Washington Coliseum.
I didn’t tell my boss or many friends that I was going. It felt a little embarrassing, but also private; this was between the boys and me. When I arrived I stood in the back, shivering in the wintry air, trying to trick my mind into the time travel of the evening as a cover band slogged through the same set list that was played fifty years earlier. But it wasn’t just the band that was missing. It was the fans. Middle- and old-aged attendees milled about un-passionately, chatting in closed circles and checking their phones while waiting in the cocoa line.
That night, my best attempt to recreate the piece of history I’d missed, I didn’t feel anything.
I remembered the feeling I used to get as a child — an ache of nostalgia, to the point of pain, for the Beatlemania years I would never get to live. For some reason, I had thought there would be a residual electric current pulsing through that concert, the fantasies of the former fangirls revived, the room once again suffused with breathless anticipation and teary-eyed release. But that night, my best attempt to recreate the piece of history I’d missed, I didn’t feel anything.
It never occurred to me to ask whether there might be a modern-day equivalent; if I had ever heard of One Direction, I’d quickly dismissed them. I said my silent goodbyes to the phantoms of the Fab Four and didn’t stay until the end.
I wasn’t, and never will be, a teenage girl in the heyday of One Direction. But I recognized their screams in the concert footage. I understood, intuitively, that single tear sliding down a cheek during a slow song.
And just as it always has, the younger generation is currently playing pop culture catch-up, realizing with that painful pang of nostalgia and regret that they came of age just a little too late for One Direction. I’ve often witnessed their lamentations in the middle of the night. They can hope for a reunion, and relive concerts through screens, but they can’t go back. Like them, I’m mildly devastated to have missed it.
Can’t touch what I see
The young Beatles are eternally endearing, all ribbing and irreverence, and it’s easy to sense the same anarchic energy in One Direction — undoubtedly part of the potion that helped gob-smack every girl in the world when comparable bands found no such fandom. But I’m also drawn to the era of divulging creative pursuits and disintegration, the gradual revelation of the individuals behind such a well-marketed mask of cohesion. I like the songs that shift with stylistic dissonance. I listen again and again to the tense tracks, the tragic tracks, when the humanity cracks through. The boys in the band are heartbroken, too. They’re insecure. They’re struggling to be heard. Perhaps they’re even awake at odd hours, growing numb on the narcotic of the screen.
We want our stars to be exceptional, the best versions of us — but still flawed, still relatable.
Even lacking an active interest in celebrity, I grew up aware of the feature in Us Weekly that claims, “Stars — they’re just like us!” Recently, I’ve learned that the creation of this feature in 2002 initiated a new paparazzi incentive, which in turn prompted celebrities to smear on lipstick before taking out the trash, which in turn prompted the faux-quotidian photos that now saturate our media. We want our stars to be exceptional, the best versions of us — but still flawed, still relatable. I’m not the only one particularly drawn to the photos of Harry performing outside on a cloudy day in an oversized brown sweater, indulging that universal impulse: hands pulled all the way inside his sweater sleeves. I’m not the only one who responds to his long apparent and lyrically confessed proclivity towards jealousy with confused coos of adoration.
During my team’s office debriefs after working with a celebrity, the biggest compliment we tend to give is: they were normal. And yet it never ceases to be strange that we walk through the same world as these people we’ve so effectively isolated on proverbial pedestals. Maybe what I was searching for, I decided, was evidence that, despite the towering height of his fame, Harry was actually not all that different from me.
One evening, I found myself watching a short documentary about the making of Harry Styles’ first solo album. In it, Harry and five other men hold up drinks, toasting the warm Jamaican night. They are there to disappear into anonymity while writing songs. They are feeling their way through chord progressions in the early hours of morning. They are having a damn good time. The scene cuts to a shot taken from a low, wooden bridge.
“Where’d you go, man?” the person behind the camera asks into the darkness as a dimly lit Harry strolls slowly into focus, wearing pants and a floral, button-down shirt.
“Huh?” he responds, rubbing his face.
“Where did you go?”
“It’s hard to tell,” he says, and vaults himself over the side of the bridge. A splash is heard and the voice behind the camera yells “no!” before the film cuts to b-roll of a stripped down Harry enjoying a cinematic, sun-lit swim through the crystalline ocean.
