Trick Mirror Reflections on Self-Delusion

These essays are delicious little bites that invite you into a subject you might not have cared about/ thought was too complicated. I especially loved the essay on the Conman.

Picked this up because I heard about the Lauren Oyler literary beef (I’m nosy and I love drama) and I wasn’t expecting much! Was v pleasantly surprised at how much this resonated with me (u wouldn’t be able to tell based on how long I took to finish this tho lmfaoaoao)

The blurb makes the essays feel a bit discordant but when I was reading it, the theme of identity stuck out (identity / gender n performance shoutout judith butler) - as personal essays these are all explored through various anecdotes from Tolentino’s life but interspliced with cultural analysis, which I think works in the way she’s done it

Another recurring theme is the notion of choice feminism (or ‘individual’ feminism) vs collective feminism which I am still constantly grappling with or thinking about… it pops up at various points throughout the collection

Stand out essays:

• - The I in Internet

• - Always Be Optimizing

• - The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams

As I read, I also read reviews, and while I get some of the criticism, it was also a lesson to me in how subjective reading is and how differently we can interpret a writer and their meaning. These essays are long and dense so it took me forever to finally finish. They draw on more texts than I think I will ever read and bring me back to a fun version of what university essay writing could have been. But what I really love about Tolentino's tone is how dystopian it constantly sounds. Even when shes laying down a reference or fact to seemingly make a point, I hear in brackets (CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS SHIT? WE'RE ACTUALLY HERE???) It feels like she has a future looking view, even when she's drawing from (at times narrow versions of) the past, the resulting essay feels uneasy, uncertain of what this all means and where we go from here. I enjoyed the book in all of its questioning, examining and steering.

This book really got me thinking about our society and the internet, especially women's relationship to it and how it relates to self-presentation. I really related to Tolentino's relationship with herself through writing. There were really strong chapters and there were chapters that I really muddled to get through which is why I gave four stars. The book could feel like a trudge at certain points. My favorite chapters were 1) Always Be Optimizing 2)The Cult of the Difficult Woman 3) I Thee Dread. My least faves were 1) Pure Heroines 2) Ecstasy 3) We Come From Old Virginia

I've been thinking so much about the self lately, so I'm glad my hold at the library came up on this when it did. The common thread across Tolentino's essays here is the impossibility of seeing one's self clearly--an impossibility amplified by everything from the internet (a main culprit) to the wedding industry. This had some really bright standout essays that made my brain fire on all cylinders, and some sort of mediocre ones that didn't quite register. There's a lot of synthesis happening in Trick Mirror; Tolentino pulls from all corners of the internet (i.e. a disturbing 4chan deepdive) and experience (i.e. her time on a reality show as a teen) to construct her main points, creating a sort of collage that articulates larger social trends I may have implicitly noticed, but never articulated (not that I could have if I tried). The personal pieces didn't feel navel-gazey or pompous, which is usually what irks me in memoirs and essays. Probably as a product of the subject she's writing about, Tolentino writes about her history and her ideas with a fair amount of skepticism of her own self. She suggests we all do as much in the first essay, "The I in Internet," writing that to put an end to the worst of the internet, "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..." Would recommend.

Trick Mirror is one of the better collections of essays about a millennial woman's struggle towards self-actualization I've read. It has all the usual topics-- an essay about one's identity on the internet, an essay about religion and party drugs, an essay about literary heroines, an essay about wedding ambivalence, an essay about crime reportage, and so on; the one main omission is an essay about the author's parents-- which renders it exemplary. Tolentino is a better writer than most of the people who attempt these, so the narrative that is a plague on the entire personal essay form of donning a thrift store vintage leather jacket to meet a friend who just finished bicycling across France at a wine bar in Brooklyn to cry about one's brokeness, lack of social safety net, and the unobtainability of the American Dream is kept between the lines and in the margins. Tolentino also doesn't say much haven't heard about these topics before, but in interests of fairness, I have read half the bibliography. Finally, this book made me thankful that, while my current job is awful, at least it does not compel me to monitor Twitter discourse on Melania Trump's footwear.

some interesting points were made but it was SO BORING

Essays about identity, women and the media/internet. Very insightful and smart, written engagingly, feels personal but substantial. I'd reread this.

