Published by Random House on 06 Aug 2019
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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 in a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Jia writes about the cultural prisms that have shaped her: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the American scammer as millennial hero; the literary heroine’s journey from brave to blank to bitter; the mandate that everything, including our bodies, should always be getting more efficient and beautiful until we die.

Trick Mirror includes nine essays, all having to do with this particular flavour of self-delusion that is unique to this current moment of American identity, culture, technology, and discourse, which have all become extricable from each other in this era:

• The I in the Internet: on how the internet has gone from a place of pleasure to a place of increasing exhaustion
• Reality TV Me: on the progression from reality TV to social media
• Always Be Optimizing: on the pursuit of becoming the ideal woman
• Pure Heroines: on literary women
• Ecstasy: comparing drugs and religion
• The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams: including your favourites—Operation Varsity Blues, Fyre Fest, Theranos/Elizabeth Holmes, Anna Delvey—and much more
• We Come from Old Virginia: on institutional dismissal of sexual assault
• The Cult of the Difficult Woman: on uncritical feminism
• I Thee Dread: on the gender inequality entrenched in heterosexual marriage

As with most collections, there were some essays that stood out more to me than others, my favourites being “The I in the Internet,” “Reality TV Me,” “Always Be Optimizing,” and “The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams,” which is quite a handful of favourites, considering there are only nine essays in the collection.

I enjoyed half the essays and at least found the other half insightful — it was a mixed bag. Tolentino is clearly well-read and well-informed, making several academic and cultural references throughout her essays. However, as a fiction reader who is trying to read more nonfiction, I’m often looking for an anecdote, a personal touch, a memoir-like quality to hook me into the narrative and get me invested. Rather, my feeble mind found some essays a bit too dense with information. On the other hand, some other essays felt inconclusive.

In spite of those gripes, as weeks passed, I found that I couldn’t put this book out of my mind. I looked up Tolentino’s new articles as a staff writer for the New Yorker (check out “How TikTok Holds Our Attention” and “The Age of Instagram Face: how social media, FaceTune, and plastic surgery created a single, cyborgian look”). I peeped her social media (subsequently getting into The 1975 after seeing her post a concert video from Pitchfork Paris). I looked up podcasts she guest starred in, particularly loving her feature in In Good Company, hosted by Otegha Uwagba of Women Who.

In their discussion, two points about Tolentino’s approach to writing especially stuck with me: 1) to write informatively, she constantly self-edits to avoid self-indulgence, and 2) to write realistically, she resists neat conclusions by sitting in uncertainty.

1) On writing informatively: “I’m interested in myself, obviously—we’re all naturally interested in ourselves—but I’m really interested in myself as the entity that has allowed me entry into the world. I’m interested in myself as a conduit for what I learn. I mean, I naturally insert myself into things because often I find that firsthand experience is the way that you experience the world, but the self to me is interesting only as an avenue, and it’s extremely interesting as that avenue, but it’s not interesting as a thing… The purpose of a sentence about me has to convey something about the idea that I’m writing about.”

2) On writing realistically: “I’ve been [trying] to write strong arguments with no conclusions… I feel absolute certainty about what I believe politically and what I believe morally, but that doesn’t really lead to a sense of certainty in real life at all for me. And I wanted my writing to reflect that and not to do the thing that I think is reflexive and natural to do, which is wrap it up and provide a takeaway, because I just don’t have that feeling in life… That is the fertile ground: the uncertainty. It’s sort of like a shared language for that uncertainty seems foundational to whatever is gonna happen next. But I think we need to sit. It’s worth sitting with that uncertainty for as long as we can.”

It’s funny that Tolentino pointed out those two intentions, because those were essentially, exactly my gripes with the essays I initially found weaker: I wanted them to be more personal and I wanted there to be takeaways tied up with string. I still prefer the essays I preferred, but now I appreciate the other essays for what they are—beginnings of conversations with more to explore—and appreciate not being led into the pretty trap of self-deluded conclusions.

Although I still have many questions, this book has brought so much clarity, helping me frame thoughts that I previously found too frustrating to lean into, especially regarding social media (I’ve straight up deactivated Facebook, and at least once a week I muse about how nice it’d be to do the same with Instagram).

Tolentino packed so much into her essays, and there’s still so much left to understand and explore. This is a book to spark conversation. It’s a book that I’ll be returning to again and again.

