With her debut book of essays, writer JIA TOLENTINO
cements her status as one of the premier chroniclers of our
obsessions and anxieties. By Molly LangmuirSHE CONTAINS
MULTITUDES
PERSPECTIVES
n September 2004, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, then 15, tried out
for a reality show. She and her parents were at a mall in Houston when
they noticed a booth advertising a casting call, and her dad offered
her $20 to audition, as a joke. Three months later, Tolentino was on a
plane to the Caribbean to appear in Girls v. Boys: Puerto Rico—which,
it should surprise no one, involved two teams of teenagers competing
against each other in various challenges while living together in a house brimming with
hormones and low-stakes drama.
At the time, reality TV was just beginning its sprawl into every corner of conscious-
ness, and almost all traces of Girls v. Boys: Puerto Rico have since disappeared from not
just television but the internet (though it is possible to find one picture of the cast stand-
ing arm in arm on the beach, with Tolentino sporting a crop top and a winning grin). It
would be easy to dismiss the show as just so much detritus from the new millennium,
or simply an early harbinger of what was to come.
Instead, Tolentino, in an essay from her debut collection, Trick Mirror: Reflections
on Self-Delusion (out August 6), tells a story about her experience with so much depth
it practically rips open a portal. Using language that often conjures a Technicolor vivid-
ness, it is about how our identities have come to be shaped by algorithms and our sense
of reality distorted; about complicity, performance, self-surveillance, and how selfhood
itself is a complex, ever-shifting concept. The book includes nine original pieces—about
half are personal memoir, while the rest are social criticism—and in all of them, over and
over, Tolentino lays out a satisfyingly perceptive insight only to push past it, asking how
she might be using it to obscure something else. At one point, in the essay about Girls
v. Boys, she writes that rewatching her show felt similar to scrolling through Twitter,
“thinking on the one hand, Where are we underneath all of this arbitrary self-importance?
And on the other: Aren’t we all exactly as we seem?”
That all this observation unspools from a forgettable early-aughts reality show feels
almost like an act of transmutation, as if someone used a bag of Doritos and a bottle of
Snapple to produce a multicourse feast. But this is also what has come to be expected
from Tolentino during her rapid rise through the media world.
“What is Jia now, 30?” asks David Remnick, the editor-in-chief of the New Yorker,
where Tolentino has been a staff writer since 2016. “I mean, God Almighty, I didn’t
know how to tie my shoelaces when I was 30. You look at Joan Didion when she was
young—suddenly there was this voice that seemed new and distinct and was talking
straight at you. Jia’s a very different sort of writer in terms of temperament, but the
effect is similarly startling and fresh.”
At the New Yorker, Tolentino’s interests have been omnivorous—she’s covered,
among other things, the Westminster Dog Show, abortion rights, the lawyer Gloria
Allred, the e-cigarette company Juul, Ovid, and the Cosby trial—and her writing often
goes viral. Routinely, she’ll pull at what appears to be a disparate thread and show it to be
part of a vast web in which we are all entangled. She has also proven uniquely able to take
up a popular artifact, like weighted blankets or the Pixar movie Coco, and, in exploring
her own response, convey the confusion and anguish many Americans feel about the
state of our country. “It makes some of the noise fade away, just to hear it through her
voice,” says Puja Patel, the editor-in-chief of Pitchfork and a longtime friend. (This has
occasionally made Tolentino a target—she recently tweeted a screenshot of an email
suggesting she deserved to get anal cancer.)What can seem contradictory is that while her writ-
ing is obviously informed by a searing intelligence, when
she appears in it, it’s often as a blank-brained stoner
speaking in slang. In the Juul piece, for example, she
asks a student in a college library who’s holding an e-cig-
arette, “Can I...maybe hit it?” (She does.) Similarly, she
writes extensively about her own capacity for delusion,
but comes across as unusually undeluded. In the essay
about Girls v. Boys, a few pages after writing that she
auditioned for the show on a whim, she adds, “I like this
story better than the alternative, and equally accurate
one, which is that I’ve always felt that I was special and
acted accordingly. It’s true that I ended up on reality TV
by chance. It’s also true that I signed up enthusiastically,
felt almost fated to do it. I needed my dad’s twenty dol-
lars not as motivation but as cover for my motivation.”
Tolentino often says she tries to write strong argu-
ments with no conclusions. Instead, many of her endings
serve almost as refractions, tilting the story just enough
that a new layer appears. The last few paragraphs of her
reality TV piece, for example, reference an interview she
did with one of her castmates, who says that everyone on
the show wanted to be famous, except for Tolentino. “You
were the only one who was really not interested,” he con-
tinues. “You said you would only ever want to be famous
for a reason. You were like, ‘I don’t want to get famous for
this bullshit. I want to get famous for writing a book.’”Today Tolentino lives in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, with
her longtime boyfriend, Andrew Daley, an architect, and
their dog, Luna, an undocile but good-natured 90-pound
mutt whom Tolentino described on The New Yorker
Radio Hour as both “the best thing about my life” and
“objectively a really bad dog.” In publicity shots of Tolen-
tino, Luna often appears next to her, looking endearingly
unhinged. Their home is a small space a half-block from
the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, with a door leading
to an overgrown backyard in which they used to throw
parties until neighbors began leaving what one friend
described as “ransom-style notes.” On the day I visit in
May, Tolentino, who’s wearing a snakeskin miniskirt and
a pink tie-dyed T-shirt, has made coconut cookies that
sit in a neat pile on the coffee table in the living room/
dining room/kitchen, which is full but not cluttered,
with bookshelves in every area they could feasibly fit,
and a long table with a laptop and a desktop at one end
that also serves as Tolentino’s office (and which they useI
ELENA MUDD