Tolentino's debut essay collection is a masterful examination of Millennial existence. She seamlessly blends facts with historical context, anecdote, and humor to help clear the seemingly permanent haze that has settled over many of us. Through smart examinations of social media, the Great Recession, the student loan crisis, Amazon and Facebook, reality TV, mainstream capitalistic feminism, and other hallmarks of a Millennial upbringing, she shows us a potential answer to the "why" questions many of us ask ourselves late at night with friends after a couple drinks.

We see ourselves in a very distorted light, and much of the time we are completely unaware of that fact. We are constantly overstimulated, paranoid, exhausted, and being manipulated out of our time and money. It's so bad that a lot of us feel powerless to stop it. Tolentino, through this essay collection, works to see past the trick mirror we have been presented with in order to (hopefully) live a truer life.

"...I wrote this book because I am always confused, because I can never be sure of anything, and because I am drawn to any mechanism that directs me away from that truth," Tolentino writes in the Introduction. I think she has landed on some kind of solid ground with Trick Mirror, and in the process she has led me to my own understandings. I feel lucky to have the privileged of Tolentino as the essayist of my generation. Please read this book!

I enjoyed every essay of Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror! A prevalent theme was how the things women like or want to invest in are often commercialized or used against us, making daily life very difficult to navigate. She tackles everything from the internet to religion to "althleisure wear" to weddings. Tolentino does her best to grapple with all the contradictions that are presented, and tries to untangle things bit by bit. Some of my favorite essays were about scamming as the "millennial ethos," women in classic literature, and her take on the Rolling Stone article that tore apart her alma mater, UVA. This was one was in particular interest to me because I just moved to Charlottesville and started a job to UVA, so Jia's descriptions of the area and culture hit differently. It also made me think about ways my role and my career in higher education can be aware of and sustainably grapple with rape culture on college campuses. This is definitely a must for those who enjoy essays on culture and sociology and I am excited to read more from Jia in the future!

Thank you to Penguin Random House for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino is a collection of the author's thoughts and musings on current societal and pop culture phenomenon. I would suggest this book to perhaps a younger generation, college and high school aged youth that are looking for a common ground in navigating their social media enriched world.

While the topics are interesting, the essays did not quite resonate with me a thirty-something female. I agreed with many of the authors thoughts and musings but there was nothing deep enough or thought provoking for me to be fully engaged in the conversation. The books reads as if I put together essays that I wrote in my sociology classes in college and didn't dig deep enough for me. More data, or perhaps a more experienced voice would have hit the mark for me.

On the other hand, I would have eaten this book up in college and I would absolutely suggest it to younger readers that are just starting to explore the cultural significance of their current coming of age. In college, I read Chuck Klosterman to scratch that itch, and I would have relished the opportunity to read a female author that reflects on modern feminism.

Jia is the best there is, and reading her is like discovering all of your good opinions for the first time.

Jia Tolentino is, without a doubt, a talented writer. One doesn't need to read Truck Mirror to see proof of that; her essays have been mainstays on the internet for years. But while the essays in this collection come across as being written by a deft hand, I sadly did not find them to be a quite as affecting as I had hoped. I felt that each was some combination of meandering, without clear point and none really offered much new ground when compared to both Tolentino's existing work and the existing work of other writers who explore culture with a feminist lean. My favorite piece was the one about starting in a reality show on The N, because I am the same age as Tolentino and remember watching the show myself; it was interesting to get a nostalgic look at early 2000s teen reality TV, but I doubt anyone older or younger by more than 5 years would care.

I’ve read Tolentino’s work from Jezebel and The New Yorker for several years, and was thrilled when I learned she had a collection coming out (and even more thrilled to receive the eARC from NetGalley and Random House), and it exceeded my already-high expectations. The essays in this collection weave memoir, cultural and literary criticism, and feminist thought. Tolentino never fails to pair a smart, serious tone with a lively, compelling style. Highly recommend for fans of Roxane Gay, Lacy M. Johnson, John Jeremiah Sullivan, or the magazine n+1.

