There’s a theory taking TikTok by storm about the next big celebrity memoir, and fans of the star in question can’t quite shake it off.
A group of TikTok users is convinced that Taylor Swift will publish a memoir this summer, Cosmopolitan reports.
The theory has its roots in the TikTok account of Good Neighbor Bookstore in the New York village of Lakewood. The store posted a video about an untitled book scheduled for publication by Flatiron on July 9—a Sunday, not a Tuesday, the day of the week when most new titles are published.
The post was subsequently deleted, but Swifties preserved it via “duets,” in which users can build on other people’s videos. In the original video, the owner of the bookstore says, “The book is 544 pages,” while a graphic notes that if you add the digits 5, 4, and 4 together, you get 13—Swift’s lucky number.
The owner also noted that the publisher says the book “has a global appeal and skews towards a younger audience.” The owner pointed to a recent message Swift posted on Twitter, she uses the phrase “Dear Reader” (which would seem to refer to the reader of the tweet but could conceivably hint at a forthcoming book).
It fills me with such pride and joy to announce that my version of Speak Now will be out July 7 (just in time for July 9th, iykyk 😆) I first made Speak Now, completely self-written, between the ages of 18 and 20. The songs that came from this time in my life were marked by their… pic.twitter.com/oa0Vs5kszr
— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) May 6, 2023
“So if you’ve come to the same conclusion that myself and a number of booksellers have, that this book is probably a memoir by Taylor Swift, and you want to get on this early, there’s a link in our tree to place an order,” the bookstore’s owner said.
The theory drove TikTok Swifties wild and inspired a Reddit post that had more than 680 comments as of Monday morning.
The attention—and preorders—seem to have caught Good Neighbor Bookstore off guard. On Sunday, the owner posted another TikTok video, saying, “Last night, I made the decision to close preorders, because I had received over 600 of them, and I am a one-person operation, and 600 orders is a lot of orders for me to handle if we are correct in the title that’s coming out in July.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.