Taylor Swift’s “august” narrator falls in love with James.
James is the 17-year-old boy at the center of Folklore’s fictional love triangle. In “august,” he spends part of the summer with the unnamed narrator, but he is already connected to Betty. When the summer ends, James returns to Betty, leaving the narrator to grieve a relationship she hoped would become permanent.
A common mix-up is assigning the narrator’s romance to Betty, because “betty” is another song in the same story. The three perspectives are deliberately connected: “august” presents the unnamed girl’s view, “betty” presents James’s view, and “cardigan” presents Betty’s view. The shared characters are fictional creations rather than straightforward autobiographical portraits of Swift’s relationships.