Like many pop stars who weren’t yet pop stars in the early 2000s, Britney Spears was both an inspiration and a cautionary tale to someone like MARINA. Her influence undeniable on every millennial from Taylor Swift to Charli XCX. In 2021, MARINA paid homage to that influence in a “justice for Britney” sort of way with the “Purge the Poison” lyrics, “2007/When Size 0 was the rage/Britney shaved her head/And all we did was call her crazed.” That song was released in June of 2021, five months before Spears would officially be freed from her thirteen-year conservatorship. When she finally was, it didn’t take long for the people who had rallied for her liberty to start critiquing her ever more “unhinged” Instagram posts. Posts that consistently show she’s still on autopilot with regard to “performing.” More specifically, acting like a Lolita type now trapped in a forty-something’s body. It’s easy for this disconnect to happen to any female pop star, but especially someone as pigeonholed into being a “sexy teen” as Spears was long after the release of …Baby One More Time (and its song/video of the same name that immortalized Spears as the archetypal “Lolita girl”).

Can it be any wonder, then, that Spears would end up singing a song called “I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman” (released in 2001 on Britney and included in her panned movie, Crossroads)? A single that would presage her ongoing schizophrenic state, if you will, on this matter. At one point even declaring on her birthday in 2022, “I’m not turning 41 … I’m turning 12.” In short, Spears, like many women (famous pop stars or not), has struggled with letting go of girlhood. Not just because it was essentially robbed from her, but because women are conditioned to believe that this era in their lives is the only time when they’re ever given attention—revered (even while being degraded in the process) solely for how they look, not what they have to say. Letting go of girlhood, women are told, means becoming effectively invisible to society…so even if you do have something to say, no one is going to listen to it anymore. What does all of this have to do with MARINA’s poetry book, Eat the World, which often reads like an autobiography? Well, only that, as she stated during her October 22nd book tour event in London, a lot of the collection is about letting go of the girl she was so that she can fully transcend into the woman she wants to be.

In each of the thirty-eight poems in the book, there is an element of that dissection of who her girlhood self was and the desire to relinquish those aspects so that she can transform. Hence, the recurring visual of butterflies in poems like, what else, “Butterflies” and the extremely powerful “Cocoon.” It is in the latter that MARINA is at her most candid about the painful nature of transformation, particularly as a girl trying to become a woman…even as “late” as in one’s forties (to be “fair,” MARINA is thirty-nine, and had no qualms about saying so several times throughout the night). So it is that she admits in “Cocoon,” “This cocoon will be/a casket if I don’t/start living soon.” And part of “living” beyond the girlhood stage means acknowledging that you’re no longer in it. One of the most difficult tasks for women that isn’t talked about enough in the modern climate of youth obsession. Whereas, in the past, women “of a certain age” were expected to simply retreat from public life once their face and body began to reveal the ravages of time. But with advancements in cosmetic products and procedures, more and more women feel inclined to dig their heels into the girlhood era, even if it’s only a facade.

However, as MARINA also writes in “Cocoon,” “Eventually decay/splits/my walls/wide open/The rot has got me angry hot/(Becoming a butterfly/is not what I thot)/Metamorphosis/awaits/every being/in the end/If you don’t break your/cocoon soon, life will do/it for you, friend/These days when I see/butterflies float/effortlessly by/I know exactly what it takes/to grow the wings/they need to fly/They make it look so easy/twinkling in the sky/But I know the pain of/changing shape, I know/the exact price/Now I can see, to truly/live, parts of me had to die/To be reborn/again, again/a better butterfly.”

With regard to parts of her dying, MARINA wasn’t afraid to address a related subject in conversation with Shon Faye at the Emmanuel Centre: being child-free. A decision she made after years of reflection, deciding that too many parts of herself would have to die a.k.a. be sacrificed in order to become a mother (a good one, anyway). And that’s something her artist self couldn’t reconcile doing. Indeed, a UK-born contemporary of MARINA’s, Lily Allen, has all but confirmed that with a statement she made earlier this year about her own retreat from pop stardom after having kids: “It really annoys me when people say you can have it all because, quite frankly, you can’t. And, you know, some people choose their career over their children and that’s their prerogative, but, you know, my parents were quite absent when I was a kid and I feel like that really left some, like, nasty scars that I’m not willing to, you know, repeat on mine. And so, I chose stepping back and concentrating on them and I’m glad that I’ve done that because I think they’re very well-rounded people.”

MARINA, on the other hand, isn’t willing to trade the art life for the mom life—and it is always a trade. While it might have been painful, at first, to realize she would never live a conventional existence, gradually, MARINA came to the understanding (as stated in “Eclipse”), “I’d built my own life/And I did it without/having to be a/mother or a wife/Slowly but surely/my desire to change/had finally eclipsed/my desire to stay the same.” Thus, no longer can she cling to or pretend to be that girl she was at seventeen, or even that Electra Heart girl she was at twenty-seven (the version of her that fans continue to be “obsessed” with). In another poem about her past self, “Aspartame,” MARINA recalls her early days in Los Angeles, having arrived there after following a high school boyfriend to California. When it didn’t work out, she went to Hollywood “like a cliché.” It is here that she also alludes to her eating disorder of yore, casually remarking, “My plan to be thin hadn’t worked/I didn’t make him love me.”

