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Trick Mirror
Reflection on Self-delusion
384 pages
A razor-sharp, dizzying plunge into the funhouse mirror of modern internet culture and millennial self-delusion.
What it feels like
Reading this collection feels like finally putting into words the low-grade anxiety of living online. It is a brisk, dizzying, and incredibly sharp experience that holds up a mirror to the exhausting performance of modern life. The prose is both culturally fluent and rigorously analytical, moving seamlessly from reality television to literary theory without missing a beat. You sit in an atmosphere of hyper-connected reflection, oscillating between feeling deeply seen and slightly called out. It is perfect for the chronically online reader who is tired of self-optimization and girlboss feminism, offering a cathartic, wry, and deeply intelligent untangling of the webs we weave to survive late capitalism.
- Mood
- anxious
- hyper-connected
- reflective
- dizzying
- Tone
- sharp
- self-aware
- wry
- probing
- conversational
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- the performance of self · internet culture and identity · millennial anxiety · commodification of feminism · late-stage capitalism
- The writing
- Razor-sharp, culturally fluent, and densely packed with insight, balancing academic rigor with internet-native colloquialisms.
- The arc
- Moves from a dizzying immersion in modern culture to a sharp, somewhat unsettling clarity about our collective self-deceptions.
- Who it's for
- Chronically online millennials and cultural critics who feel overwhelmed by the pressure to constantly optimize themselves.
Content notes
- discussions of sexual assault
- drug use
- internet toxicity
- religious trauma
About the book
From one of the brightest young chroniclers of US culture comes this dazzling collection of essays on the internet, the self, feminism and politics. We are living in the era of the self, in an era of malleable truth and widespread personal and political delusion. In these nine interlinked essays, Jia Tolentino, the New Yorker's brightest young talent, explores her own coming of age in this warped and confusing landscape. From the rise of the internet to her own appearance on an early reality TV show; from her experiences of ecstasy both religious and chemical to her uneasy engagement with our culture's endless drive towards 'self-optimisation' from the phenomenon of the successful American scammer to her generation's obsession with extravagant weddings, Jia Tolentino writes with style, humour and a fierce clarity about these strangest of times. Following in the footsteps of American luminaries such as Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Rebecca Solnit, yet with a voice and vision all her own, Jia Tolentino writes with a rare gift for elucidating nuance and complexity, coupled with a disarming warmth. This debut collection of her essays announces her exactly the sort of voice we need to hear from right now and for many years to come.
Description from Open Library.
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