Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Nonfiction

January’s Book Club Pick: Jia Tolentino on the ‘Unlivable Hell’ of the Web and Other Millennial Conundrums

Tolentino writes with an inimitable mix of force, lyricism and internet-honed humor.Credit...Elena Mudd

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

TRICK MIRROR
Reflections on Self-Delusion
By Jia Tolentino

In May 2017, Jia Tolentino declared the personal essay dead. “The personal is no longer political in quite the same way that it was,” she wrote in an essay for The New Yorker’s website. Five years ago, readers salivated over “it happened to me” essays posted daily on women’s websites. But after the 2016 presidential election, such pieces started to seem petty, self-indulgent, naïve. Still, Tolentino, who once edited this kind of writing for The Hairpin and Jezebel, found herself occasionally nostalgic for the authorial voices that developed during the personal essay’s heyday. “I am moved by the negotiation of vulnerability,” she wrote. “I loved watching people try to figure out if they had something to say.”

Now a staff writer at The New Yorker, Tolentino has made her own foray into self-study in her absorbing first book, “Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion.” The book is a collection of nine original essays, some of which have their roots in writing she’s done for The New Yorker; each is a mix of reporting, research and personal history. Her voice here is fully developed: She writes with an inimitable mix of force, lyricism and internet-honed humor. She is the only writer I’ve read who can incorporate meme-speak into her prose without losing face.

Unlike the digital personal essayist in her description, Tolentino considers the modern self not as something to be exposed or exploited, like a mineral deposit, but as something to construct and critique. She finds her subject in what she calls “spheres of public imagination”: social media, reality television, the wedding-industrial complex, news coverage of sexual assault. Tolentino wants to know how Americans, particularly those of her generation, have adjusted to life under late capitalism. What happens to people when they are forced to compete for the smallest bit of security? Who do we become when we’re always being watched?

[ “Trick Mirror” was one of our most anticipated titles of August. See the full list. ]

The brief answers to these questions are: not very good things, and not very good people. The book’s first essay, on the “feverish, electric, unlivable hell” that is the internet, makes a good case for the degradation of civic life in Mark Zuckerberg’s America. Posting on Facebook or Twitter “makes communication about morality very easy but makes actual moral living very hard,” Tolentino argues, in part because so many jobs require online engagement — which in turn lines the pockets of tech moguls. We often confuse professing an opinion — posting, liking, retweeting — with taking political action. Meanwhile, social media makes us feel as if we’re perpetually onstage; we can never break character or take off our costumes. Channeling the sociologist Erving Goffman, Tolentino explains how “online, your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end.”

The work of being yourself online is relentless, exhausting. Women, she suggests, are especially familiar with this kind of “self-calibration.” Some, like Kim Kardashian, manage to profit off self-exposure, while other women (or sometimes the very same) endure digital harassment. Even as online movements such as #MeToo have forged female solidarity, they have also pressured women to be vulnerable, to cede control of their own stories — in the same way, not incidentally, that the online personal essay industry once did. And if the personal essay is dead, the internet is still very much alive. Tolentino concludes that only “social and economic collapse” could rid us of this digital plague.

Image

This kind of fatalism, dispiriting but perhaps fair, runs through the book. (In the introduction, Tolentino describes writing the book in the spring of 2017 and the fall of 2018, a period that included the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville and the Kavanaugh hearings, and that produced so much despair.) In an essay on exercise culture and “optimization,” Tolentino notes how her own exercise regime, which consists mostly of expensive barre classes, is both “a good investment” and “a pragmatic self-delusion” — she is training herself to “function more efficiently within an exhausting system” from which she cannot escape.

Later, in an essay on scam artists and confidence men, she depicts capitalism as the ultimate scam — one exposed once we reckon with the arbitrariness of success, or even of survival. We’re not all Billy McFarland, the scammer behind the Fyre Festival, but, in a country transformed by financialization and the gig economy, we’re all making risky bets. Tolentino persuasively compares betting on stocks to crowdfunding money for medical emergencies: “if you’re super lucky, if everyone likes you, if you’ve got hustle … you might end up being able to pay for your insulin, or your leg surgery after a bike accident.” Overwhelmed by the injustice she sees around her, she reflects on her own “ethical brokenness”: “I have felt so many times that 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.” You can refuse on principle to use ridesharing apps or to rent from Airbnb, but you might end up panicked and sweating on another broken-down subway train, late to a job that doesn’t cover your travel expenses but that expects that you, like a savvy scammer, will figure something out.

These are distinctly millennial sentiments, the complaints of a generation that has come into political consciousness only after investing so much in false meritocratic promises. Tolentino’s earnest ambivalence, expressed often throughout the book, is characteristic of millennial life-writing, and it can be contrasted with boomer self-satisfaction and Gen X disaffection in the same genre. Though she never presumes to be anything like the voice of a generation, Tolentino is a fair representative: Now 30, she graduated from college into an economic recession, watched her parents sink into debt and from the age of 16 has worked multiple jobs simultaneously. In many ways, “Trick Mirror” is a cri de coeur from a writer who has been forced to revise her youthful belief in American institutions.

Several of the essays are about losing faith: in institutionalized religion, in the American dream, in the fundamental kindness of others. In “Ecstasy,” a lovely meditation on selflessness in all its forms, Tolentino writes movingly about leaving the evangelical church in which she was raised. In her post-religious life, she has sought and found bliss elsewhere: during late evening walks, at music festivals, on drugs. It’s the book’s strongest essay, as well as its least vexed. In it, Tolentino dwells more easily among contradictions: “I can’t tell whether my inclination toward ecstasy is a sign that I still believe, after all of this, or if it was only because of that ecstatic tendency that I ever believed at all.” She writes beautifully about her desire for self-transcendence and how it led her to writing, a tool she uses to understand herself.

As a reader (and a fellow millennial), I could have done with more essays like “Ecstasy,” in which contradiction felt enriching, or generative, rather than imprisoning. I credit Tolentino for examining her complicity in the structures she critiques, but at times I wished she would go easier on herself, or that she’d keep working to transcend the contradictions she observes. I’m not sure that criticism is always a form of amplification, as Tolentino fears it is, or that the line between feminism-as-politics and feminism-as-branding is as “blurry” as she at one point suggests. She has realized that moral purity is a “fantasy,” but she might also acknowledge a more hopeful truth: Though the shearing forces in our lives inevitably compromise us, they need not paralyze us. “I am complicit no matter what I do” can be both a realization reached after rigorous self-reckoning and something like a dead end. Just because you can’t fix climate change with your own consumer choices doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be done.

With this in mind, Tolentino’s insistence that we move beyond the personal may be her most trenchant political insight. “Feminism that prioritizes the individual will always, at its core, be at odds with a feminism that prioritizes the collective,” she writes in her essay on scammers. Elsewhere, she underscores the importance of building solidarity among different social groups. What she likes about a drug like Ecstasy, she explains, is that it literally produces empathy. While on it, you care about more people than you would think possible: “It makes the user’s well-being feel inseparable from the well-being of the group.” Ecstasy expands our understanding of the collective. This is a productive self-delusion, the kind of fantasy that inspires rather than cripples. It is a personal experience that Tolentino gracefully politicizes — an ephemeral feeling that, if we take it seriously, we might use to bring about a better world.

Maggie Doherty’s first book, “The Equivalents,” will be published in March.

Trick Mirror
Reflections on Self-Delusion
By Jia Tolentino
303 pp. Random House. $27.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 9 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Agony and the Ecstasy. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT