I think my friend Kirsty first mentioned Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino, and it falls in a genre I particularly like – the sort of essay that is both personal and well-researched. When they lean too much one way (entirely confessional without any sort of context) it can feel a little unrelenting. If they fall more into the objective-research category, then I don’t feel sufficient connection.
The latter, of course, has been a mainstay of essay-writing forever. In recent years, a number of excellent essayists have written in the area I most appreciate. (Recent-ish works I’ve admired are Notes to Self by Emilie Pine, Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm, Toxic by Sarah Ditum, Notes From No-Man’s Land by Eula Biss, The Wreckage of My Presence by Casey Wilson, Miss Fortune by Lauren Weedman. Probably not a coincidence that they’re all by women.)
Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2019) puts ‘self’ right in the title, and there is certainly a lot of reflecting in every sense of the world. She holds up a mirror to her own life constantly – but it is a large mirror, and she gathers in a large number of people standing around her. She sees herself in a number of different groups, about whom she writes en masse – be that millennials, women, millennial women, non-Caucasians, internet-users, unmarried people etc. It works because she doesn’t wield the sort of unanswerable certainty that we see in right-wing column writers and Twitter firebrands. Tolentino’s thoughts on (say) how we represent ourselves on social media would be self-indulgent if she considered herself a lone example of the insecure bravado of internet posting – and far-reachingly bland if she thought everybody was exactly the same. Tolentino finds the middle ground, which sounds like a wide path but is surprisingly seldom trodden.
In each essay, Tolentino often moves from the specific to the broad. In the case of that internet-essay (‘The I in the Internet’), she starts from reading back over a blog she launched in her middle teens, and almost as quickly gave up on. It harkens back to a more innocent (perhaps) era of the internet, where the ‘blog’ section of a free website was about the only place you could launch these performances of the e-self – but Tolentino follows the connected line between this sort of phenomenon and the place we find ourselves now. As she does so, she takes in more and more of the internet landscape, and I found it a compelling take even in a much-discussed arena.
Continuing that specific vs broad and personal vs universal line: Tolentino is at her best when she can combine them, leaning on the specific and personal. Easily my favourite essay in the collection was ‘Reality TV Me’, where Tolentino looks back on her appearance in a short-lived, little-known American reality TV show Girls v Boys. What makes it a fascinating essay isn’t Tolentino’s relation of her experiences – it’s the clever way she comments on the memories. She had never watched the full show – and finds that she has misremembered many elements of it, partly in service to her construction of her own identity. She gets back in touch with the other contestants and, together, they analyse how they were cast, which archetypes they were intended to represent, how the show formed their understanding of themselves, and how their recollections of it relate to it. It’s a layered, complex, extremely well-constructed essay.
Leaning more towards the detailed research side of things is ‘We Come From Old Virginia’, about rape culture on university campuses. It’s a tough, brilliant essay. Even in an era where sexual assault and sexual violence is more widely recognised and discussed than in the past, there is still a lot that shocks and saddens in this essay. It links to the essay on reality TV in its unravelling of memory and truth – centred around a notorious rape claim in Rolling Stone that turned out to include many false details. It is brave to include this sort of scandal in a feminist book – it could too easily have seemed to downplay rape culture, and was used as such by some commentators at the time – but Tolentino writes with nuance, insight and compassion. Above all, she asks, why is the false accusation of rape considered so much worse a crime to many (especially right-wing men, but beyond that too) than rape itself.
At the other end of the spectrum, Tolentino is weakest when she treads old ground. Does anybody really need her takes on marriage as a patriarchal institution? The fact that she doesn’t want to get married is only really interesting to her (and her boyfriend, I suppose). ‘I Thee Dread’ is the most formulaic essay of the lot, and has no specific hook to hang on. ‘The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams’ is interesting but, again, the idea that capitalism is rewarding the super-wealthy and nobody else isn’t ground-breaking. The one turn to literary criticism – ‘Pure Heroines’ – is solid but unexceptional.
I started reading around Trick Mirror and its reception, and discovered the furore around a piece of criticism by Lauren Oyler in London Review of Books, unforgivably badly titled ‘Ha ha! Ha ha!‘ (I don’t know if a sub-editor is to blame for that title, but they should be suspended without pay.) Oyler is apparently renowned for writing savagely about acclaimed books and, sure, it’s easier to get a reputation that way than by writing kindly about them. The critique itself is a masterclass in pieces that sound profound, but don’t actually say anything at all. I went further down the rabbit hole, and the best thing written about it all is Freddie deBoer’s takedown of Oyler’s takedown.
Pace Oyler, I think Tolentino is – at her best – astoundingly good. The only problem with a collection is that her best only comes when she balances the specific/general and the personal/broader spectrums . There are enough examples in Trick Mirror of her doing that to make it well worth reading. It’s not a perfect collection, but I think she is deservedly recognised as a thoughtful, emotionally intelligent and well-researched voice in modern essays, and I’ll certainly read more by her.