A collection that’s squarely of its moment. The title comes from a phrase Tolentino once used to describe “what women seemed to want from feminist websites.” By extension, it applies to the internet generally, through which our experience is inevitably filtered. The rise of Trump and his ilk has been enabled both by television and by the internet, which allows each consumer to select the version of reality they’d like to see.

In this perilous American experiment, Tolentino is like the subject crying out, “There are four lights!” She refuses to relinquish her tools of discernment, her belief that there is an essential reality that we can approach, at least asymptotically, through critical thinking.

Tolentino, who is fluent in millennial culture without fetishizing it, pegs “scamming” as “the quintessential American ethos.” The book’s central chapter puts Trump at the unseemly apex of a pyramid of fraudsters including Billy McFarland (you may have seen Tolentino on the Fyre Festival documentary from Hulu), Mark Zuckerberg (the author reminds us that Facebook grew out of its founder’s desire to compare his classmates’ faces to those of farm animals), and #GIRLBOSS Sophia Amoruso.

More personal, and delicately nuanced, essays examine religion (Tolentino was raised in a Texas megachurch its teen parishioners called “the Repentagon”) and the culture of her alma mater, the University of Virginia. She matriculated there at age 16, having shot through school at an accelerated pace, and more or less lived the dream. “For four years I cranked out papers at the library; I wrapped myself around a boyfriend; I volunteered and waited tables and sang in an a capella group and pledged a sorority and sat on my rooftop, smoking spliffs and reading, as the kids at the elementary school across the road shrieked.”

Like a trick mirror, the 2014 Rolling Stone report “A Rape on Campus” was both true and false. It was false in its particulars — “Jackie,” the reporter’s central source, proved unreliable — but as Tolentino notes, it was accurate in its portrayal of the university campus as a place where sexual violence was normalized. Her unflinching essay describes just how deep the roots of rape culture grow in Virginia and far beyond.

If, like me, you have long admired Jia Tolentino's work in the New Yorker, Awl and Jezebel, this collection of essays will not disappoint. Insightful essays on the state of our country, our culture, women and marriage.

Very possibly a voice of a generation (millennials), but not my generation. Likely for that reason, I didn’t quite connect to these essays, which I found rambling and meandering but without thesis or certainty. My favorites were Ecstasy and We Come from Old Virginia.

Essays at their best open honest revealing the type of essays that leave you thinking from the opening essay about the on line world I was drawn in essays to savor to think about and discuss, #netgalley #randomhouse

I have been a Jia Tolentino fangirl for a long time, so I've been eagerly awaiting this book. It's even better than I thought it would be. Tolentino is both brilliant and a beautiful writer, and in these essays she examines American culture, from her time as a teenage reality show contestant, to rape culture at her alma mater UVA, and to the ascendance of scammer culture that we're all currently living with. I particularly loved that essay about scams - she talks about Wall Street and Theranos and the Fyre festival, as well as the brutalization of workers at places like Amazon and Uber and of course the scam that is the current administration. One of my favorite essays was "Ecstasy," which is about growing up in a conservative mega church in Houston, and how religious ecstasy is not unlike the feeling provided by drugs. Each essay is so smart and challenging and gave me so much to think about. Highly, highly recommended.

I would read Jia's grocery list if I could. I love her writing style and mix of pop culture and memoir. Reminded me of being back in college with some of the deconstructions and analogies.

Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror is particularly difficult to review. It failed me, but I know with total certainty that it will be praised as precious in many quarters. So I have to appreciate it for what it is, and not what it didn’t do for me. It will appeal to a large and specific audience, and that needs to be recognized in any review of it. I learned this from Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, who, to my young amazement, gave an Arnold Schwarzenegger film their thumbs-up, knowing that it had no plot, terrible writing, poor acting and no redeeming values. But they recognized it would be a blockbuster film that satisfied millions of fans, who would quote it endlessly for months. There was no point judging it by any other standards. So while what I say next can be construed as criticism, let me plant the firm notion that it is not criticism. It is description.

The book is a collection of nine new essays. They are founded in memoirs, and flower into surveys of the literature and associations on the topic. Most of the topics are feminist. The essays often wander, but rarely dive. They skim; they remain largely superficial. Tolentino loves to drop names from pop culture, which readers should still recognize today, and relate to, but which will make the book unreadable in a few years, as all those people are forgotten. She doesn’t like introducing people or giving their credentials, but finds them authoritative nonetheless. She interviewed no one for this book.

