Jia Tolentino’s debut, “Trick Mirror: Reflections on self-delusion,” is a series of nine critical and personal essays — the kind of thing you would normally read on the internet about the internet without actually being on the internet (and the eye strain that comes from staring at screens for too long).
It’s the kind of thing you pick up when you want to be connected to the world — to think about the Fyre Festival and feminist and Facebook and #MeToo and reality TV and avocado toast generation — while simultaneously being disconnected.
The format, 303 printed pages, means you’re not going to be distracted by addicting and self-affirming notifications that feed into your self-worth or PEOPLE SHOUTING AT YOU ON TWITTER or creepy and annoying popup ads that follow you around or thoughts of, “What was I searching for again?” — although you may be thinking of some of those things while reading the first essay in this series, “The I in the Internet,” which documents the evolution of the internet from the place of “ULTIMATE COOL” to the tiresome place which Tolentino describes as “like a rat pressing the lever, like a woman repeatedly hitting myself on the forehead with a hammer masturbating through the nightmare until I finally catch the gasoline whiff of a good meme.”
She writes this because “writing is my only strategy for making this conflict go away” — the conflict of optimizing your time to the point that you’re working through your lunch break but not getting paid more to do so (as detailed in the essay “Always Be Optimizing”), or the conflict of still paying for Amazon Prime despite knowing that the company treats humans like machines (as documented in the essay, “The Story of a Generation of Seven Scams”), or the conflict of spending a full year’s salary and work on a day’s celebration of supposed “I do’s” where the woman agrees to give up her maiden and family name to belong to another (as mentioned in “I Thee Dread,” an essay about not wanting to get married).
Through these reflections, Tolentino writes about “the prisms through which I have come to know myself,” and in doing so, she also holds a mirror to every other 20- and 30-something-year-old woman in the United States.
I could see myself in the cracks of Tolentino’s mirror when she writes about buying Lululemon leggings to wear at the gym or about becoming frustrated with female literary role models because of their tendency to disappear by either getting raped, killed or married. Reading “Trick Mirror” is like reading about another potential version of myself — of who I could have become if I grew up in Houston or pursued cheerleading after middle school or if I moved to New York City or if I still wrote essays like I did in college English classes. If I was more confident and less self-conscious, would I have ended up on a reality TV show like Tolentino did (which she writes about in the essay “Reality TV Me”)? Would I have written and published a book by now? Or ended up as a staff writer at The New Yorker?
Like Tolentino, an Asian American who was once told she had to be the Yellow Power Ranger, I grew up with very limited Halloween costume choices that I could have convincingly pulled off: No. 1. being Cho Chang from “Harry Potter”; or No. 2. being the Yellow Power Ranger; or No. 3. being Mulan.
I was (and sometimes still am) convinced that I don’t belong because I didn’t see another Asian face in the books I read or the movies and television shows I watched. And while the mid-2010s gave us shows like ABC’s “Fresh Off the Boat” and movies like “Crazy Rich Asians” and “To All The Boys I Loved Before,” it’s hard to shake the feeling that you can be a mermaid or the main character in your own story when everything else you grew up with told you otherwise.
But Tolentino’s “Trick Mirror” gives me hope.
“I couldn’t be the Pink Ranger, which meant I couldn’t be Baby Spice,” she wrote in her essay “Pure Heroines.” “I couldn’t be Laura Ingalls, rocking her bench until she got kicked out of the classroom; I couldn’t be Claudia Kincaid, taking baths in the cousins at the Met.”
But Tolentino became something better — she became a published author — and shows us that there’s a path forward for those of us self-deluded enough to want to become that, too; please don’t let that be a trick, too.
“Trick Mirror: Reflections on self-delusion”
By Jia Torentino
303 pp. Random House. $27.
2019.
Pass the Popcorn 