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. 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.

Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. 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. In Trick Mirror, Tolentino expands her method and style, developing what amounts to a meditation on the consolations of a culture in which people (particularly women) are made to feel complicit in their own degradation.Publisher Synopsis: Jia Tolentino is a peerless voice of her generation, tackling the conflicts, contradictions, and sea changes that define us and our time.

Since joining the New Yorker as a staff writer in 2016, Tolentino has produced a variety of spectacular and important journalism about both the gravely serious (including some of the most formidable analysis of Bill Cosby’s trial and the Harvey Weinstein case) and the ostensibly frivolous (Tolentino, the pre-eminent documenter of Twitter culture, identifies where it is literary and where it is dangerous in 2018 she also wrote an extraordinary investigation into the rise of vaping in US schools). With Trick Mirror: Reflections on self-delusion, Tolentino has produced a début collection of essays so insightful and moving that it appears to exist in a genre separate to so much perpetually circulated personal and political writing, the surfeit of which seems to define our era. Many do it well, but few do it as shrewdly as Jia Tolentino. Writers describing the contemporary moment abound.

Trick mirror book review