During the last months of 2010, as the One Direction boys were crowding onto the stairwell at the X-Factor house to record video diaries for their new fans, I started dating a guitar player at my university outside of Chicago. He had recently formed a band with a childhood friend, and they quickly progressed from shows in beer-puddled basements to gigs at trendy venues in the city. The lead singer wore his hair in a bun and adopted a stage name. Two others were identical twins from the South, quick-witted and prodigious with wordplay. The drummer eventually moved on to backing a quirky blue-haired teen named Billie. To be in the presence of the band was to witness an explosive force of creative collaboration. Never before or since have I tried so hard to be so hot and so cool, until I felt myself flatten to two dimensions, stretching thin between those ever-retreating traits.
“I want your bandmates to think I’m cool,” I told my boyfriend early on.
“Just walk in with some beer and toss it down on the table,” he said, so that’s what I did. I wore his faded crimson sweatshirt, misted in cologne, offsetting the nonchalance with a red lip and a coy flicker in my eye. I learned to watch football and to talk trash, but in a cool way. I sat in on rehearsal, clinking spoons in the corner of a smoky stairwell, trying to seem interested, then bored, then amused, while the band was immersed in song on the landing.
But that was their realm, not mine. I acted as a pretty prop of my own creation. Occasionally I was welcomed in as an observer, but that space belonged to the boys.
I just wanted to be one of them — investing in a shared dream, making something together in the middle of the night, feeling invincible enough to topple off a bridge in the dark in all of my clothing.
My favorite song from my college boyfriend’s band’s first album is written from the perspective of a talented but word-stuck singer who asks for his lover’s hand in marriage before realizing he actually just wanted her around for lyrical inspiration. The song is not about me, but I once liked to imagine that it was.
“Baby you’re crazy, I’ll be on my way,” one of the twins sings to a crescendo of instrumentals, “but hey — at least you were my muse.”
It’s clear to me now that, momentously more than wanting to beguile anyone as I watched those boys practice and perform, I just wanted to be one of them — investing in a shared dream, making something together in the middle of the night, feeling invincible enough to topple off a bridge in the dark in all of my clothing.
So again, my theory flipped. I didn’t want Harry Styles to be me. I wanted to be Harry Styles, confidently occupying a space I have long been too insecure or too timid to claim, relegating myself instead to the role of muse. I wanted to be Harry, even while feeling the gravity of the disclosure that follows the serenity of his swimming scene.
“I really enjoy being private more,” he says as a camera follows him into a bedroom where he sits at a typewriter and begins to pluck at the keys. From experience, I knew the neat lyrics that he’s supposedly typing are likely a prop, but maybe that’s why it affected me so viscerally. As long as there’s a camera rolling, it doesn’t matter how far into the Caribbean you’ve run.
Part of my probe, then, had to do with the contradiction of this moment — the perpetual, seemingly private access coupled with complete inaccessibility. On some social sites, there is a real illusion that any random fan can engage with the celebrity of their choosing and the latter will see it, might even respond. Our technology brings us so close — and yet. How can we have all of this content, but no access? If we consume enough of it, with enough dedication, seeking out and solving all the puzzles, understanding better than any other person understands, doesn’t a door open?
Sounds just like a song
When I discovered in mid-January that I’d already seen nearly every meme I was scrolling past, I shifted focus. I deleted my social apps and made myself instead into a student, as I had with the Beatles — and as with my pilgrimages to Bank Street, the effort felt mostly like enacting a kind of empathy, even while recognizing that to lean into obsession is always to tempt the darkness.
The effort felt mostly like enacting a kind of empathy, even while recognizing that to lean into obsession is always to tempt the darkness.
On long evening walks, I listened to Harry’s albums until I knew them in a way that felt intimate and personal, then I listened to songs thought to be written about him, then I listened to the musicians he admires, trying to stir up in myself the same poignant inspiration he feels in, say, Joni Mitchell. And what does the Wings song “Arrow Through Me” do to him that he listened to it every day for a month? Is it the pain of the lyrics, or the funky bass line, or something else? As I walked in circles in the dark, each track felt like a development in some essential dialogue.
Sometimes I listened through One Direction albums start to finish, trying to parse voices and match songwriting styles to the different members. When the chorus hit in “Best Song Ever,” or the beat dropped in “Steal My Girl” (objectifying lyrics notwithstanding), or Harry held that oscillating high note in “Drag Me Down,” it could make my breath catch with giddiness, striding down the sidewalk as though I had a huge, hilarious secret — feeling, for the duration of those songs, like a teenager again, swirling with potential. I sometimes noticed myself acting overly subtle as I navigated to favorite tracks, but mostly having that music blaring in my ears felt like a super power, one I shared with the other midnight Directioners, whoever they were and despite our differences.