Tolentino goes broad but usually not deep. She is all about headlines. For many readers, this will be revelation enough, but Tolentino breaks no new ground, leaves no lasting suggestion, and will change no one’s perspective. It is rather a demonstration of her ability to assimilate the state of the culture, and she demonstrates it very well. She writes with a firm hand.

She doesn’t demonstrate a new way to look at the world. There are no new takeaways from this book. It largely lacks humor, except perhaps for the essay on weddings. Tolentino doesn’t stake out a persona for herself like other feminist writers do. Outside of her continuing defense and mourning of Hillary Clinton, she remains fair and neutral - for an admitted left-leaner.

The best chapter is the one on sexual harassment. She explores it from numerous vantage points, discusses a major case of false claims, and the conundrum of how to tackle the problem, which her own school failed at, famously and miserably (though it won $3 million in a suit against Rolling Stone).

There is a chapter on fictional heroines, where Tolentino often resorts to simply listing books that have heroines. She quotes fictional heroines as if their lines were Truth. The essay shows she is an avid reader, but not much more.

She was a contestant in a TV reality show while in high school, and doubles the length of the essay about it with endless pointless synopses from the show, which has been long forgotten (along with the cable network that aired it). Once, she was recognized in a store in a mall.

This is the second book I have reviewed of memoirs from someone too young to write them (Tolentino is now 30. The other was 27). I don’t think people under 30 have the perspective to do justice to even their own lives. Basically, it is too early to wax nostalgic about the 2000s.

Too predictably, Trick Mirror focuses on growing up (in Houston), the internet (she was hooked at the age of ten), school (a Baptist megachurch), college (UVA Charlottesville), the constant pressure to look good, drugs (party variety) and weddings (she has spent $35k on other people’s weddings). A typical middle-class American life. Sadly, there is only a page on her perspective-changing year in the Peace Corps (in very Islamic Kyrgyzstan). It would have made the best essay.

To her immense credit, Tolentino uses these events and eras as launch pads to go on rants and tirades about religion, date rape, feminism, and politics. So far more than simply memoirs, Trick Mirror adds value. Not new value, but value nonetheless.


David Wineberg

This was an interesting collection of essays by the author about life in our world. It covers many topics from the internet to marriage. I found the essays to be engaging and slightly thought provoking.

I would like to thank netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy free of charge. This is my honest and unbiased opinion of it.

Rambling (not necessarily a criticism) essays about millennial life and the ways in which existing systems, especially patriarchy, entrap us because even resistance constitutes engagement that might keep the old structures alive. (E.g., “as women have attempted to use #YesAllWomen and #MeToo to regain control of a narrative, these hashtags have at least partially reified the thing they’re trying to eradicate: the way that womanhood can feel like a story of loss of control. They have made feminist solidarity and shared vulnerability seem inextricable.”) A lot of the book is about the internet, which has allegedly heightened the risk that everything becomes personal/identity-based and not primarily political. Some of it is annoying to old folks like me (“In the five years since my graduation, feminism had become a dominant cultural perspective”—sure, fine, whatever), but many of the observations are sharp.

I was a fan of this bit, as part of a discussion of the effects of clothing on how we behave: “athleisure frames the female body as a financial asset: an object that requires an initial investment and is divisible into smaller assets—the breasts, the abs, the butt—all of which are expected to appreciate in value, to continually bring back investor returns. Brutally expensive, with its thick disciplinary straps and taut peekaboo exposures, athleisure can be viewed as a sort of late-capitalist fetishwear: it is what you buy when you are compulsively gratified by the prospect of increasing your body’s performance on the market.” Tolentino, discussing scammers from Fyre to Trump, admits that “my own career has depended to some significant extent on feminism being monetizable. As a result, I live very close to this scam category, perhaps even inside.” Much of the story she tells is, sadly, pretty relatable: thinking herself immune from sexism because she was young and talented, then later on realizing that her UVa campus was fucked up—among other things, she got roofied and considered herself lucky that it made her violently ill, and also every Valentine’s day “flyers blanketed the campus with Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings depicted in cameo silhouette, and the cutesy slogan “TJ [heart]s Sally” below that.”

