CONTINUED FROM PAGE 272SHE CONTAINS MULTITUDES
of many of her peers. “They wanted me to go
to a good school,” she says. “It just happened to
teach creationism.” Tolentino also began first
grade early, making her about two years young-
er than her classmates, and the school was
mostly white and wealthy, whereas for about
half her time there, she was on scholarship.
“As long as I can remember, I was completely
different from everyone around me,” she says.
“Yet because of my temperament, I was com-
pletely at home.”
A cheerleader and the salutatorian, Tolenti-
no rebelled, slightly. She appeared three times
in Fiddler on the Roof, a musical she loves, but
also thought it was funny, in the mournful end-
ing, to lie down on the floor and pretend to be
dramatically giving birth. “Everyone knew
Jia was the smartest person in our class by a
million miles,” says Robert Doty, a friend who
was in her grade. “And she was always a good
student, so the teachers liked her, but they hated
that they couldn’t control her.” In an essay from
Trick Mirror that somehow manages to braid
together her school, religion, the drug Ecstasy,
and a type of remixed Houston hip-hop called
“chopped and screwed,” Tolentino recalls that
during her graduation speech, she broke from
what she’d prepared and made jokes, including
one referencing the fact that students referred
to the church as “The Repentagon.” But she
also writes, “I’ve always been glad that I grew
up the way that I did. The Repentagon trained
me to feel at ease in odd, insular, extreme envi-
ronments...and Christianity formed my deepest
instincts.” It is, for example, a big part of why
the question of how to engage ethically in an
ethically compromised world informs so much
of her work. “Writing, for her, is a moral act,”
Haglund says.
She got into Yale University early admission,
but during her senior year of high school, she
learned that her parents were facing money
problems, and that once she was out of the
house she’d have to be financially independent.
This was right before she left to film Girls v.
Boys: Puerto Rico (she’d convinced her school to
let her have three weeks off by saying she hoped
to “be a light for Jesus, but on television”). Once
she returned to Texas, she applied for and then
accepted a full merit scholarship to the Univer-
sity of Virginia.
In college, Tolentino joined a sorority and
was an English major. She was also part of an
a cappella group called the Virginia Belles—in
the evidence that still exists on YouTube, her
voice is sweet and slightly throaty. The fact
that she is skilled at so many things actually
became a joke within the group. Daley went
to UVA as well, and initially encountered To-
lentino at an a cappella concert. “Someone had
put together a video basically making fun of Jiafor being supersmart and incredibly talented,
but also loving dumb things,” he says. “It was
meant to take place 20 years in the future and
showed that Jia had cured cancer, and Jia
had solved global warming, and Jia had won
a Pulitzer Prize.”
“I’ve had the exact same personality since
I was three,” Tolentino says. “Like, the exact
same.” Her views, however, have changed.
While growing up, “I probably considered
myself a libertarian,” she says, and she didn’t
call herself a feminist until after college. She’s
now a progressive who has a whole essay in
Trick Mirror about (among other things) how
she doesn’t want to get married. She remains
able to relate to people who disagree with her,
though. “I don’t even want to know how many
of the people we graduated with are Trump
supporters,” Doty says. “But she found a way to
love those people and still does—a lot of them. I
think that what Jia fundamentally understands
is that human love is messy and weird. And she
likes it that way.”
When it comes to getting along with differ-
ent sorts of people, it likely helps that Tolentino
is quick to make herself a punch line, is earnest-
ly into internet memes, and doesn’t often lead
with her intelligence. “There is a huge portion
of me that is very legitimately stupid,” she says.
“If we had met this weekend, when I was at this
music festival in Gulf Shores, Alabama, you’d
be like, ‘This girl’s a fucking idiot.’” Though
her acceptance has limits. At the festival, her
friends went to a party where there was an NFL
player who asked, as part of a game, what was
something every man hates—the answer was
“feminists.” “That dude, I’m done with him
forever,” Tolentino says. “At the same time, I
was partying with him all night.”fter college, Tolentino joined
the Peace Corps and in-
tentionally didn’t request a
country, hoping to be sent
wherever she was needed.
She ended up in Kyrgyzstan,
which she later described in The Awl as “a
post-Soviet, syncretically Muslim, rapidly glo-
balizing country in Central Asia that looks like
a combination of Switzerland and the moon.”
The experience “flattened me,” she says. A
week after she arrived, there was a coup, and
she and other volunteers were evacuated to an
American air base. Later, in her village, Tolen-
tino was confronted by deep poverty—there
was no running water and never enough heat,
and she was haunted by the memory of a $27
cocktail she’d once ordered, she wrote in The
Billfold, “as I watched my tiny, hungry host
siblings divide every meal.” She ended up leav-
ing early, with the program’s encouragement,partially because she broke a few rules, and
also because she’d frequently been sexually
harassed (bride kidnapping still occasionally
occurs in the country, and it didn’t help that To-
lentino was sometimes assumed to be Kyrgyz).
Doty says she was different when she returned.
“There was a seriousness to her,” he says. “I
think it made the world more real.”
Tolentino only included a few pages about
Kyrgyzstan in the book, partly, she says, because
she didn’t take notes while she was there. “It’s
hard to be like, ‘Here’s what happened to me
today,’” she says. “You feel like an asshole.” Still,
these passages are memorable. “She writes with
such sympathy for the way all of us have to bear
up under endless performative demands,” says
the writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus, another friend
of hers. “But she seems to move between the
various performances required of her with
such fluidity and ease. When she writes about
Kyrgyzstan, that’s one of the rare moments she
seems genuinely destabilized.”
Back in the U.S., Tolentino applied to the
fiction MFA program at the University of Mich-
igan, received a fellowship, and moved to Ann
Arbor with Daley. The first short story she sub-
mitted anywhere ended up getting published
in the literary journal Carve, winning the 2012
Raymond Carver Contest and being nomi-
nated for a Pushcart Prize. But even as many
of her classmates focused solely on fiction,
Tolentino pitched a series of interviews with
adult virgins to The Hairpin, the beloved idio-
syncratic, now-defunct women’s site. When
Emma Carmichael became its editor-in-chief,
she hired Tolentino as a contributing editor
and they became close, despite mostly running
the site via Google Docs and Gchat. “It was like
having a pen pal,” Carmichael says. A year later,
they finally hung out in person at SXSW, where
they shared an air mattress at an Airbnb mutual
friends had rented. “The house was a complete
disaster zone,” Carmichael says. “We broke the
hot tub.” Patel, who was already close with Car-
michael, met Tolentino for the first time at that
SXSW, too, and assigned her to write a review
of a ScHoolboy Q performance for Spin, where
she was editing at the time. “The next day she
couldn’t file,” Patel says. It remains the only
deadline Tolentino has ever missed.
In 2014, when Carmichael began running
Jezebel, she hired Tolentino as deputy editor
(she moved to New York from Ann Arbor two
days before starting the job), and she rapidly
established herself as a writer with almost be-
wilderingly broad abilities. She could be fun-
ny; she could construct pieces that combined
reporting with personal history (as she did in
a piece covering Rolling Stone’s debacle of an
article about rape at UVA); and she could write
essays exploring the expectations people haveA
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