“I’m going insane! I literally am addicted to the web!” wrote Jia Tolentino, aged ten, on an Angelfire site she created in 1999. Two years later, she was publishing several thousand words a week on LiveJournal; three years after that she migrated to MySpace. As she finished high school, she got Facebook and then, a couple of years out of college, Twitter, the better to circulate the essays and interviews she had started publishing. In 2013 she became an editor for the Hairpin, a women’s website belonging to the now-defunct Awl network, and the following year moved to the feminist blog Jezebel, then owned by Gawker Media. In the summer of 2016, a week after Gawker filed for bankruptcy, the New Yorker announced that it had recruited her as a staff writer.



TRICK MIRROR: REFLECTIONS ON SELF-DELUSION by Jia Tolentino Random House, 320 pp., $27.00

Tolentino, who is 30, belongs to the microgeneration that remembers a time before the internet, but for whom the advent of the internet coincided with the advent of adolescence, so that the world-expanding experiences of the two became inextricable from one another. This positioning, right in the middle of the millennial generation, is part of what makes her one of the most persuasive commentators on the seductions and ironies of cultural and other forms of capital, and the ways they move through the digital sphere. Growing up sharing her feelings online was no doubt good training for the Hairpin and Jezebel, both websites that became successful in part through publishing extremely personal first-person essays. In a 2017 article in the New Yorker, Tolentino recalled receiving, in her first couple of years at those sites, “at least a hundred first-person pitches and pieces each week.”

A number of the nine essays in Trick Mirror, Tolentino’s first book, are more or less straightforwardly memoiristic. She looks back on the weeks she spent, aged 16, participating in a reality TV show in Puerto Rico called Girls v. Boys. She surveys the hardy, cheerful female protagonists of books that she loved as a child, and muses upon how disconnected she feels from the heroines of adult novels, both because of these heroines’ bitterness and constrained circumstances, and because of their whiteness (Tolentino is Asian American). She considers her experience growing up in a wealthy, white, Evangelical Christian community in Houston and, having lost her faith as a teenager, finding in recreational drugs the ecstasy that she once located in religion.

None of these essays could be described as ultra-confessional, and none of them dwells on the pain, trauma, or gross-out physical experiences in which Jezebel essays, for example, often specialized. Rather, the most autobiographical essays in Trick Mirror are those that most steadfastly reject distress, adopting instead a slightly distanced optimism. They give the impression of an author who believes that our most private and painful experiences are often not, in fact, the ones through which we learn the most. Writing about the unhappy white heroines of Anglo-American fiction, Tolentino says that she felt “shut out of a realm that I didn’t even really want to enter,” before concluding that not entering that realm has actually been beneficial, helping her to affirm her identity and become “something more” than their sorry examples of marital misery and trampled ambition. “I’ve always been glad that I grew up the way I did,” she writes elsewhere, referring to her Evangelical Christian adolescence. Her Texan megachurch “trained me to feel at ease in odd, insular, extreme environments, a skill I wouldn’t give up for anything, and Christianity … gave me a leftist worldview, an obsession with everyday morality, an understanding of having been born in a compromised situation, and a need to continually investigate my own ideas about what it means to be good.”

The tone of these essays can partly be attributed to Tolentino’s temperament. “I value control almost as a matter of etiquette—as an aesthetic,” she says at one point, and it’s true that her writing, lively and funny and poignant as it often is, resists big emotional crescendos. But her tone is also the product of the contemporary moment. The article in which she described being sent a hundred first-person pieces every week appeared under the decisive headline “The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over” and pointed out that, since Trump’s election, women’s websites have turned away from the confessional writing that that helped make their names. (Some of these sites no longer exist: The Hairpin and the Awl have both shuttered, and xoJane, with its notorious “It Happened To Me” section, ceased operations at the end of 2016. Jezebel, since Gawker’s closure, has continued under different ownership.)