Book Review: "Trick Mirror" by Jia Tolentino
“Trick Mirror” by Jia Tolentino
Publisher Synopsis: Jia Tolentino is a peerless voice of her generation, tackling the conflicts, contradictions, and sea changes that define us and our time. Now, in this dazzling collection of nine entirely original essays, written with a rare combination of give and sharpness, wit and fearlessness, she delves into the forces that warp our vision, demonstrating an unparalleled stylistic potency and critical dexterity.
Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly through a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Tolentino writes about a cultural prism: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the advent of scamming as the definitive millennial ethos; the literary heroine’s journey from brave to blank to bitter; the punitive dream of optimization, which insists that everything, including our bodies, should become more efficient and beautiful until we die. Gleaming with Tolentino’s sense of humor and capacity to elucidate the impossibly complex in an instant, and marked by her desire to treat the reader with profound honesty, Trick Mirror is an instant classic of the worst decade yet.
Rating (out of 5): 5
Review: I’ll admit that, while I’ve read Jia Tolentino’s pieces for The New Yorker, she was never a writer I specifically sought out. That absolutely changed after I read this book of 9 essays. I’ll also admit to rolling my eyes a bit anytime someone is described as a “voice of their generation” (thanks, Lena Dunham). But, these essays were not just good, they were insanely thought-provoking and even educational, which is what all outstanding essays should be.
First off, Jia is brilliant. And it comes across in her writing. Reading these essays made me feel dumb. When she took us on a journey of her evangelical Christian upbringing and then started comparing religious experiences to mind-altering drugs, with historical references not just sprinkled throughout, but everywhere, I was just like, “…damn.” Vulture calls her a modern-day Joan Didion, and that certainly isn’t a stretch. It’s kind of hard to review essays like this because they touch on so many different subjects (as you can see from the summary), and make so many pop culture and historical references, but I will say, just read it.
While there are 9 essays, some spoke to me more than others, so in the interest of keeping this review as short as possible, here’s a look at my favorites.
The essay on scamming as the “definitive millennial ethos” was a delight. (And also depressing.) Interspersed with pieces on pop-culture-popular scams such as Fyre Festival, Anna Delvey (read our review of “My Friend Anna” here), #GirlBoss and goofy start-up tech scams, are looks at the actual scams that severely affected the lives of our generation: the student debt crisis, social media, the housing crisis and Great Recession, “disruptors” like Amazon, and of course, the 2016 presidential election. Jia made me want to delete my Facebook account and start shopping local again. And, I could not love her take on #GirlBoss more; she perfectly articulated my feelings on manufactured, mass-produced, commercialist feminism:
The problem is that a feminism that prioritizes the individual will always, at its core, be at odds with a feminism that prioritizes the collective. The problem is that it is so easy today for a woman to seize upon an ideology she believes in and then exploit it, or deploy it in a way that actually runs counter to that ideology.
I knew I would appreciateThe Cult of the Difficult Woman going in. Jia takes a look at how ineffective it is to use celebrities as a teaching tool for feminism online, and how our increased awareness of feminism may actually be backfiring, because it can lead us to praise a woman specifically because she’s criticized (see: Kellyanne Conway).
Women claiming the power and agency that historically belonged to men is both the story of female evil and the story of female liberation. To work for the latter, you have to be willing to invoke the former: liberation is often mistaken for evil as it occurs.
Jia goes back to Eve and Delilah (yes in the Bible), and then brings it all the way home to Hillary Clinton, and how the women in the Trump administration have benefited from misplaced feminism (“the pop-feminism reflex of honoring women for achieving visibility and power, no matter how they did so”).
Also, I was relieved her take on Hillary Clinton was the same as my own.
The last essay, I Thee Dread, was a delight. Jia looks back on the 46 weddings she and her partner have been invited to, and examines why she herself does not want to get married. She takes us on a historical journey of the Wedding Industrial Complex (did you know Marshall Field’s invented the wedding registry in 1924? Now you do), and reminds us that historically, marriage has been great for men and shitty for women. (OK, that’s not the exact language she used.) She examines how women are affected by wedding planning, and how much the whole damn thing costs, and ultimately determines that, “I don’t want to be diminished, and I do want to be glorified—not in one shining moment [her hypothetical wedding], but whenever I want.”
There’s also a very personal essay on sex, race, and power against the backdrop of Jia’s alma mater, the University of Virginia. (You may remember the Rolling Stone journalistic nightmare from a few years ago.) This examined campus sexual assault, fraternity culture, race, and even journalistic ethics. I went to a large Southern state school as well, hence the photo of the book against the backdrop of the University of Georgia’s famous arch. (I just happened to be in Athens a few weeks ago.) Much like UVA, UGA its own skeletons in the closet, and, while I loved my time there in the mid- to late-2000s, I look back on it and realize how fucked up some of the systems were, and likely still are.
TL;DR: A fresh look at life in 2019, running the gamut from athleisure, drugs, Hillary Clinton, Joan of Arc, reality TV, chopped salad chains, sexual assault, race and power, and how scams have defined our lives. Just read it. First you’ll feel dumb because Jia’s so smart, then you’ll feel better for having read it.
If you liked this, try:
“Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger” by Rebecca Traister
“I Know What I’m Doing and Other Lies I Tell Myself” by Jen Kirkman
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