An essay collection contextualizing and analysing the (feminine) self in a society that revolves around selfhood. Incisive and timely.

Was looking forward to reading this book since 2019 when I saw excerpts of it online, so it's safe to say I had high expectations that I feel Tolentino was going to meet anyways. Sadly, this book didn't reach those expectations despite glimpses of genuine insight here and there. Though I can see why she is usually hailed as the millenial Joan Didion, I feel as if her potential to actualize that comparison is cut short by long-winded summaries of references—which made the book read more like a review of related literature for a thesis rather than a book of essays—and a condescending tone indicating she has no trust in her own readers. It's weird that she's, by profession, a journalist when sensitive essays such as the essay about the UVA sexual harassment case did not have any interviewees. Whether or not this is true to her actual feelings, Tolentino writes about social issues as if they are intellectual exercises rather than lived experiences. Each essay also left me feeling... cold and downtrodden. I don't think one has to offer solutions or be positive to create resonance since writing has a lot to do with connecting with your readers as well—however, I didn't feel that with Trick Mirror. I remember finishing Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist thinking: this is not the strongest feminist book, though her experiences do resonate with me in a lot of ways despite the fact that we come from such different contexts as women. With Trick Mirror, I didn't feel that way, perhaps because this was just one punitive lecture after another about female objectification, self-hatred, and capitalism rather than an empathetic narrativization of these issues. Joan Didion did say that we look to stories to live, but there's no story here besides a synopsis of what you've already read on Twitter in 2016. Or, maybe part of the reason why this book also leaves me feeling cold is because, to quote Lauren Oyler, "I get the sense that she must feel overwhelming pity for ugly women, if she has ever met one." All-in-all, it's a painfully American book that masquerades as radical and subversive when in reality it’s actually very timid and self-indulgent; what’s even more irritating is that she’ll probably use the whole “see—it’s a trick!” shtick as a shield against being called out for hypocrisy. Whatever; I’m past the age of nihilistic adolescence already so that kind of fatalism is just grating to me at this point. Ironically, Tolentino's distrust towards her own individual experiences as as an untrustworthy “way to get to the bottom of a subject” may have actually just hindered her from developing the sociological and acute imagination she so desperately salivates over throughout the book. I wish I had just opened Google Scholar instead.

i didn’t finish reading the last 2 chapters of this book bc i just can’t. my official review of this is: fart

She talks about a bunch of things I care about, but it's just nyc media schlock without any real analysis or quality writing. I liked her personal anecdotes most of all, and her "let me write a book report" citations least of all.

This book unfairly assumes marriage is patriarchal and limiting for women. But modern marriages are increasingly egalitarian partnerships built on love and respect, not outdated gender roles. Wives now have agency, careers, and equal say. Marriage provides support so both partners can thrive, not dependence. It has flaws but can empower women rather than limit them if defined by communication and shared values.