My book review ends here. Following, I synthesise each essay by splicing excerpts into outlines, mostly for my own future reference, but maybe you’ll find it helpful too 😉

The I in the Internet – 31 pages

Tolentino asks how the internet got so bad—how it’s gone from a place of pleasure to a place of increasing exhaustion—and identifies five intersecting problems:

“In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act” (8). You must communicate an identity, for “the internet’s central platforms are built around personal profiles” (8), but “to communicate an identity requires some degree of self-delusion” (13): “the self is not a fixed, organic thing, but a dramatic effect that emerges from a performance. This effect can be believed or disbelieved at will” (14).

• “Women—who, as John Berger wrote, have always been required to maintain an external awareness of their own identity—often navigate these online conditions so profitably. It’s the self-calibration that I learned as a girl, as a woman, that has helped me capitalize on ‘having’ to be online. My only experience of the world has been one in which personal appeal is paramount and self-exposure is encouraged” (16)

1. “The internet is built to distend our sense of identity” (12)

• “As we move about the internet, our personal data is tracked, recorded, and resold by a series of corporations—a regime of involuntary technological surveillance, which subconsciously decreases our resistance to the practice of voluntary self-surveillance on social media… On social media platforms, everything we see corresponds to our conscious choices and algorithmically guided preferences” (14)
• “In physical space, there’s a limited audience and time span for every performance. Online, your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end… there’s essentially no backstage on the internet; where the offline audience necessarily empties out and changes over, the online audience never has to leave” (15)

2. “It encourages us to overvalue our opinions” (12)

• “In the absence of time to physically and politically engage with our community the way many of us want to, the internet provides a cheap substitute: it gives us brief moments of pleasure and connection, tied up in the opportunity to constantly listen and speak. Under these circumstances, opinion stops being a first step toward something and starts seeming like an end in itself” (18)

3. “It maximizes our sense of opposition” (12)

• “Within the economy of attention, conflict always gets more people to look” (22)
• “It is nearly impossible, today, to separate engagement from magnification” (25)
• “Brave contrarians [build] entire arguments on random protests and harsh tweets, making themselves deeply dependent on the people who hate them, the people they hate” (25)

4. “It cheapens our understanding of solidarity” (12)

• “But the internet brings the ‘I’ into everything. The internet can make it seem that supporting someone means literally sharing in their experience—that solidarity is a matter of identity rather than politics or morality, and that it’s best established at a point of maximum vulnerability in everyday life” (26)
• “It’s because of the hashtag, the retweet, and the profile that solidarity on the internet gets inextricably tangled up with visibility, identity, and self-promotion” (29)

5. “It destroys our sense of scale” (12)

• “This is not an accident but an essential design feature: social media was constructed around the idea that a thing is important insofar as it is important to you” (29)
• “The internet was dramatically increasing our ability to know about things, while our ability to change things stayed the same, or possibly shrank right in front of us” (31)

To put an end to the worst of the internet, we would have to “act on a model of actual selfhood, one that embraces culpability, inconsistency, and insignificance. We would have to think very carefully about what we’re getting from the internet, and how much we’re giving in return. We’d have to care less about our identities, to be deeply skeptical of our own unbearable opinions, to be careful about when opposition serves us, to be properly ashamed when we can’t express solidarity without putting ourselves first” (33).

Reality TV Me – 29 pages

Tolentino spent three weeks when she was sixteen filming a reality show called Girls v. Boys: Puerto Rico. She observes how the reality TV condition of documenting lives to be viewed has progressed through social media (51).

“Reality TV enacts the various self-delusions of the emotionally immature: the dream that you are being closely watched, assessed, and categorized; the dream that your life itself is movie material, and that you deserve your own carefully soundtracked montage when you’re walking down the street” (44).

When we document ourselves to be viewed, in an effort to present ourselves more honestly, we attempt to calibrate the external self to the internal self. The process has become so instinctive that it is sometimes “impossible to differentiate between the pretext for an experience, the record of that experience, and the experience itself” (48).

• “I worry that all this self-monitoring has made me…in danger of becoming a ‘character to myself'” (45)
• “This is, I write, an attempt to be more honest: I want to act in a way that reflects how I feel; I want to live the way that I ‘really am.’ But I also worry that I’m more interested in narrative consistency than anything” (45)

Always Be Optimizing – 32 pages

Tolentino frames optimization as the pursuit of becoming the ideal woman (64) that coexists with mainstream feminism (65).

“[Mainstream feminism] has organized itself around being as visible and appealing to as many people as possible” (65).