“Years later,” however, her past self is validated when she meets the ex at the Roosevelt Hotel (Los Angeles and its various landmarks are a frequent backdrop of the poetry book) and he tells her that “when he’d seen/the ‘Hollywood’ video he’d felt sick./Because I’d achieved my dreams/Because I wasn’t a lunatic./And somehow it healed a forgotten part of me.” A part that had been buried in order to make way for the glossy famous version of herself. A version that would still embody the “girlhood traits” that make a pop star successful. If there was any clear pivot away from that, however, it was 2019’s Love + Fear. Not just because of the lyrical themes and subject matters (fueled, in part, by her then recent foray into getting an education in psychology), but because that was the album where she rid herself of the “and the Diamonds” aspect of MARINA. Her decision to do so, she said, stemmed from the following: “It took me well over a year to figure out that a lot of my identity was tied up in who I was as an artist…and there wasn’t much left of who I was.” So, once again, MARINA was starting to shed a skin that was tied to the more youthful days of her career.

With Eat the World, it is as though she is obliterating that self entirely to embrace who she’s finally become. And a key element of “becoming,” for her, has been writing. In her introduction, she notes (aside from psilocybin’s contribution to her poetry), “Writing is a way to remember and also a way to forget, to let go. Since I was twenty years old, I have used it as a way to alchemize pain. To explore wounds so that I can heal them, to understand them intimately so that I can let them go. My love for writing is intrinsically linked to its magical ability to ignite significant chapters of self-growth. It’s an invisible thread that connects me back to my true self…” Or whatever remains of its original essence after so much transformation.

Part of that transformation, for MARINA, is being unwilling to settle for “any old man” merely for the sake of not being alone. Even though being alone is hard, especially the older you get and everyone around you seems to have paired off and started their “real” lives. MARINA delineates this in “Sex Robot” with the verses, “But anyhow, anyhow/Everyone’s married now/Nobody’s going out/I’m the last girl in town/of my kind/I don’t mind/but it would be nice to find/Somebody solid/who’s actually there/No hot-air balloon/prone to rogue gusts of air/I’m still on the carousel,/alone at the fair.” Below this verse is a pop art-esque image of a carousel horse. This and many other images/layout and design choices (courtesy of Dominique Falcone) are part of what makes Eat the World so distinctly “MARINA.” It has her style sensibilities all over it, and almost serves as an extension of her Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land-era “mood boards.” Which makes sense since she wrote these poems soon after that record’s release.

Among other aspects of MARINA’s girlhood-to-womanhood transformation is a total surrender to loving and living in Los Angeles. To the extent that she would decide to put roots down there with the purchase of real estate. And yes, there are a few poems that speak to her love for that city, not least of which is “Soft Warning,” during which she comments, like Joan Didion, on the intrinsically ephemeral and violent nature of California/LA. This via such lines as, “I love her but she makes me nervous/Impermanence permeates/every valley, every canyon/“you cannot have me forever”/I love her but she makes me nervous…/But what if I don’t find another LA?…/Is it predictable of me to fall in love with a/place built on shaky ground?” Almost immediately after that poem is “Land of Limbs,” another ode to LA and its particular strangeness. Not least of which is being an “industry town,” therefore a town of transplants. And a town of “hippie-dippy,” “overly positive to the point of toxicity” people. Something MARINA speaks to when she quips, “Cynics do not survive/They move away/to cooler climes/Leave their bile behind.” She further describes it as a “Town of transplants/City of saplings/Land of amputated limbs/Millions of orphaned legs hands feet looking/to rejoin their bodies/Searching to be sewn/back onto where/they belong.”

MARINA, aware that perhaps the only place (in America) more written about than New York is LA, is sure to add, “I know everyone/writes about LA/but I am one of/her children now too/I’ve been adopted/No longer lost/I’ve been co-opted.” And, speaking of that and the aforementioned Joan Didion, MARINA not only mentioned Eve Babitz as a must-read for lovers of Los Angeles at her Emmanuel Centre event, but also thanks her in the acknowledgements section of Eat the World (another coup for Babitz this year, what with Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz shedding further light on the latter’s increasingly less underrated brilliance—especially with regard to her unique insight into MARINA’s adopted town).

Obviously, the elephant in the room about this whole thing is that there’s another famous singer-songwriter who also released a poetry book not so long ago (no, not Jewel): Lana Del Rey. And yes, the two are often lumped into the same “2012 Tumblr era” category together, even sharing a friendship as a result. So sure, it would be easy for some to write off MARINA’s poetry book or bill it as the “same thing” Lana Del Rey did with 2021’s Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass, which is also chock-full of “typesetting and photo shticks,” as well as ruminations on botched romances and odes to LA (e.g., “LA Who Am I To Love You”). But the two are perhaps best described as the Didion and Babitz of the songwriter-turned-poet scene, with Del Rey in the more overrated Didion category—especially now that she’s a married square like Joan. In contrast, MARINA has taken the Babitz road less traveled: being a single, child-free woman in a world that still seeks to make women feel like alien freaks when they do choose that route. It’s, thus, no coincidence that Babitz gets her thank you in the acknowledgements, with MARINA praising her for “pav[ing] the way for many women to live freely and show[ing] the world that there are many ways to live a life.” Namely, as a woman.

This isn’t to say, of course, that MARINA doesn’t have her occasional “reversion” moments, confessing to the audience at the Emmanuel Centre that, yeah, she still finds it difficult to resist the prospect of fillers and that she recently bought a Hello Kitty Gameboy. Call it a flicker of Britney Spears dancing practically naked on Instagram like it’s still the 2000s. And somewhere, it probably still is.