Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

By Jia Tolentino

A Times book of the year A Guardian book of the year ‘Magnificent’The Times ‘Dazzling’ New Statesman ‘It filled me with hope’ Zadie Smith

We are living in the era of the self, in an era of malleable truth and widespread personal and political delusion. In these nine interlinked essays, Jia Tolentino, the New Yorker’s brightest young talent, explores her own coming of age in this warped and confusing landscape.

From the rise of the internet to her own appearance on an early reality TV show; from her experiences of ecstasy – both religious and chemical – to her uneasy engagement with our culture’s endless drive towards ‘self-optimisation’; from the phenomenon of the successful American scammer to her generation’s obsession with extravagant weddings, Jia Tolentino writes with style, humour and a fierce clarity about these strangest of times.

Following in the footsteps of American luminaries such as Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Rebecca Solnit, yet with a voice and vision all her own, Jia Tolentino writes with a rare gift for elucidating nuance and complexity, coupled with a disarming warmth. This debut collection of her essays announces her exactly the sort of voice we need to hear from right now – and for many years to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Aug 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9780008294946

Jia Tolentino

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at the New Yorker, the author of the essay collection Trick Mirror, and a screenwriter. Formerly, she was the deputy editor at Jezebel and a contributing editor at the Hairpin. In 2020, she received a Whiting Award as well as the Jeannette Haien Ballard Prize. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine and Pitchfork, among other places. She lives in Brooklyn.

Reviews for Trick Mirror

[capewood · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

T/FB: 2021 Book #78. 2018. Tolentino is the co-author of the New Yorker article that started the "Free Britney" business. The book is a series of essays about social media, drug use, feminism, and her, considering she was only 30 when she wrote it, interesting life. Good book.

[addunn3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The author hives some interesting perspectives of women, discrimination, and culture.

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fascinating collection of essays, looking at modern forms of self-delusion. The writing is often personal, and while that might alienate some (I've read reviews elsewhere saying that the reader couldn't relate to the writer as much as they wished) I think it adds an extra dimension to the point being relayed. The essay on the various scams that are central to modern America is one of the strongest, and if you aren't angry when you come to the end of that piece you haven't been paying attention.

[thereserose5 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed these essays. My favorite by far was I Thee Dread, but the overall voice of the book was strong and these were clearly well-researched.

[tytania-2 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Collection of essays. She's better when not talking about herself.

She's in her 30s, Filipina, grew up in Houston in an evangelical church, and as a teenager was a cheerleader and appeared in a reality TV show. I can't relate remotely to this person.

[streamsong_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Author [[Jia Tolentino]] is known as a ‘quintessentially millennial’ author and essayist.
Her essays cover a wide variety of subjects, and the subjects were a bit hit or miss for this older reader.

Some were not relatable to my casual, retired lifestyle. These included growing up with the internet, being a teen reality TV star, Barre exercise classes and the need for women, especially professional city women hoping to rise in their profession, to be ‘constantly optimizing’ their looks and bodies.

Others essays were of more interest. One of these was the rape culture on various campuses, including the University of Virginia that she attended.

I was also interested in her essay ‘Ecstasy’ where she compared religion to drug addiction. It’s an old trope (“Religion is the opiate of the masses”) but she had interesting twists on the idea – especially as she grew up in a Texas evangelical mega church (which she dubbed ‘The Repentagon’), attending private Christian schools. She later left the evangelicals and dabbled with drugs.

My favorite essay was “Pure Heroines”; a survey of literature’s women protagonists – from the independent childhood heroines such as Anne Shirley and Harriet the Spy, to the blank ‘Mary Sues’ of The Hunger Games and Twilight and to the ‘happily ever afters’ of 19th and 20th century fiction when marriage was the ultimate fulfillment. She lists some 40 books and authors, and I am tempted to read the half that I have not yet read.

“If you were a girl, and you were imagining your life through literature, you would go from innocence in childhood to sadness in adolescence to bitterness in adulthood – at which point, if you hadn’t killed yourself already, you would simply disappear.” P 95

Pithy, witty writing. I believe that some of the topics may appeal most to younger readers, and though I hate to sound sexist, I believe many of her topics might appeal more to women readers than to men.

I’ll average the 5 star essays and the 3 star essays to a solid 4 star rating.

[kglattstein · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have to admit that I absolutely loved some of the essays, some of them were tedious and too wordy, and I skimmed some. I have this book on my list to reread. All of Jia's commentary is intelligent and well presented - especially for someone like me who is a little "older" and wanting a little view into the mind of a millennial. A number of books I've picked up have not connected or I found a little whiney or too obvious in their attempt to persuade the reader toward their point of view as if there is no other. This book is definitely none of that. Jia writes about her experiences and perceptions about current issues based on those experiences. I found all of her writing gave me insight into another way of thinking - one which I was seeking.

[kwharton-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

So many spoilers in the "Pure Heroines" chapter! Don't read it if you don't like spoilers! There are spoilers about Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Twilight, The Virgin Suicides, and probably many others I can't remember.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.