Mariah Kreutter
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, by Jia Tolentino, Random House, 320 pp., $27
In June of 2019, the writer Jia Tolentino bought a $38 Tatcha lip balm, a $22 bag of weed-infused espresso beans, and a $65 potted plant. On July 24th, she went to Carbone, an upscale red sauce Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village, with three friends, where they drank two bottles of wine and a round of Montenegros, before heading to Sing Sing for six hours of Fireball-fueled karaoke. And on August 1st, she was reading Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener, a copy of which sat on her nightstand.
I don’t know these facts because I stalk her; I know them because, in the week preceding the release of her first book, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, Tolentino participated in what someone on Twitter called the Triple Crown of New York City millennial media book promotion: New York Magazine’s “Guest Strategist Haul” and “Grub Street Diet,” and the New York Times’ “By the Book,” plus a number of other similar features. These are formulaic, breezy columns in which mildly to extremely famous individuals tell readers about things they’ve consumed. They contain affiliate links (often to Amazon) so that readers, too, can consume these things. Into the Gloss, the blog that launched the beauty brand Glossier, featured Tolentino in its own iteration of this column, “Top Shelf.” In the upper-right corner of the webpage was a small banner, adorned with a cherry, reading “Shop Glossier.”
There was something exhausting about Tolentino’s media blitz, and she knew it. Man Repeller — a fashion blog that has expanded into e-commerce, selling charm earrings and giant barrettes for prices in the triple digits — published a roundup titled “Let Us Luxuriate in the Next-Level Media Blitz for a Very Good Book.” Tolentino retweeted it with the caption, “You know you’re overexposed when there’s an aggregation of your overexposure & you know you’re extremely lucky when it’s this funny and kind 🌷”. Eventually, there was a parody installment: a profile of Tolentino’s dog, Luna, by Jezebel writer Clio Chang: “Luna is large like a mountain, but shapely like a pear…As I prepare to leave, I crouch down on the floor with her and ask her whether she thinks she’s the key voice of her generation.” It was the entire life cycle that characterizes the internet — subject, exposure, memeification, selling shit, backlash, parody, amnesia, and, in this case, ironic reappraisal — in a single book tour.
I’m bringing all this up because Trick Mirror is primarily about two things, the internet and capitalism, and it seems impossible to talk about the book without mentioning everything that surrounds it. Tolentino, who has written about everything from vaping to Instagram Face to TikTok for the dignified cultural juggernaut that is the New Yorker, is a cult figure for a certain demographic. That demographic is 21-year-olds who carry New Yorker tote bags and write for their college book review, which is to say me, and probably also you. Reading every entry in the Tolentino media blitz, I was struck by the things I could buy or eat or read or smear onto my face that seemed to solidify into a certain kind of life, a life I wanted, and I felt hungry in a deeply intellectually unserious way. I would’ve liked to read a Jia Tolentino essay about the whole scenario.
“The I in the Internet,” the book’s first essay, comes closest. It’s a critique of contemporary digital culture that doubles as a personal history of the internet. Tolentino leads us through her early LiveJournal and Angelfire pages, including a post she wrote at age ten called “The Story of How Jia Got Her Web Addiction,” up through her beginnings as a freelance writer in the blog era, when she realized it was professionally useful to create what we now call a personal brand. “In doing this, I have sometimes felt the same sort of unease that washed over me when I was a cheerleader and learned how to convincingly fake happiness at football games — the feeling of acting as if conditions are fun and normal and worthwhile in the hopes that they will just magically become so,” she writes. (Cue the Glossier ad.)
