In the Metaverse: Taylor’s “Dear Reader” Meaning, Simplified

Dear Reader is Taylor Swift’s most meta track to date, and it’s chock-full of contradictory, hypocritical advice from an unreliable narrator. 

Taylor deliberately references themes and metaphors from previous songs, urging us not to take her advice: she’s not the idol we think she is, she says. 

But what does it all mean? Why is she breaking the 4th wall, and why is she looping in a Jane Eyre from classic English literature? 

I’m here to break it down for you, line by line. Here’s my completely lyrical analysis of Taylor’s Dear Reader meaning. 

Dear Reader by Taylor Swift

• Title: Dear Reader
• Written by: Taylor Swift, 
• Track: 20, Midnights, 3am Edition
• Pen: Quill 
• Lyrics from Genius

Dear Reader Meaning: Narrative Summary

• Setting: Breaking the 4th wall. 
• Characters: Narrator (Taylor), subject (her reader, “you”) 
• Mood: Somber self-doubt. 
• Conflict: She’s not a person to be giving advice. 
• Inciting Incident: “Never take advice from someone who’s falling apart”: she’s feeling imposter syndrome. 
• Quest: Let her “reader” know that she’s not the person we think she is. 
• Symbols & Metaphors: “Dear reader,” “trap,” “map,” “Run,” “burn all the files,” “past lives,” “don’t recognize yourself,” “someone who’s falling apart,” “bend” vs. “snap,” “answer”, “your secrets,” “aim at the devil,” “don’t miss,” “wander through these nights,” “hiding in plain sight,” “fourth drink in my hand,” “desperate prayers of a cursed man,” “ for free,” “You wouldn’t take my word for it if you knew who was talking,” “a house, not a home,” “pace in my pen,” “playing solitaire,” “guiding light,” “shine so bright,” “you should find another.” 
• Lesson: Taylor is an unreliable narrator. 

What is Dear Reader About? 

Dear Reader is Taylor breaking the 4th wall, letting her audience know that she’s not who we think she is. 

She reflects on her place in society as an idol, narrating how she feels like an impostor. She’s not perfect, she tells us, and we wouldn’t look up to her if we knew the truth. 

The song is also deeply ironic as she narrates several pieces of advice, then tells us not to listen to her advice at all. 

Who is Dear Reader About? 

Dear Reader is about Taylor’s relationship with her fans. She addresses her audience directly, and urges us not to take advice from her or look to her as a mentor. 

Dear Reader Explained: Line by Line

The first verse opens with the iconic Charlotte Brontë line from Jane Eyre: “Dear reader.”

In that classic novel, the narrator closes by breaking the fourth wall – acknowledging her audience directly – with “Dear reader, I married him.” 

Taylor uses the phrase to do the same. She’s addressing us directly with her “dear reader, if it feels like a trap / you’re already in one.” If we feel like something is shady, it’s probably too late. 

“Dear reader, get out your map,” she says, using a common navigational metaphor. Look at the map of your life, she urges, and “pick somewhere and just run.” 

Escapism is also a common theme Taylor uses in songs like Getaway Car, the lakes, I Know Places, and many more. Here she urges escapism from your life, trying to find a new purpose in a new setting. 

“Dear reader, burn all the files,” she says, “Desert all your past lives.” Get rid of the evidence, she urges, and leave your old self behind. This is deeply hypocritical, as Taylor famously keeps everything: her diaries, her letters, her old songs, her voice notes, etc. 

She even keeps evidence within her lyrics. She’ll “bury hatchets but keep maps of where I put ‘em,” and keep envelopes full of “cold hard proof.” 

“And if you don’t recognize yourself,” she says, after we’ve gotten rid of our “past lives,”  “that means you did it right.” If we no longer recognize our faces in the mirror, we’ve completed the transformation. 

Taylor has often used mirrors and reflections as metaphors, most notably in The Archer. “And I cut off my nose just to spite my face,” she says in that track, “then I hate my reflection for years and years.” 

The Archer urged us not to ‘cut off our noses to spite our face,’ but in Dear Reader, she urges us to change so drastically that we won’t recognize our own reflections. 

This contradictory and hypocritical advice is the major theme of the song. We shouldn’t listen to her, she demonstrates. She’s unreliable, and not the perfect mentor we think she is. Don’t listen to me, she emphasizes, because I don’t know what I’m talking about. 

“Never take advice from someone who’s falling apart,” she says directly. She’s the one falling apart, and we shouldn’t follow her example. 

“You should find another” echoes in the background, emphasizing that we should find another star to look up to. 

Verse 2: “The Greatest of Luxuries is Your Secrets”

“Dear reader, bend when you can,” she says in the second verse, “Snap when you have to.” We should try to be flexible, she urges, but if it becomes too much, we can snap and break away. 

This echoes lyrics from it’s time to go, where she says: “That old familiar body ache / The snaps from the same little breaks in your soul / You know when it’s time to go.” When being flexible turns into a full-body ache, it’s time to let go. It’s time to snap and run. 

“Dear reader, you don’t have to answer,” she says, “Just ’cause they asked you.” We don’t owe anyone answers just because they’re curious. 

This alludes both to Taylor’s constant questions by the media and the public at large, but also ties into the many questions she asks in her lyrics. Rhetorical questions are one of her most common themes, where she asks and doesn’t get answers (see Lover, The Man, Question…?, and many, many more). 

🌌 Are you a Mastermind? Try my Midnights Lyrics Quiz! 🌌

“Dear reader, the greatest of luxuries is your secrets,” she says, contradicting both her previous ideas about secrets and about luxury. 