** spoiler alert ** This book was incredible! However, I found chapters 1 ( The I in the internet ) and 4 ( Pure heroines ) to be the most informative and interesting. Therefore, they're my favorites. The 1st chapter examines the revolution and evolution of social media and how individual selfhood has been amplified with a commercialized importance. Tolentino suggests that social media platforms have encouraged users to take a performative approach to the internet, in which the audience is imagined to closely follow a user’s every move. Tolentino further argues that the internet has distorted the human perception of scale - this meant that an idea was only as important as it was important to each individual. Consequently, our culture has become increasingly ego-centric while viewing content that naturally corresponds with our ideological alignment. Chapter one is followed by some autobiographical chapters where Tolentino discusses different topics and social issues. As for chapter 4, it focuses on popular literary characters and their emotional maturation from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. Tolentino first provides examples of female protagonists in popular childhood books whom are naturally resilient despite growing up in troubling circumstances, so the author concludes that the typical literary heroine’s journey reminds us that women often traverse a journey from brave to blank to bitter as a result of social conditions. Notes & quotes " The dream of a better, truer self on the internet was slipping away. Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation. The freedom promised by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest potential lay in the realm of misuse. Even as we became increasingly sad and ugly on the internet, the mirage of the better online self continued to glimmer. As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. 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. You have to communicate in order to maintain an internet presence. And, because the internet’s central platforms are built around personal profiles, it can seem—first at a mechanical level, and later on as an encoded instinct—like the main purpose of this communication is to make yourself look good. Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones, and then overtake them. This is why everyone tries to look so hot and well-traveled on Instagram; this is why everyone seems so smug and triumphant on Facebook; this is why, on Twitter, making a righteous political statement has come to seem, for many people, like a political good in itself. This practice is often called “virtue signaling,” a term most often used by conservatives criticizing the left. But virtue signaling is a bipartisan, even apolitical action. Twitter is overrun with dramatic pledges of allegiance to the Second Amendment that function as intra-right virtue signaling, and it can be something like virtue signaling when people post the suicide hotline after a celebrity death. Few of us are totally immune to the practice, as it intersects with a real desire for political integrity. Posting photos from a protest against border family separation, as I did while writing this, is a microscopically meaningful action, an expression of genuine principle, and also, inescapably, some sort of attempt to signal that I am good." " It has already built an ecosystem that runs on exploiting attention and monetizing the self. Even if you avoid the internet completely—my partner does: he thought #tbt meant “truth be told” for ages—you still live in the world that this internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by centralized platforms that have deliberately established themselves as near-impossible to regulate or control. The internet is also in large part inextricable from life’s pleasures: our friends, our families, our communities, our pursuits of happiness, and—sometimes, if we’re lucky—our work. In part out of a desire to preserve what’s worthwhile from the decay that surrounds it, I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale." " a regime of involuntary technological surveillance, which subconsciously decreases our resistance to the practice of voluntary selfsurveillance on social media. If we think about buying something, it follows us around everywhere. We can, and probably do, limit our online activity to websites that further reinforce our own sense of identity, each of us reading things written for people just like us. On social media platforms, everything we see corresponds to our conscious choices and algorithmically guided preferences, and all news and culture and interpersonal interaction are filtered through the home base of the profile. The everyday madness perpetuated by the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions personal identity as the center of the universe. It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection. Through social media, many people have quickly come to view all new information as a sort of direct commentary on who they are." " Identity, according to Goffman, is a series of claims and promises. On the internet, a highly functional person is one who can promise everything to an indefinitely increasing audience at all times." "This is why, with the internet, it’s so easy to stop trying to be decent, or reasonable, or politically engaged—and start trying merely to seem so. " "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 mutual vulnerability in everyday life. Under these terms, instead of expressing morally obvious solidarity with the struggle of black Americans under the police state or the plight of fat women who must roam the earth to purchase stylish and thoughtful clothing, the internet would encourage me to express solidarity through inserting my own identity. Of course I support the black struggle because I, myself, as a woman of Asian heritage, have personally been injured by white supremacy." " 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. I had started to feel that the internet would only ever induce this cycle of heartbreak and hardening—a hyper-engagement that would make less sense every day. But the worse the internet gets, the more we appear to crave it— the more it gains the power to shape our instincts and desires. "

This book was a thorough and well researched book and truly an achievement in cultural critique writing. I just didn’t love the topics that much, most of them felt like preaching to the choir with nothing new to add. My favourite chapter surrounding the flattening discourse around difficult women. That was supremely written covering how the use of feminism is being co-opted by corporate entities so much that it’s value is being dispersed. It was so sharp. Upon reflection this is probably worth more stars than given. My main issue the book was it made me feel like I was reading a website, which in pandemic era, makes me want to scrape my eyeballs out of their sockets.

