The Very Pink, Very Perfect Life of Taylor Swift

Afterward, Swift takes more photos with the girls and looks at her fan letters. The girls write about feeling like outsiders, about getting ostracized by girlfriends over misunderstandings with boys, about hating girls who make fun of other girls and not understanding why some people enjoy being so cruel. "When I first discovered your music a few years ago, something in me opened up," says a meticulously crafted two-page letter from a high school sophomore, who included a picture of herself at the beach. "I had been feeling upset, and you told me that I'm not alone," she continues. "Your lyrics mean the world to me, and I swear they are the narration of my life." She adds that Swift has given her a path for the future: "I wish more than anything that I could change a teenager's perspective," she writes, "the way you have done for me."

This is Swift's primary hope for her music: She wants to help adolescent girls everywhere feel better about themselves, and in the process heal her younger self. "In school, I loved reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and I'm very interested in any writing from a child's perspective," she says. At high school in Henderson, Tennessee, a suburb of Nashville — her parents agreed to move when she landed her RCA contract, at the beginning of her freshman year — Swift's interest in country music was obviously considered normal, but she still wasn't popular. She may be pretty now, and she eventually might have abused the power that comes with being a beautiful senior girl, but when she left high school, at 16, she was still a gangly sophomore. "There were queen bees and attendants, and I was maybe the friend of one of the attendants," she says. "I was the girl who didn't get invited to parties, but if I did happen to go, you know, no one would throw a bottle at my head."

In a way, Swift's emotional state seems to be stuck at the time when she left school. She says that she has only a half-dozen friends now — "and that's a lot for me" — and she talks constantly about her best friend, Abigail, a competitive swimmer and freshman at Kansas State, with a new nose ring and a new pet snake, doubtlessly having many experiences that Swift may not be ready for. In fact, Swift is a very young 19-year-old. "I feel like Miley, Selena and Demi are my age," she says at one point, acknowledging the fast-paced lives of her Los Angeles-based contemporaries. "It's crazy, I always forget that they're 16."

And in her love life, Swift admits to being mighty inexperienced. She says that she's had her heart broken, but she's not sure if she's ever really been in love. She had a boyfriend her freshman year, a senior hockey player: "We weren't an It couple," she drawls. But there really haven't been many guys since then except for Joe Jonas, who famously broke up with her over the phone for another girl. Swift wrote a song on her second album, called "Forever & Always," about Jonas, then filmed a MySpace video with a Joe Jonas doll, during which she remarks, "This one even comes with a phone so it can break up with other dolls!" Jonas later insinuated that she hung up on him. "I did not hang up on him," she says now, then mouths, "Omigod."

The illogic of love is unsettling to Swift, who has a hard time understanding it with her supremely rational mind. Music, for her, is a way of expressing feelings that are largely repressed or absent. She maintains that marriage is something she would "only do if I find the person I absolutely can't live without" and "it's not my ultimate goal in life." In fact, the first two singles on Fearless — "Love Story" and "White Horse" — are about a guy that she considered dating but never even kissed. Many of her songs are not about her own personal experiences with love — about half are inspired by her friends' relationships. "I'm fascinated by love rather than the principle of 'Oh, does this guy like me?'" she says. "I love love. I love studying it and watching it. I love thinking about how we treat each other, and the crazy way that one person can feel one thing and another can feel totally different," she says. "It just doesn't take much for me to be inspired to write a song about a person, but I'm much more likely to write that song than do anything about it. You know, self-preservation."