Tolentino is very good at pinpointing inconsistencies, ironies, and the kind of flawed logic I can only call doublethink. Like any good critic, she can name problems — with Twitter discourse, with popular women’s literature, with marriage — but she’s hesitant to offer solutions. I appreciated the book’s general lack of interest in prescriptiveness. There’s a strain of pessimism in Tolentino’s work, which has drawn ire from both directions (she’s too nihilistic! No, she’s not nihilistic enough!), but I find her tempered, clear-eyed realism refreshing and honest. “The I in the Internet,” which begins with the downright Biblical “In the beginning the internet seemed good,” ends on something of an intellectualized shrug emoji: “What could put an end to the worst of the internet?” she asks. “We’d have to care less about our identities, to be deeply skeptical of our own unbearable opinions, to be careful about when opposition serves us… The alternative is unspeakable. But you know that — it’s already here.”
The best essays in the book all come right at the beginning. “The I in the Internet” is followed by “Reality TV Me,” one of the most thoughtful reflections on reality television and the performance of selfhood I’ve ever read. Tolentino frames her teenage appearance on a (painfully tame, by today’s standards) reality show called Girls vs. Boys: Puerto Rico as a kind of excavation of an archaeological ruin — because anything without clips on Youtube qualifies as an archaeological ruin. Like the previous essay, it allows Tolentino to do what she does best: criticism filtered through the self. She reckons with her own constructed narratives and, yes, self-delusions, about her teenaged meanness, and especially with her belief that the whole thing had just happened to her. “It is now obvious to me, as it always should have been, that a sixteen-year-old doesn’t end up running around in a bikini and pigtails on television unless she also desperately wants to be seen,” she writes. The essay takes on a metatextual grimness in its placement after “The I in the Internet,” and really in the context of the Tolentino Media Blitz as a whole. “We were categorized as characters,” she writes of her time on Girls vs. Boys, before reflecting on how her position as a character in the digital landscapes that I’ve seen termed “Literary Brooklyn” or “New York Media Twitter” is hardly any different: “The process of calibrating my external self became so instinctive, so automatic, that I stopped being able to perceive it.”
And, well, the character works. The most successful essays in the book tend to straddle cultural criticism and memoir. Tolentino needs an outside subject to play off of. Her purely memoiristic pieces — like “Ecstasy,” which was excerpted to great acclaim in the New Yorker — can feel loose and sludgy. The analysis isn’t as sharp; the connections aren’t as airtight. The interplay in that piece between drugs and religion struck me as fairly played-out, and I wasn’t convinced by her writing on the Houston hip-hop scene. On the other hand, pieces without the “Jia” character can seem a bit lifeless. “The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams,” the essay that most consciously tries to Explain Millennials, is overly broad. Taking Fyre Festival as a starting point, it jumps from the 2008 financial crisis to #GirlBoss to Amazon to Trump in search of a grand, unifying theory of youthful cynicism, and hardly does any of the things that usually make Tolentino’s writing interesting. Each subsection, independently, feels like the beginning of an interesting essay, but the burden of supporting such a massive narrative prevents any of them from feeling fully-formed. Tolentino’s writing, usually so sharp, begins to seem obligatory: not bad, but you start to wonder, while turning the pages, if you’re actually going to hear anything new. Tolentino is capable of much more than the cultural criticism version of a Vine compilation.
But the good essays are brilliant. My favorite was “Always Be Optimizing,” one of those startlingly lucid pieces that names a phenomenon you’ve never quite been able to put your finger on but that seems obvious in hindsight. The essay takes Tolentino’s extensive experience with barre classes and Sweetgreen kale salads as key examples of a contemporary obsession with optimization, with everything and everyone being, not the thinnest, not the sexiest — oh God no, how regressive — but the best. “I had been primed, first with my girlishly regimented physical training — dance, gymnastics, cheerleading — and then with yoga, my therapeutic on-ramp to the thing I was slowly realizing, which was that you could, without obvious negative consequences, control the way your body felt on the inside and worked on the outside by paying people to give you orders in a small, mirrored room,” she writes of her own conversion to barre classes. That kind of criticism, funneled through the first-person, is one thing I love in Tolentino’s writing.