In an essay on difficult women, Tolentino discusses, among other things, the double bind of criticizing conservative women: sexism works on them too, and yet, “if you stripped away the sexism, you would still be left with Kellyanne Conway,” very worthy of condemnation. “Moreover, if you make the self-presentation of a White House spokesperson off-limits on principle, then you lose the ability to articulate the way she does her job.” Although it’s her job, she’s skeptical of “adjudicating inequality through cultural criticism,” which allows people like Ivanka Trump to claim feminist allyship (though not racial justice allyship, which seems important). It’s true that conservatives have learned to weaponize accusations of insufficient feminism, but I’m not sure that liberals did that (Tolentino thinks we taught them how) or that bad faith is avoidable in any particular way by progressives; it just has to be fought. Overall, a lot of wheat and a lot of chaff in here.

You can find my blurb at Book Riot as part of a round-up if 2019 essay collections: https://bookriot.com/2019/02/11/2019-essay-collections/

I ate this book slowly, chewing on each essay one at a time. I would reread passages and put the book down between essays- it was such an enjoyable reading experience, bite by bite. The first essay on the internet/social media should be required reading for all high schoolers. I highly recommend this book as an entertaining read and a teachable text.

I was given an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Every time I get my New Yorker in the mail, I instantly scan the contents to see if there is any new content by Jia Tolentino. Her writing is fresh, current, relevant, and is always entertaining. When I heard that she was going to put out a book of essays, I cannot express how thrilled I was. I was fortunate enough to be provided an ARC through Netgalley and Random House, and I took my time going through this book. While the writing I usually consume by Tolentino is often reporting, this book contained essays that were more personal than I am used to, from her! I was enthralled. She expertly communicated the problems of this decade, through essays about technology and the age of the internet, reality television, athleisure, wedding culture etc. Occasionally, I recognized tidbits and researched details that she had focused on in her New Yorker pieces, which were, here, weaved into examining this decade through a personal lens. I loved this collection of essays and I will continue to eagerly consume every new piece that Jia Tolentino puts out! I would highly recommend this collection to those who enjoy personal essays and honestly, to any millennial! There are some serious themes discussed in this book but guised in expertly weaved, sharp, and funny writing. Very entertaining!

Lately, I’ve been feeling a bit fatigued by the wave of memoirs or memoirs-disguised-as-essay-collections that have come out from writers (most of them female) with varying degrees of media world or Twitter-based fame—think Shrill by Lindy West or All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung or This Will Be My Undoing by Morgan Jerkins. Many of these books speak to experiences and explore identities that deserve to be broadcast, widely, but as publishers have latched on to the profitability of identity politics and first-person think pieces, I’ve started to wonder if the only way female Internet writers can get published is if they’re writing about themselves—and, specifically, their experiences of marginalization. In the year 2019, when so many of us have become literate in the scripts of progressive discourse regarding identity and the sanctity of individual opinion, all these conversations have started to feel rote and predictable, trapping us in the same ideological holding patterns while we wait for someone to chart a path toward greater (or at least a more complicated kind of) enlightenment.

Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion might just be the course change we need as we approach a new decade. A known figure in that corner of the Internet where literary, cultural, and (progressive) political interests intersect, Tolentino is formerly an editor of The Hairpin and Jezebel and currently occupies the plum position of staff writer for The New Yorker. At 30 years old and the daughter of Filipino immigrants, she very much fits the profile of the kind of young, micro-famous female writer who might be tapped, over and over again, to write about her experiences and the opinions she has formed based on those experiences. But in Trick Mirror, Tolentino is far more interested in interrogation than in mere expression. The nine essays in this razor-sharp collection circle around the notions of identity and the self that have become all-important and inescapable in the Internet era. With remarkable clarity and in good faith, Tolentino highlights the distortions and self-delusions that have festered on digital platforms and begun to spread into our analog lives—and she considers the intellectual rewiring that might be necessary to free us from our overinflated selves.