Grace was never fanatical, but she was an actual fan — of Harry, at least — during the One Direction years. She ensured my discovery of the band’s best moments and in return I filled our texting thread with every last Harry Styles smile to beam out during his post-album publicity flare-up. We were sitting again in the living room one morning when she looked up from her phone.
“I’d really like to read a parenting book written by Anne Styles,” she said.
“Anne Twist,” I corrected her, because that’s who I am now, “and, me too.”
Here was yet another theory I hadn’t previously considered. Perhaps my study of Harry has in part been an attempt to glean wisdom about how he became who he is, not during and since One Direction, but prior to it — how his mother raised a man who at every turn might have succumbed to the sweet poison of excess but instead traverses the world in a string of pearls championing kindness — so that I might someday emulate the parenting style when I myself am a mother.
I was beginning to suspect, as is often the case when a simple inquiry is disproportionately difficult to answer, that I had all along been asking the wrong question.
But by late January, I was running out of excuses and the desire to conjure them. The obsession had started to subside, and I was beginning to suspect, as is often the case when a simple inquiry is disproportionately difficult to answer, that I had all along been asking the wrong question.
Just let me adore you
Let me be clear: when I wrote this, I’d been a fan of Harry Styles for a grand total of two and a half months, and of One Direction for six weeks. I had to look up the word “stan,” and was surprised to learn there are comparably devoted groups supporting a long list of musicians, occasionally becoming fervent enough to bring tar and feathers to a petty feud. I’ve merely glanced the surface of this fandom, and I know little about the lives of the youth that created it, except that their experiences were so nearly my own.
As young women worldwide fawned over One Direction, I was only a year or two or ten removed, purchasing stiff suits and practicing the script of adulthood. But what I’ve realized is that the former is in no way less serious, or less important, than the latter.
I came to recognize that this denial has, despite my interest and envy, been an attempt to distance myself from the fainting fangirls, the fan-fiction writers, the conspiracy theorists, even as I lurk among them.
At some point, I had to ask myself why I am trying so hard to pretend my interest is strictly anthropologic, why I am speaking in the past tense while attempting to convince an anonymous reader that I have not occasionally lingered longer over the shirtless Rolling Stone cover where Harry looks like he may bump into me if I lean in just a little. Indeed, it would be a lie to say I’d dislike being bumped into by Harry Styles. And reluctantly but without question I came to recognize that this denial has, despite my interest and envy, been an attempt to distance myself from the fainting fangirls, the fan-fiction writers, the conspiracy theorists, even as I lurk among them.
This essay began as a joke, a short, throwaway anecdote about a silly fixation. It took me many weeks to realize that the relevant question is not, “Why am I obsessed with Harry Styles?” but rather, “Why is that a joke?” Is it actually true that I never cared about pop culture, or did I just care more about being perceived as serious and mature? How did I come to believe that pop stars, specifically pop stars focused towards female fanbases, are not those things? When did I learn to devalue what is light-hearted and fun, intuiting that it’s better to identify with the older, stoic John Lennon of the blue album than with the young, enthused John Lennon of the red album?
For a few years, the Beatles bopped their mop-tops and the girls screamed and the old men scoffed, but then the band grew up — they earned respect, not from the girls whose respect they had had all along, but from the men who had previously dismissed them. And in doing so, they were validated; it was henceforth acceptable for me, and anyone else, to like the Beatles. Before I even knew how to read, I knew that my dad liked the Beatles enough to carry their records from his childhood home across the country and organize them carefully in our upstairs closet.
Become fans, and we’re told that the music is not serious; scream or cry over the boys, and we’re told we are crazy.
But ‘N Sync wasn’t the Beatles; One Direction wasn’t the Beatles. Those bands were simple, juvenile, sometimes downright foolish. Or were they? Isn’t that part of what we love about the Beatles? And even if every subsequent boy band was all of those traits, and none evolved to the same levels of artistry and innovation, what’s wrong with that? When did I learn to dismiss what girls find appealing?
Even the boys themselves, moving on from the band, often go on to deride it. Why are girls made to contend with this internal judgment, this self-erasure, sitting in our beds steeped in shame while scrolling through photos of the band, when the band has been made and marketed just for us, our interest calculatedly stoked? Become fans, and we’re told that the music is not serious; scream or cry over the boys, and we’re told we are crazy.
“Young girls like the Beatles,” Harry points out in a Rolling Stone interview in 2017 when asked about his fanbase and whether he feels pressure to find credibility with older crowds. “You gonna tell me they’re not serious? How can you say young girls don’t get it?” Two years later, he reiterated the statement. “They’re the ones who know what they’re talking about,” he insists. “They’re the people who listen obsessively.”
