Tolentino’s Essays Cut Through the Internet’s Din

Jia Tolentino was one of my favorite writers long before every 20-something in Brooklyn started posting pictures of her new book on their Instagram story. I say this not for the bragging rights, which no one cares about, but because I can truthfully say, having read everything she’s written for the public, “Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion” is a crystallized distillation of the elements that make her an essayist to look up to. In an era in which finding a voice that cuts through the din of the internet is exhausting, “Trick Mirror” is the book I have been looking for, in my growing desperation to accumulate writers who keep me grounded through their articulation of treading contradictions. 

“Trick Mirror” includes essays previously published in The New Yorker and a couple of new ones. The first two, about the internet and a reality show she filmed at 16, weave together sharp observations about the creation of a performative self for various audiences, including those online. “Always Be Optimizing” is one of the best explanations I’ve seen in years of how we are fooling ourselves celebrating certain feminist gains. Just because we might be past thinking the ideal woman is a demure wife and mother, she warns, doesn’t mean we’ve stopped expecting some kind of ideal. 

Through exploring athleisure and the lifestyle it’s built to maintain — full of expensive barre classes, chopped salads, smoothies, and the Instagram posts documenting it all — she reveals what branded lifestyles might be costing us.  Her final essay, “I Thee Dread,” lays bare the extreme commodification within the wedding industrial complex, one that offers women infinite ways to wring perfection out of themselves. Tolentino has articulated exactly why I feel anxious eating at Sweetgreen, why I’m intrigued against my will by Glossier and why we’re all crankily hooked on our relentless quests for self improvement. 

Other standouts — from tracing a family tree of literary heroines, to an exploration of the triangulation of drugs, music and religion, to her navigation of reporting on sexual assault during her early editorial years — make it clear why Tolentino has been compared to several older great writers, Joan Didion and Renata Adler among them. Originally, these comparisons might have been meant stylistically, but they feel more useful in placing her writing slightly outside what might be considered her milieu. 

Though she writes about topics on which plenty of others are currently spilling ink — or whatever the digital equivalent is of spilling ink — she avoids the excessively quippy, biting tone of much of today’s cultural criticism. Tolentino ponders. She is unafraid of uncertainty, willing to use her own life as a test case and let us draw our own conclusions, and carries the weight of both the dry existentialism that feels inevitable in today’s cultural criticism and the possibilities of hope. 

“Trick Mirror” is one of the most cohesive collections I’ve ever read, flinging me out of an inarticulate discomfort into some sort of truth. 

“Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion” by Jia Tolentino is available in bookstores and online now.