This piece of advice is not hypocritical at all: Taylor is very secretive, and the theme of secrets is heavy on every album. She’s telling us there is a part of herself that she keeps hidden, and for good reason. 

But what is an unreliable narrator? Secretive. Illusive. Two-faced. She’s telling us flat-out that she only lets us see what she wants us to see. 

“Dear reader, when you aim at the devil,” she says, “Make sure you don’t miss.” When we try to take down our enemies, we need to aim carefully. 

This echoes previous lyrics about revenge, such as I Did Something Bad, my tears ricochet, Look What You Made Me Do, Vigilante Shit, and more. In those songs she describes how she’s tactical and methodical, as she narrates in Mastermind. 

But then the voice that reminds us she’s an unreliable narrator chimes in again: “Never take advice from someone who’s falling apart.” 

‘Scratch all that’, she says, ‘and don’t listen to me. I may know a thing or two about secrets, revenge, and questions, but look where it’s gotten me: I’m falling apart.’  

Bridge: “I Prefer Hiding in Plain Sight”

The bridge is the most candid and straight-faced she gets in Dear Reader. 

“So I wander through these nights,” she says, describing the sleepless nights of her life that she’s dedicated the entire album to. 

“I prefer hiding in plain sight” describes her status as the anti-hero and unreliable narrator. She seems like one thing on the outside, but on the inside, she’s the opposite. 

“My fourth drink in my hand” is her attempt at self-medicating, wallowing in sorrow. As she gets drunker and drunker, she voices “desperate prayers of a cursed man.” 

What are the “desperate prayers”? Her lyrics. Her music. She’s “spilling out to you for free,” meaning we get a free peep show into her spectacular implosion. 

We get to hear her deepest, darkest thoughts in her lyrics, but we’ve taken it the wrong way. We’ve taken it as advice, when it was really meant to be an example of what not to do. 

“But darling, darling, please,” she urges her audience, “You wouldn’t take my word for it if you knew who was talking.” If we knew what was really going on inside her mind, we wouldn’t take her lyrics as gospel. 

“If you knew where I was walking” describes the precarious and lonely situation she’s in. She’s going “To a house, not a home, all alone ’cause nobody’s there.” 

Her music may have gotten her more money than God, and privilege beyond belief, but it means nothing, because she has no one to share it with. There is no one she can open up to, because she’s gotten so good about maintaining this façade. 

Her empty house is her internal world, where “nobody’s there,” because she can’t let anyone in. If she did, they wouldn’t stick around (like “who could ever leave me darlin’, but who could stay”). 

Her empty internal world is “Where I pace in my pen,” describing her life as akin to a caged animal. Taylor has used this metaphor several times before to describe her life of celebrity, as in So it Goes, tolerate it, Midnight Rain, and more.  

She’s alone in the cage, because “my friends found friends who care.” She’s been left all alone, because she can’t maintain a friendship with this two-faced double life. Public Taylor is very different from private Taylor, and both are difficult to maintain a relationship with. 

“No one sees when you lose when you’re playing solitaire,” she says. She’s playing games, but only with herself. That way, no one can see her lose. 

Games are very common metaphors in Taylor’s lyrics (see End Game, Blank Space, Mastermind, et al), but here, she has no opponent. She’s either defeated every enemy, or has gotten so compulsive and competitive that no one wants to face off with her anymore. 

Outro: “You Should Find Another Guiding Light”

The outro is her final plea to her reader: “You should find another guiding light,” she urges. We shouldn’t look up to her anymore. She’s a False God. 

This calls back to a much earlier song in Taylor’s career: The Lucky One. That song describes her fame as her “name up in lights,” akin to a “guiding light.” But those lyrics also question how long her celebrity and success will last. 

“’Cause now my name is up in lights / But I think you got it right,” she says to her predecessors in The Lucky One. They got out alive, but will she? 

“But I shine so bright” is her acknowledgement that she is the brightest star, and naturally people follow her. They shouldn’t – she doesn’t know what she’s doing or what she’s talking about. 

Like her song mirrorball, she’s built to shine and entertain. “But when I break, it’s in a million pieces,” she says in that track. Her star shine is fallible, and can fall at any moment. We shouldn’t rely on its guiding light, because it could burn out. 

“You should find another,” she repeats, emphasizing that we need to find another idol, another mentor, another “guiding light”. 

‘Stop following me. Stop making me your sky,’ she urges. She may show us “every version” of ourselves, but if we keep looking in that mirror, it will shatter. And we won’t like what we see. 

🌌 Are you a Mastermind? Try my Midnights Lyrics Quiz! 🌌

Dear Reader Lyrics Meaning: Final Thoughts 

With these lyrics, Taylor has firmly placed herself in unreliable narrator territory. So what should we believe? Where lies the truth? 

We’ll never know. But even though this song is full of contradictions and hypocrisy, it’s also the most earnest and truthful song Taylor has ever written. Why? 

Because she’s acknowledging that all is not what it seems. She’s telling us directly that she may know what she’s doing in her career and in her songwriting, but in the more important aspects of her life – in friendship and in relationships – she has no idea what she’s doing. 

We “should find another” idol, not because she’ll burn out, but because we were all moths to a flame in the first place. If we fly too close to the sun, our wings will catch fire, and we’ll all fall to earth. The impact won’t be pretty.

More Songs From Midnights 

• Lavender Haze
• Maroon
• Anti-Hero
• Snow on the Beach
• You’re On Your Own, Kid
• Midnight Rain
• Question…?
• Vigilante Shit
• Bejeweled
• Labyrinth 
• Karma
• Sweet Nothing
• Mastermind
• The Great War
• Bigger Than The Whole Sky
• Paris
• High Infidelity
• Glitch
• Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve
• Hits Different
• You’re Losing Me