In distancing myself from the fangirls, I’ve dismissed them — and in dismissing them, I’ve dismissed myself.
And of course he’s right, and I do. I am one of them. In distancing myself from the fangirls, I’ve dismissed them — and in dismissing them, I’ve dismissed myself. I can be a respectable, rational writer and also an enthusiastic, emotional fan. During Harry’s upcoming tour, whenever it happens, I can take notes as an ethnographer and also scream a little, also shed a tear.
Curiously, most of Harry’s fans seem more intent on celebrating, protecting, and liberating him than on personally catching his eye, and I’ve come to share the sentiment. I genuinely don’t care who he is dating — I just fiercely, almost aggressively, want this human to be happy. I acknowledge that’s another kind of pressure to put on him. Still, it feels vitally important somehow, like the fate of the world depends on it; it’s that kind of crush.
There, I said it. In an elaborate attempt to grant myself permission to care, I’ve been overthinking this. I simply have a crush on Harry Styles — an everyday, unoriginal crush. Not on the actual person, but on the image of him I’ve been allowed to see and the further fractured parts of that image fed me by the algorithm — on the idea of him, and the goodness he has come to represent. I’m not special. In 2019, Harper’s Bazaar dubbed Harry the “imaginary boyfriend to the entire internet,” and there’s nothing I begrudge more than becoming a cliché.
Nonetheless, I admit: I am a grown woman with varied ambitions and intellectual pursuits and a consuming crush on a pop star. And I admit this, too: it feels good, sitting in the glow of it. It feels good to be distracted. It feels good to wander off in a daydream. It feels good to feel hopeful. And it feels good to repossess the popular music I’ve often deprived myself of in a not-quite-conscious conflation of solemnity and seriousness.
Nobody can drag me down
At the end of 2019, a personalized Spotify notification popped up without my asking, congratulating me for being in the top 1% of Jonas Brothers fans. Even acknowledging the extent of my sudden fandom, this seemed like a dramatic conclusion to draw. I face-palmed theatrically, for Grace’s benefit. The following December, as 2020 finally came to a close after a year that felt like a decade of the same dull, anxious days, another Spotify notification appeared on my screen: “One song helped you get through it all,” it declared brightly, with an image of One Direction’s final album, Made in the A.M., a reference to the song “Drag Me Down.”
The statement was false, or at least outdated. During the first two and a half months of 2020 I listened to One Direction so consistently in so many public spaces that the play counts overrode the entirety of the rest of my statistics. But mid-March onward was a different year, one of lonely, fade-into-the-background music, a soundtrack that required a stark split from any pre-pandemic listening preferences, and also a lot of silence. The year’s-end Spotify notification felt like a mistake, a technical glitch referencing a time when endless hours of insomnia were unusual and falling down celebrity rabbit holes was not yet how half the internet passed a typical Tuesday.
My algorithm gradually righted itself into a grid of cats and cake decorating videos, and I don’t stalk Harry Styles anymore — though I admit to slipping him a smile when I saw the December cover of Vogue, on which he’s blowing up a blue balloon in a lace dress. He is looking away, and that’s okay. Because the shift in me, after those months of obsession, was always broader than a blush in my cheeks or a tune in my ears. It’s a renewed sense of levity and playfulness. It’s an internal voice — my own but bolstered, and a bit British — reminding me to TPWK. It’s a restored desire to cultivate and claim space, not only as a fan, not only as a muse, but as an artist, taking hold of that bolt of inspiration that tends to leave me wide-awake in the middle of the night, losing track of the hours, but for all the best reasons.
In the final week of February 2020, not long before New York City went into lockdown, I woke up in the middle of the night in the middle of the work week to see Harry live on the TODAY show. In the damp morning light, he stood on a temporary stage and performed for fans tightly packed, two blocks deep, into Rockefeller Plaza. Some had crossed state lines to be there. Many had slept on the sidewalk in the rain. Almost everyone had waited through the eerie gloom of witching hour, holding bladders, protecting positions, only to have the line break into a running, screaming swarm when the gates finally opened.
“Please don’t run!” security guards had shouted. I looked at my friend Alex, who I’d convinced to wake up at 4 AM to join me. We were a solid decade older than most of the crowd. We were there anthropologically. But girls were passing us, we were falling behind. So we ran. It was the closest thing to Beatlemania I’ll ever experience, the most euphoric I felt all year. •
