Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

September 30, 2019 9:45 AM - by Jia Tolentino

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. [Goodreads]

Excerpted as a Guardian Long Read: Athleisure, barre and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman
Excerpted in The New Yorker: Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston
Reviewed in The Washington Post: Jia Tolentino’s smart takes on this absurd modern life
Reviewed in The Paris Review: Please Fire Jia Tolentino
Reviewed in The New York Times: Jia Tolentino on the ‘Unlivable Hell’ of the Web and Other Millennial Conundrums

posted by ellieBOA (3 comments total)

I haven't actually read enough of this to discuss it, but I bought the book after a highly compelling (and strongly recommended) Jia interview on Ezra Klein's podcast.
posted by grandiloquiet at 8:28 PM on September 30, 2019

Thanks, will have a listen. I loved this book enough to finish it, which is a rarity.
posted by ellieBOA at 9:35 PM on September 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

I appreciated "The Cult of the Difficult Woman," but this book left me cold; there's an undercurrent of casual cruelty in her analyses. Or maybe the relentless admiration of the problem was too much for me? The bleakness of the subject matter and the detached, numb, hyper-clinical navel-gazing were off-putting, but that may also be a function of reading the book mid-pandemic. In any case, it struck me as a read-once work; I think I'd rather see Ann Helen Petersen's take on these issues because by contrast, Petersen has a position that isn't "ha-ha, nothing matters, too busy being eaten by this shiny pop cultural ouroboros."
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:34 AM on February 24, 2021