• It “[conforms] to patriarchy and capitalism to become mainstream in the first place” (80)
• “Figuring out how to ‘get better’ at being a woman is a ridiculous and often amoral project—a subset of the larger, equally ridiculous, equally amoral project of learning to get better at life under accelerated capitalism” (66)

“When you are a woman, the things you like get used against you. Or, alternatively, the things that get used against you have all been prefigured as things you should like. Sexual availability falls into this category. So does basic kindness, and generosity. Wanting to look good—taking pleasure in trying to look good—does, too” (77).

• Work is rebranded as pleasure, becoming a matter of lifestyle (65); beauty is rebranded as self-care (80); self-improvement is not done for our husbands but for ourselves (81).
  • “The default assumption tends to be that it is politically important to designate everyone as beautiful, that it is a meaningful project to make sure that everyone can become, and feel, increasingly beautiful. We have hardly tried to imagine what it might look like if our culture could do the opposite—de-escalate the situaton, make beauty matter less” (80)
  • “Instead of being counseled by mid-century magazines to spend time and money trying to be more radiant for our husbands, we can now counsel one another to do all the same things but for ourselves” (81)

“The worse things get, the more a person is compelled to optimize” (66).

• “It’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible. Women have known this intimately for a long time” (68)

Pure Heroines – 35 pages

Tolentino is not satisfied with “the trajectory of literary women from brave to blank to bitter” (128).

“And surely part of what I love about childhood literary heroines is the way they remind me of…the time when I, already a complicated female character, wouldn’t hear the phrase ‘complicated female character’ for years. Those girls are all so brave, where adult heroines are all so bitter, and I so strongly dislike what has become clear since childhood: the facts of visibility and exclusion in these stories, and the way bravery and bitterness get so concentrated in literature, for women, because there’s not enough space for them in the real world” (97).

• “If you were a girl, and you were imagining your life through literature, you would go from innocence in childhood to sadness in adolescence to bitterness in adulthood—at which point, if you hadn’t killed yourself already, you would simply disappear” (95)
• “My hesitation, as an adult, to find myself within the heroine universe has been rooted in a suspicion that that identification would never be truly reciprocal: I would see myself in Jo March, but the world’s Jo Marches would rarely, if ever, be expected or able to see themselves in me” (127)
  • “If women were not allowed to be seen as emblematic of the human condition, I wouldn’t even get to be seen as emblematic of the female condition” (128)
  • “Traditionally, male literary characters are written and received as emblems of the human condition” (118), and straight white female literary characters are written and received as emblems of the female condition (127)

But literary heroines can be “the base from which to become something more” (129).

• “The fact that the heroine’s journey is framed as a default one for women is proof of our failure to see, for so long, that other paths were possible, and that many other ones exist” (128)
• “Difference was not the problem; it was the beginning of the solution” (129)

Ecstasy – 27 pages

Tolentino makes connections between drugs and religion.

“But still, each time, [ecstasy] can feel like divinity. It can make you feel healed and religious; it can make you feel dangerously wild. What’s the difference? Your world realigns in a juddering oceanic shimmer. You feel that your soul is dazzling, delicate, unlimited; you understand that you can give the best of yourself away to everyone you love without ever feeling depleted” (148)

“I don’t know if I’m after truth or hanging on to its dwindling half-life. I might only be hoping to remember that my ecstatic disposition is the source of the good in me—spontaneity, devotion, sweetness—and the worst things, too: heedlessness, blankness, equivocation” (154)

The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams – 39 pages

Tolentino examines scamming as the definitive millennial ethos.

• “The con is in the DNA of this country, which was founded on the idea that it is good, important, and even noble to see an opportunity to profit and take whatever you can” (167)
• Millennials have been “raised from adolescence to this fragile, frantic, unstable adulthood on a relentless demonstration that scamming pays” (195)

1. The crash: “The financial crisis was a classic con—a confidence trick, carried off by confidence men” (165). People exploited others for their own financial safety.

• Mortgages were “extended to people who would never be able to pay them” (164).

2. The student debt disaster: “Colleges sell themselves as the crucible through which every young person must pass to stand a chance of succeeding” (170).

• The difference between housing debt and education debt is that “if you hope to improve your life in America, you can’t quite turn away from a diploma the way you can a white picket fence” (168).
• As seen in the Operation Varsity Blues scandal, even “exorbitantly wealthy parents still place enough value in a college education that they will commit outright fraud in order to game the already rigged admissions system and give their children an education that they, of all people, do not actually need” (170).
• But while tuition is increasing, that money often goes towards improving facilities rather than the education students receive. “The institution’s need to survive in the market, in other words, ends up hampering the student’s ability to do the same after they graduate” (168).