The other thing I love is her inversion of widely-accepted narratives. The idea that it's deeply destructive for society to expect us to be in constant pursuit of a better self is just counterintuitive enough to be radical. After all, “The best” is hard to argue with. “Your best,” as skincare and exercise companies love to frame it, is even harder. Isn’t that what we were taught as children: be the best you can be? (The dead-eyed political limpness of this ideology is captured nowhere so clearly as in Melania Trump’s confusing “Be Best” initiative, which is maybe about the opioid crisis, or is it online bullying?) But Tolentino cracks open the endless quest for self-improvement and lays its corrosive core bare. “If women start to resist an aesthetic, like the overapplication of Photoshop, the aesthetic just changes to suit us; the power of the ideal image never actually wanes,” she writes.
There is a decided uneasiness to the contrast between Tolentino’s writing and the landscape she inhabits. Was that “Into the Gloss” feature selling out? Was Tolentino exploiting the same capitalist structures she critiques as soon as it came time to try and sell her book? Eh. Maybe? She never holds herself separate from the systems she mistrusts; she writes honestly about her personal investment in everything from Twitter to butt exercises. (“Why do I have such a personal relationship with my face wash?” she asks in “Always Be Optimizing.” “Why have I sunk thousands of dollars over the past half decade into ensuring that I can abuse my body on weekends without changing the way it looks?”) She’s less interested in individual choices than in the undercurrents that society floats on. The uneasiness, I think, is part of the point: Tolentino’s emphasis on the collective might be defeatist, but it doesn’t lack nuance.
One thing I did miss from Trick Mirror was her humor. There were certainly moments of sharp wit and goofiness: she describes Spandex as “uniquely flexible, resilient, and strong” and then takes an absurdist turn in a parenthetical: “(‘Just like us, ladies!’ I might scream, onstage at an empowerment conference, blood streaming from my eyes.)” But overall this feels like a different, more self-consciously professional version of Tolentino than the one who appears in her iconic New Yorker piece on Juuling or even her Grub Street Diet, which includes a flawless example of comedic timing in written work that revolves around the phrase (spoilers!) “fucking that rigatoni in the ass.” Part of me wonders if that’s a natural writerly maturation, or if she felt the pressure of expectation to produce an Important Book. (Those Sontag comparisons on the jacket don’t come cheap.)
Critiquing a critic can sometimes feel like a losing battle, and I’m currently finding myself at a loss about how to end this review. What do I want people to take away from reading it? “Book Good”? “Book Overrated”? “Author Criticizes Capitalism Yet Peculiarly Also Attempts to Sell Book”? Okay, not the last one. But then the idea of a bite-sized take-away is antithetical to what Trick Mirror is about. In an interview with the luxury fashion e-retailer turned online culture magazine Ssense (typing that gave me a hernia), Tolentino said that she didn’t want people to “take away” anything from the book. “I’m like: nothing. Not nothing. The way my brain works is that I was trying to self-correct against a forceful quality of argumentation that I already have.” Again, Tolentino’s not looking for easy answers or sound bite-able solutions. If anything, she’s trying to counteract our obsession with our own opinions: “You will never catch me arguing that professional opinion-havers in the age of the internet are, on the whole, a force for good,” she writes, even as she acknowledges her culpability as one of said opinion-havers.
The essays in Trick Mirror are mostly just thought-provoking. That seems like faint praise — the book-review equivalent of calling something “interesting” in seminar — but the quality of provoking genuine thought is rarer than the platitude suggests. Some essays could’ve used more editing, but none are lacking in observational or critical dexterity. They didn’t exactly fill me with hope, as Zadie Smith wrote in her blurb, but there is a perverse comfort in reading a masterful taxonomy of 21st-century ills. Ultimately, the essays add up to a vision of the world as it is without ever attempting to articulate the world as it could be. Is that radical or lazy? At the very least, Jia Tolentino wants us to figure that out on our own.
Mariah Kreutter is a senior majoring in English at Yale.