Trick Mirror

Reflections on Self-Delusion

By: Jia Tolentino

Narrated by: Jia Tolentino

New York Times Best Seller

"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." (Vulture)

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for Best First Book

Named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by the New York Public Library and one of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review • Time • The Washington Post • NPR • Variety • Esquire • Vox • Elle • Glamour • Good Housekeeping • The Paris Review • Paste • Town & Country • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews • BookRiot

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 listener 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

"Jia Tolentino is the best young essayist at work in the United States, one I’ve consistently admired and learned from, and I was exhilarated to get a whole lot of her at once in Trick Mirror. In these nine essays, she rethinks troubling ingredients of modern life, from the internet to mind-altering drugs to wedding culture. All through the book, single sentences flash like lightning to show something familiar in a startling way, but she also builds extended arguments with her usual, unusual blend of lyricism and skepticism. In the end, we have a picture of America that was as missing as it was needed." (Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me)

©2019 Jia Tolentino (P)2019 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Jia Tolentino narrates her own collection of essays with precision, clarity, and urgency.... Listeners receive an intense onslaught of sophisticated diction and syntax, but, thankfully, Tolentino uses vocal intonation to make her words accessible in the audiobook format.... Listeners will feel that Tolentino is talking directly to them, making her arguments even more compelling." (AudioFile magazine)

“It's easy to write about things as you wish they were - or as others tell you they must be. It's much harder to think for yourself, with the minimum of self-delusion. It's even harder to achieve at a moment like this, when our thoughts are subject to unprecedented manipulation, monetization, and surveillance. Yet Tolentino has managed to tell many inconvenient truths in Trick Mirror - and in enviable style. This is a whip-smart, challenging book that will prompt many of us to take a long, hard look in the mirror. It filled me with hope.” (Zadie Smith)

“The millennial Susan Sontag, a brilliant voice in cultural criticism.... She remains engaged with her subjects even as she scratches her head and wonders why we do what we do. Even better: She writes like a dream.” (The Washington Post)

“In Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino’s thinking surges with a fierce, electric lyricism. Her mind is animated by rigor and compassion at once. She’s horrified by the world and also in love with it. Her truths are knotty but her voice is crystalline enough to handle them. She’s always got skin in the game; she knows we all do. Her intelligence is unrelenting and full-blooded, a heart beating inside every critique. She refuses easy morals, false binaries, and redemptive epiphanies, but all that refusal is in the service of something tender, humane, and often achingly beautiful - an exploration of what we long for, how we long for it, and all the stories we tell ourselves along the way.” (Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering)

Amaze!

His Tolentino gives an absolutely wonderful reading performance. “Trick Mirror” is a chewy and thought provoking book.

Would recommend!

Trick Mirror is, first, a memoir through lenses of Tolentino’s considered self scrutiny and measured self praise. This also acts as the narrative backdrop for questions to the modern condition, especially through a feminist slant. I enjoyed her slick use of literature to help add perspectives in each chapter, though it did at times read like a thesis paper (albeit an excellent one!).
My major gripe is that through her meditations on feminist theory and it’s affect within our online culture, after repeatedly pointing to herself as a beneficiary of this equation, she still sort of lands on the “getting my bag” feminist brand and doesn’t introspect much further on it in herself despite her own necessary criticism of it in others. She also not-so-subtly points to her casual drug use at multiple points, which would be relatable if not for the fact that it just really was not.
Ultimately I enjoyed the book, and find Jia to remain as a forward-leaning thinker/writer as all the hype has claimed. Will definitely still read anything by her, and recommend this volume for anyone looking to get a valuable review of the country as we now know it.

I am blown away!

WOW WOW WOW! This book is like a hug of information and validation. It’s like someone’s head opened and spewed out what I feel and how much I’ve read, but do not know how to organize. Incredible! I didn’t want it to end.

jia does her homework!

if you are looking for some insight into a millennials mind, here it is! strap yourself in.

Love it!!

Jia Tolentino is a fabulous writer and I avidly follow her work on the New Yorker. The essays are a perfect mix of scholarly research and personal introspection, and necessary reading for any millennial trapped in the myriad contradictions of daily existence, or anyone trying to understand such millennials. Read it and then recommend it to everyone you know!

Loved it

Thank you for your vulnerability and candor Jia. I adored every minute of this book. Definitely one to reread multiple times.

It's mixed for me.

I love a lot of the messages Jia delivers in this book - and there are some truths nestled in here that are important ones everyone should hear.

That said, the pacing and organization was a bit off for me. At times it felt like rambling, directionless. I wish it had been a little more neatly assembled. It would have been easier to focus on. A few times I had to re-listen to chapters, unsure of how I ended up where I did. But maybe she intended it to be this way.

Astute Observations from a very talented writer

I found this book of essays a highly compelling listen with articulate, whip smart observations about modern life. Here Jia Tolentino explores the modern foundation of 21st century self-hood in various forms (as a woman, a woman of color, a millennial, a post-reality TV star, a person on social media).

Tolentino possess both a deep introspective view on our current struggles as well as being able to bridge the sentiment with such philosophical observations as the presentation of self in the social media age to the trouble of often finding yourself in the YA literature cannon to the cult of the difficult woman in a time of #MeToo.

Tolentino's prose also does this with such a grace and often comic dead calm as well that it brings to mind the way Joan Didion's White Album could clinically cite the exact mileposts that were taking us out of the free love 60's to the cynical 70's. For Didion, the Manson family trials marked the end, and for Tolentino it would be the "7 scams" that defined the Millennial generation, from the Fyre Festival to the election of the 45th president. She is very data driven in many of her articles, citing studies that back up the feeling of either chilling dread or optimism on a given subject, some of which leave you feeling overwhelmed, some hopeful that a young talented writer is at least calling these things out.

Her narration also has a steady, calm, near-broadcast journalist quality that you could practically visualize the words and sentiment behind the essays. Definitely worth a listen!

Fresh Cerebral Provocations

An essay collection that's Fresh, Brilliant, Cerebrally Stimulating and Boundary-Expanding (for this Gen-X male, to be sure).

The New Yorker must be proud to have Jia Tolento as its millennial cultural critic.

Timely and excellently written

The essays fit together to provide insights into the political moment. It's a deeper dive into subjects I thought I understood, and I learned so much.