"I can feel the tug of my deep and recurring suspicion that anything I might think about myself must be, somehow, necessarily wrong. In the end, the safest conclusions may not actually be conclusions. We are asked to understand our lives under such impossibly convoluted conditions. I have always accommodated everything I wish I were opposed to." I really enjoy Jia Tolentino's writing, and the core theme of 'self delusion' is a really interesting one to parse through so many different topics: the internet, reality TV, girlhood, influencer/celebrity culture, rape, infamy, weddings, drugs, religion, etc. I think this book captures a lot of the mental gymnastics that modern womanhood requires (although, as some reviewers state, there aren't necessarily any groundbreaking or new insights here - rather, familiar articulations). On theme with the conflicts explored in these essays, I'm torn between wishing that the essays erred more on the reflective than the journalistic side, and feeling that some of the purely reflective essays (ex: 'Ecstasy') lost me in what I should 'take away' from it. On the other hand, 'The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams' stands out as an essay that was interesting in its use of the 'scam' as a thematic link, but I found myself missing Tolentino's reflections on what these cultural phenomena meant to her. All in all, I can't say I disliked any of these essays - though I'm also not sure I gained much from them either, and I'm curious who is the ideal audience for this kind of writing (people who would relate would already know; people who would disagree are unlikely to be convinced ??). There's not really a theme in the essays that felt most memorable to me: Reality TV Me, the essay on the UVA rape case, some parts of Always Be Optimizing. An enjoyable read, although I feel like Trick Mirror highlighted and deepened my inner conflicts more than it 'enlightened' me.

A must-read book of 2019.

I think Jia Tolentino is the writer that I wish I was constantly. It is clear that she is an expert researcher and would be a formidable opponent in any debate. Her points come across so well, and I was hooked on the book the second I read the opening page. I ended up reading this book using three different formats so that I could absorb as much of it as possible quickly and, as someone who generally hates audiobooks, hearing it read by her was pretty great. So many of the essays have left an impact on me. The Cult of the Difficult Woman, Reality TV Me and Story of a Generation in Seven Scams were three of the best essays I have ever read, hands-down. I'm not sure why I can't get myself to give this a 5-stars. Some of the essays lost me a bit in repetition, so that may be why. I also can't wait to make my fiancé read this book though.

Full disclosure: I love Jia Tolentino and I’ll read anything with her name on it. This book consists of the kind of musing philosophical essays about random subjects that I write myself when I have time, wishing I had half of her eloquence and way with words. These aren’t problem solving, solution presenting types of essays, but beautifully written verbal processing on topics I tend to think a lot about myself; the Internet, culture, feminism, social expectations etc. If you’ve read and enjoy her work online, definitely check out this book.

Started strong and I was ready to give it a 5 stars. But over time, the essays started to be regurgitations of various studies, books, and shows. I think some parts could be more concise rather than long, draining sentences. Slowly, I was unsure about what her point was.

"Women hate trainwrecks to the extent that we hate ourselves. We love them to the extent that we want our own failings and flaws to be loved. The question, then, is choosing between the two. But why would these ever be our only options? The freedom I want is located in a world where we wouldn't need to love women, or even monitor our feelings about women as meaningful - in which we wouldn't need to parse the contours of female worth and liberation by paying meticulous attention to any of this at all." "If I object to the wife's diminishment for the same reason that I object to the bride's glorification, maybe this reason is much simpler and more obvious that I've imagined: I don't want to be diminished and I do want to be glorified - not in one shining moment, but whenever I want."

4.5⭐️

I don’t get all the hype for this book. Most of the essays were a bit of a let down, either because i already had read about the subjects already (ie the scammer essay) or I felt it was a bit disjointed. I did like the reality tv essay but on the whole this book was a bit of a let down.

this is brimming with the contradictions and complexities of the last decade— matter-of-factly and sometimes hilariously revelatory. the tangential nature of some essays was a bit distracting, but i still very much enjoyed them!! my favorites are “we come from old virginia”, “ecstasy” and “always be optimizing”