3. The social media scam: Facebook exploits its users, selling our attention to advertisers and our personal data to market research firms.

• On social media, we “sell our identities in exchange for simply being visible” (174). It is done believing the personal brand can be a new path to stability.
• “The two most prominent families in politics and culture—the Trumps and the Kardashians—have risen to the top of the food chain because of their keen understanding of how little substance is required to package the self as an endlessly monetizable asset” (174).

4. The Girlbosses: This motivational personal branding provides “a feminist praxis of individual advancement and satisfaction—two concepts that easily blur into self-promotion and self-indulgence—[that] women happily bit” (178).

• “‘I entered adulthood believing that capitalism was a scam, but I’ve instead found that it’s a kind of alchemy,’ Amoruso writes. (Scams, of course, are also a kind of alchemy, spinning horseshit into gold.)” (176).
• “Instead of the structural supports and safety nets that would actually make women feel better on a systematic basis” (179), we got “the sort of self-congratulatory empowerment feminism that corporations can get behind, the kind that comes with merchandise—mugs that said ‘Male Tears,’ T-shirts that said ‘Feminist as Fuck’” (178).

5. The really obvious ones: Billy McFarland/Fyre Fest, Anna Delvey, Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos, and more.

6. The disruptors: “Amazon ignored state sales taxes, Uber ignored local transportation regulations, and Airbnb ignored city laws against unregulated hotels” (187).

• “These companies’ biggest breakthroughs have been successfully monetizing the unyielding stresses of late capitalism, shifting the need to compete from the company itself to the unprotected individual, and normalizing a paradigm in which workers and consumers bear the company’s rightful responsibility and risk” (188).
• “At the other end of the venture-capital disruption spectrum are a bunch of companies that raked in heaps of money for doing nothing at all… These companies represent a socially approved version of millennial scamming: the dream of being a ‘founder’ who gets a dumb idea, raises a ton of money, and sells the company before he has to do too much work” (188).

7. The election: Trump is a lifelong scammer, profiting from false advertising, exploitation, and abuse.

• “And here one of the most soul-crushing things about the Trump era reveals itself: to get through it with any psychological stability—to get through it without routinely descending into an emotional abyss—a person’s best strategy is to think mostly of himself, herself… The choice of this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional—to be wrecked, or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck” (193).

“People are so busy just trying to get back to zero, or trying to build up a buffer against disaster, or trying to enjoy themselves, because there’s so little else to count on—three endeavors that could contain the vast majority of human effort until our depleted planet finally ends it all. And, while we do this—because we do this—the honest avenues keep contracting and dead-ending. There are fewer and fewer options for a person to survive in this ecosystem in a thoroughly defensible way” (194)

We Come from Old Virginia – 39 pages

As a University of Virginia alum, Tolentino reflects on institutional dismissal of sexual assault through the well-intentioned but misguided, viral article “A Rape on Campus” by Sabrina Rubin Erdley in Rolling Stone that was discredited and retracted due to the false accusations reported.

• “Jackie’s false accusation, in this context, appears as a sort of chimera—a grotesque, mismatched creation; a false way of making a real problem visible” (217)

“The best-case scenario for a rape victim in terms of adjudication is the worst-case scenario in terms of experience: for people to believe you deserve justice, you have to be destroyed… The truth about rape is that it’s not exceptional. It’s not anomalous. And there is no way to make that into a satisfying story” (230).

The Cult of the Difficult Woman – 28 pages

Tolentino examines how uncritical feminism flattens discourse.

“Feminists have worked so hard, with such good intentions, to justify female difficulty that the concept has ballooned to something all-encompassing: a blanket defense, an automatic celebration, a tarp of self-delusion that can cover up any sin” (252)

“Clinton’s loss, which I will mourn forever, might reiterate the importance of making space for the difficult woman. It might also point toward the way that valuing a woman for her difficulty can, in ways that are unexpectedly destructible, obscure her actual, particular self. Feminist discourse has yet to fully catch up to the truth that sexism is so much more mundane than the celebrities who have been high-profile test cases for it. Sexism rears its head no matter who a woman is, no matter what her desires and ethics might be. And a woman doesn’t have to be a feminist icon to resist it—she can just be self-interested, which is not always the same thing” (262)

I Thee Dread – 30 pages

Tolentino examines the gender inequality entrenched in heterosexual marriage.

“[The cultural psychosis] tells women to cram a lifetime’s supply of open self-interest into a single, incredibly expensive day” (281).