Trick Mirror’s opening essay, “The I in the Internet,” considers the dangers of the ascendant self as Tolentino maps out how the Internet went from a space of “affinity and openness” in its earliest years to the teeming web of noxious opinions and opposition that it is today. As the 21st century has recast the self as an increasingly vital, often monetizable entity (or what Tolentino describes as the last natural resource of late-stage capitalism), it has become encouraged, if not required, to interpret all data and stimuli through the prism of one’s own specific and limited perspective: “Through social media,” Tolentino writes, “many people have quickly come to view all new information as a sort of direct commentary on who they are.” It follows that the social and market value of personal opinion has ballooned out of all proportion, creating the flawed impression “that speech has an impact, that it’s something like action...that it’s fine or helpful or even ideal to be constantly writing down what you think.” This economy of relentless self-expression is, Tolentino argues, a vortex of diminishing returns, where opposition and anger drive much of our discourse to intellectual dead-ends and prevent us from seeing beyond ourselves to more productive solutions and constructive ways of being.

This idea of the commodified self as an exhausting and increasingly empty distraction recurs in “Always Be Optimizing,” in which Tolentino examines the corrosive but highly-marketable narrative that female self-optimization—made possible by products like frictionless athleisure and inhalable sweetgreen salads—is empowering, necessary, and an end unto itself, rather than a synthetic place-holder for actual social and political gains.

Tolentino does not, however, view identity as anathema to progress. In “Pure Heroines,” an essay that demonstrates Tolentino’s strengths as a cultural critic, she traces the journeys of various heroines in literature and notes that her own nonwhite identity is, in one sense, at odds with the whiteness of the characters she describes. But rather than conclude her thoughts on that expected point, Tolentino digs into the implications of disparate identities and, drawing on the ideas of the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, she reaches for an understanding of self that might build on and incorporate, rather than obviate, collective experience:

“I’ve started to wonder if, through refusing to identify with the heroine, I have actually entrusted myself to her—if, by prioritizing the differences between us...I have been able to affirm my own identity, and perhaps hers, too…. I cling to [this] understanding of these literary heroines as mothers. I wish I had learned to read them in this way years ago—with the same complicated, ambivalent, essential freedom that a daughter feels when she looks at her mother, understanding her as a figure that she simultaneously resists and depends on; a figure that she uses, cruelly and lovingly and gratefully, as the base from which to become something more.”

It is a conception of difference not as a point of severance but rather as a kind of inheritance, a vision in which the project of determining selfhood is open and expansive rather than oppositional and cocooning. (The fluidity of Tolentino’s argumentation and her ability to draw meaningful connections between seemingly polar entities reaches another sublime peak in “Ecstasy,” where she manages to harmonize the disparate subjects of MDMA, the chopped and screwed hip-hop that emerged in Houston in the early ’90s, and her own experiences growing up in an Evangelical Texas megachurch.)

Some essays are, of course, stronger than others. “I Thee Dread” is cathartic for anyone who has ever had to participate in the wedding industrial complex but dismantles its commercially-fabricated traditions and retrograde gender politics with the usual arguments. Similarly, “The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams” is as rigorous as any of the entries in the book but looks at case studies—including Fyre Festival, Elizabeth Holmes, and the 2016 election—that are too well-trod and over-think-pieced to be especially illuminating.

On the whole, though, the essays in Trick Mirror are excellent. With her formidable intellect, Tolentino grapples with the fundamental cultural, political, and digital shifts that have transformed public and private life in recent years. These are changes that many of us have not even begun to reckon with but that have nonetheless altered our very conception of ourselves. Tolentino gives us a place to start, tenaciously pursuing lines of inquiry to new and surprising ends and offering a certain degree of clarity amidst the warped, funhouse reflections of the present era.

This book wasn’t what I was expecting it to be - Jia is a fantastic journalist and essayist, but I couldn’t make it through the first essay (about the internet). Perhaps it will be of more interest to people who are not of the same exact generation/experiences as she is? I won’t be finishing the book and therefore can’t give fair and honest feedback. I genuinely hope it is a success for her!