NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “From The New Yorker’s beloved cultural critic comes a bold, unflinching collection of essays about self-deception, examining everything from scammer culture to reality television.”—Esquire Book Club Pick for Now Read This, from PBS NewsHour and The New York Times • “A whip-smart, challenging book.”—Zadie Smith • “Jia Tolentino could be the Joan Didion of our time.”… Smith • “Jia Tolentino could be the Joan Didion of our time.”—Vulture
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE’S JOHN LEONARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY AND HARVARD CRIMSON AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • Time • Chicago Tribune • The Washington Post • NPR • Variety • Esquire • Vox • Elle • Glamour • GQ • Good Housekeeping • The Paris Review • Paste • Town & Country • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews • BookRiot • Shelf Awareness
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.
FINALIST FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY
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The essays in the collection reflect a range of topics but are all angled in some way toward the self. Specifically, the different ways that external forces (in which we invest our time, money, and attention) help shape our sense of ourselves.
Readers looking for a moral in every essay will be disappointed, as Tolentino isn’t interested in a black-and-white approach to any subject. What she does offer the reader is the first step toward any kind of change: to pay attention, gather information, interrogate assumptions, and ask yourself if what you see is really what you get.
Probably my favorite essay of Tolentino’s is “Ecstasy,” an analytical but also beautifully lyrical crash course that ties Tolentino’s experience growing up in an evangelical Christian community to the history of Houston rap, religious mysticism, and the rise of two different drugs — ecstasy and codeine cough syrup, aka “lean.” Fellow book lovers will definitely enjoy “Pure Heroines,” an essay that is both a tribute and a takedown of literary heroines, tracking their rise and fall from children’s literature to young adult and beyond, into the realm of literary and contemporary fiction.
I wasn’t familiar with Jia Tolentino when I requested this. I was intrigued by the title, cover, and blurb. When I started reading, I was a little worried I was falling into some sort of Millennial-takes-herself-too-seriously world, one in which being on a reality show as a teen meant she thought she should be an arbiter of pop culture and that this somehow earned her chops as a *real* thinker/writer/personality.
Wow, was I mistaken.
I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of essays, finding them thoughtful and provocative and very well written.
Tolentino may have started out on her path to fame in a way that made me roll my eyes (sorry!) but somewhere along the way she developed a keen sense of herself, her generation, and the world around her – and her ability to translate that sense into language that is engaging, thought-provoking, and brutally upfront about the realities of being a woman in the modern world caught me off guard.
This was a marvelous collection of essays – I’ve talked her/the book up to my step-daughter, who is also a young woman making her way in this hot mess of a contemporary world we find ourselves in, and think she could do way worse in finding a guide along the way. True, there were a few eye-rolling moments (Tolentino, as is the case with so many writers who expound on the nature of the world around them, occasionally takes herself a wee-bit too seriously), but on the whole I found this to be a powerful collection of thoughts on the way the world looks – and works…
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for my review copy.
Essays for our times written by a thoughtful and intelligent writer with her eyes opened on the significance of what is happening to her and to us.
Hard to read and chapters seemed to drag on. The messaging was pertinent though!
Jia Tolentino asks us to examine the influences which determine who we are.She writes Regarding the internet When the internet moved to an organizing principle of opposition , much of what had formerly been surprising ,rewarding. and curious became tedious,noxious and grim .But the worst the internet gets ,the more we appear to crave it – the more it gains the power to shape our instincts and desires To guard against this , I give myself arbitrary boundaries. The author is wise in asking us to question our reality and the hours we spend on line
This book was brilliant – smart, incisive and sharp. I was so happy that someone finally expressed all my complicated internal ramblings in a way that was articulate and made sense. I look forward to reading everything Jia Tolentino writes in the future.