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!