Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
By Jia Tolentino
Publication Year: 2019
Type: Non-fiction
Genre: essays, culture, feminism
Read on 2021-02-16
★★★★☆
Jia Tolentino is my absolute favourite cultural critic and essayist. She speaks to me and on topics I care about with such acerbic clarity and personality. My favourite essays from this collection are the earlier ones on social media/influencers and on the optimization of women’s body/leisure time through a culture of athleisure wear and assembly line salads. As with all collections of semi-disparate things like essays or short stories, I wasn’t into all of them. And because I devoured this book so quickly I really let myself skim through the passages I was less gripped by too.
She ends the entire book with an essay on the endless parade of weddings she has attended as a person in a decade-long relationship who does not want to get married. This final “delusion” (the frame for all the essays in this book are the self-delusions, collective delusions, scams, and trick mirrors of our present-day culture) she grapples with with the most uncertainty. She ends on a note that she can’t even be sure of what she says are her opinions as she says them, a sentiment that would be unbecoming of a critic were it not for how sincerely I understand and relate to it personally. I’m very biased but this confession ultimately feels honest and self-aware, which only reifies my devotion to Tolentino’s mastery of her own voice as a writer and critic.
The very last line in her acknowledgments is a deeply moving and romantic anti-thesis to this final chapter: she thanks her partner, Andrew, who is mentioned in small ways throughout the book, for “building her a desk and a life” and confesses that she has felt married to him for a long time. And that is why I read acknowledgments - for these glimpses of non-writerly sincerity where the author as a person and not an author speaks directly if publicly and performatively to the people that have helped them professionally and loved them personally. I’m a Cancer moon I really can’t help that I’m like this.