• “This is of course not the case for everyone, but for plenty of women, becoming a bride still means being flattered into submission: being prepared, through a rush of attention and a series of gender-resegregated rituals—the bridal shower, the bachelorette party, and, later, the baby shower—for a future in which your identity will be systematically framed as secondary to the identity of your husband and kids” (290)
• “I don’t want to be diminished, and I do want to be glorified—not in one shining moment, but whenever I want” (291)

Last notes…

I would love to include my reflections on each individual essay, but I fear this post is already much too long! I have a feeling I’ll be referencing Trick Mirror in various aspects of my life, and by extension, in future blog posts, so hopefully all this information doesn’t just die here. But before signing off, I would like to make some last notes on more popular topics that are more accessible, even without having read the book.

// Reality TV Me: “I was learning that in the twenty-first century it would sometimes be impossible to differentiate between the pretext for an experience, the record of that experience, and the experience itself.”

I think about this soooo much when I blog, specifically when I’m recounting a past experience, looking through photos and trying to figure out what to write. I wrestle with the suspicion that I sometimes (maybe even often times) remember experiences better than they were. I always recount the remembered experience authentically, but who’s to say how self-deluded those memories are.

// Always Be Optimizing: The first time I came across the conversation around optimisation was through the viral Buzzfeed article about millennial burnout. The Buzzfeed article frames optimisation as a generational phenomenon, whereas Tolentino frames optimisation as a phenomenon of mainstream feminism, in which women strive to become the ideal woman, “progressive” in that the pursuit is no longer done for ~the man~ but for herself. I find this topic especially interesting to examine in the blogosphere, where the majority of the focus is on beauty and lifestyle.

// The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams: True crime had its moment and now it’s all about scammers. This essay included several scams in popular culture, and I thought I would leave some bonus content if you have a gross fascination with scams that you’d like to indulge.

Billy McFarland/Fyre Fest: Fyre Fest was the luxury music festival that never was, conning investors and ticket holders. Check out the Netflix documentary Fyre and Hulu documentary Fyre Fraud for more.

Anna Delvey: Delvey was a young con artist who lived a life of luxury in NYC posing as a German heiress. I first came across her story upon the publication of My Friend Anna by Rachel DeLoache Williams mid-2019; Delvey personally conned Williams out of $62,000. The book received a lot of hype on bookstagram, but I found that the writing was repetitive, frustrating, and stressful to read, though a fascinating case. I think it’d be sufficient to read Jessica Pressler’s article if you’re interested in this case.

Hustlers at Scores: In which a group of strippers drugged men, ran up their credit cards at their clubs, and negotiated lucrative percentages of their spendings. This case wasn’t mentioned in Trick Mirror, but it’s another fascinating scam in popular culture that Jessica Pressler covered, her article inspiring the movie Hustlers.

Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos: Founder and CEO of Theranos, Holmes promised to revolutionise the medical industry with a machine that would significantly improve blood testing, conning investors, FDA officials, and her own employees. This story broke in The Wall Street Journal by John Carreyrou, who later documented the full inside story in his book Bad Blood. For more on Theranos, check out The Dropout podcast (addictive!) and HBO documentary The Inventor.

// We Come from Old Virginia: “The best-case scenario for a rape victim in terms of adjudication is the worst-case scenario in terms of experience: for people to believe you deserve justice, you have to be destroyed… The truth about rape is that it’s not exceptional. It’s not anomalous. And there is no way to make that into a satisfying story.”

There has been a lot more visibility and conversation around sexual assault lately, which is great, but because there is so much other content out there, I don’t think this essay is exactly necessary reading. Except for this one point, which I find extremely concise, poignant, honest, and which I don’t believe is considered enough in the general discourse. Tolentino makes this point regarding the well-intentioned but misguided, viral article “A Rape on Campus” by Sabrina Rubin Erdley in Rolling Stone that was discredited and retracted due to the false accusations reported.

I recently read Know My Name by Chanel Miller, so I can’t help but make a connection to something Miller said in her book: “Legal definitions are important. So is mine. He filled a cavity in my body with his hands. I believe he is not absolved of the title simply because he ran out of time.” At one point in her book, Miller asks, “How much was I expected to take?” If you do read anything on the topic of sexual assault, Know My Name is the number one reading I’d recommend (amongst all books, articles, whatever). It made me cry so many times.

If any other topics from the outlines jump out at you, I would love to discuss them with you in the comments and/or simply elaborate on what was said about it in the book!

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