Please Fire Jia Tolentino
Jia Tolentino. Photo: © Elena Mudd.
Is there any topic Jia Tolentino can’t tackle? Since becoming a staff writer for The New Yorker in 2016, she’s written features about the electronic cigarette brand Juul and the culty athleisure company Outdoor Voices; commentaries on the disastrous Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the violent rise of incels; and examinations of the “large adult son” meme and the YouTube phenomenon of remixing popular songs so they sound like they’re echoing in abandoned malls. In the early years of her professional writing career, she conducted a series of funny yet deeply sympathetic interviews with adult virgins at The Hairpin, and her work as deputy editor at Jezebel helped shape online feminist discourse as we now know it. She also has an M.F.A. in fiction, and the first short story she ever submitted won Carve magazine’s Raymond Carver Contest. “If I got fired tomorrow,” she told me, “I would probably go to the woods and try to write a novel.” Even her tweets are good; for what it’s worth, my introduction to her work came via the occasional dog photos and thoughts on music she posts, which are often the bright spots in my feed.
What unites these wildly disparate threads is Tolentino herself. Although she’s been called the voice of her generation, her writing is sharp, clear, and utterly her own. Tolentino’s first book, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, vibrates with her presence. Over the course of nine long original essays, she turns inside out the fast-casual restaurants, pricey exercise classes, and dubiously simple narratives we use to propel ourselves through our overmediated lives. The result is a sort of revision of Joan Didion’s “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” for the late-capitalist horror show
