January Book Club: Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
In the introduction to Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino writes that “A well-practiced, conclusive narrative is usually a dubious one.” This is an interesting claim for a writer to begin her first collection of essays with—for what is a published think-piece, most of the time, but a well-practiced, conclusive narrative designed to express opinions the author has already reached?
But in Tolentino’s hands, happily, the essay is never an exercise in straightforward argument, never entirely conclusive or self-satisfied.
The nine essays in Trick Mirror—whose subtitle is Reflections on Self-Delusion—are open-ended intellectual, emotional, and moral explorations, closer in spirit to the genre’s origin in the French verb essayer: “to try, to attempt.” Whether she is grappling with the spiritual and societal damages of the internet (a well-trodden subject, but one she handles with unique grace and specificity), journeying into the expensive and gendered world of athleisure and high-end exercise, or chronicling her childhood in a Texas megachurch, Tolentino writes with an eye toward complexities, contradictions, and hypocrisies—including her own. She is not afraid to reveal her own attraction to the pricy barre classes she critiques, the ways her career depends on social media, or the thoughtless things she said as a teenager on a long-gone reality show.
I’ve admired Tolentino’s New Yorker writer pieces for several years now, and it comes as no surprise to me that she is now being heralded as “the Joan Didion of our times” and even, gasp, “the voice of her generation” (a title she vigorously rejects). For in acknowledging her own complicity in the systems she so skillfully dissects and criticizes, she has found a voice that perfectly expresses the uncertainty and complexity so many young adults—myself and many of my friends included—feel in this moment of online hyper acceleration and political turmoil. In this collection, she has the audacity to hold up this uncertainty, and the willingness to own it, as useful and even necessary in these times.
Written by John Shakespear
Posted January 24, 2020