PERSPECTIVES
occasionally for beer pong). On the brick wall behind it
is a sign that reads “Drug-Free School Zone” alongside
a faithful reproduction Tolentino made of “Monkey
Jesus,” the Spanish fresco that became an internet phe-
nomenon after a botched restoration attempt.
Tolentino herself has a buoyant personality, bleached
hair whose color she once described as “champagne
cocker spaniel,” and a voice just gravelly enough to be
sultry. (She has few inhibitions about pursuing her side-
line enthusiasms and has occasionally done voice-over
work—she narrated a recent commercial for Square,
the electronic payment system, and she can be heard
explaining how to squeeze the most juice out of a lemon
in a 2015 Lifehacker YouTube video.) She’s also enthu-
siastic about wide-ranging bits of pop culture (lately
this includes Lana Del Rey’s cover of Sublime’s “Doin’
Time,” the 1999 mockumentary Drop Dead Gorgeous,
and Ocean Vuong’s wrenching novel On Earth We’re
Briefly Gorgeous) and a lifelong insomniac.
She and Daley seem, in many ways, to be compatible
opposites. He doesn’t read much, whereas Tolentino has
compared her literary consumption to that of an indus-
trial vacuum. He loves children to the extent that he vol-
unteered at a day care in college; until recently Tolentino
described her IUD as her most prized possession. (In
June, she tweeted that she’d removed it.) She’s also “ex-
tremely online,” as Daley puts it, whereas he has no social
media and keeps up with her posts on Twitter, where she
has 101,000 followers, by bookmarking her page.
There is a mythology that has grown up around
Tolentino, and one rumor circulating is that her work
doesn’t require any editing—the friend who told me
this a few months back mentioned it in a hushed,
almost horrified tone. When I asked her editor at the
New Yorker, David Haglund, whether it was true, he
said that it varies from piece to piece, but then con-
firmed another rumor about her, which is that she’s
never missed a deadline, at least not with him. “That’s
the really upsetting one,” he says. “I think she turned
her book in on time, too.” (“She did,” says her literary
agent, Amy Williams. “Of
course she did.”)
Being around Tolen-
tino, it can be hard to un-
derstand how the different
parts of her personality fit
together. There’s the per-
son who, when express-
ing her ideas, speaks with
such urgency it’s as if her
mouth can’t keep up with
her thoughts. Then there’s
the person who, her legs
tucked up underneath
her on the sofa, tells me
she smokes enough weed
that now she sometimes
forgets to smoke. “I used
to have a sign up that was
like, ‘Do you need to smoke
weed?’” she says. “I’ll go
a week and be like, ‘Wait!Weed’s been here this whole time?’” Neither of these
aspects seem false. They just don’t often coexist in a
single person.
The questions of which sides of her personality are
real and which are contrived, which of the stories she
tells are trustworthy and which are self-serving, are ones
Tolentino herself asks routinely. And one could argue
that her awareness of our ability to deceive ourselves
is exactly what makes her a clear-eyed observer of this
moment. We live at a time, after all, filled with deep fakes
and alternative facts, when reality itself shimmers with
illusion and many long-standing assumptions no longer
seem logical. “It’s hard to imagine anyone putting a pin
into what’s going on,” Williams says. “There are no an-
swers. If I’m going to trust anyone, it’s someone who’s
doubting her own assertions.” Instead of offering more
answers, Tolentino simply tries to chronicle her confu-
sion with clarity, then questions that clarity, too. In the
introduction to Trick Mirror, she explains that she writes
in order to feel less confused, then continues, “It’s exact-
ly this habit—or compulsion—that makes me suspect I
am fooling myself. If I were, in fact, the calm person who
shows up on paper, why would I always need to hammer
out a narrative that gets me there?”
Tolentino often presents herself, in life and in her
work, as both enthusiastic convert and impartial critic.
This past March, for example, in a New Yorker feature
about the activewear brand Outdoor Voices, she writes
that, as research, she decided to adopt OV’s slogan,
“Doing Things,” as a mind-set and regularly pursue
exercise she enjoyed. Working out so much put her in a
“terrific, if conflicted, mood,” she writes. Then she adds,
“Am I taking care of myself, doing sun salutations in my
motivational crop top, or am I running survival drills
for life under an advanced capitalist economy? The
answer, I’m sure, is both.” Two months later, Tolentino
went hiking in Utah with a friend, and posted a series of
photos on Instagram in which she’s wearing OV—one
person commented, “#doingthings.” “I was like, ‘Fuck
me,’” Tolentino says. As for her experience of the trip,
“You feel so lucky that this was colonized by Europeans,
you know what I mean?” she says. “I don’t belong there.
And the only reason I’m able to be there was because of
this legacy of intense cruelty, right? I feel like one of the
juxtapositions [of this era] is that what joy we have is
predicated on being one of the lucky ones. And always at
someone’s expense. What kind of joy is possible without
ever forgetting that? I’ve been trying to figure out what
kind of hope can be predicated on fatalism.”While Tolentino was growing up in Houston, almost
every aspect of her childhood seems to have been cali-
brated to foster in her an ability to be comfortable in any
environment—“fully, willingly present,” as she describes
it—but also able to pick it apart. In the mid-1980s, her
parents emigrated from the Philippines to Toronto,
where she was born; they moved to Houston when she
was four (she also has a younger brother). There, the
family joined an evangelical megachurch that ran a small
private school, which Tolentino attended (as did, years
earlier, Ted Cruz), even though her parents were less
stringently religious than thoseROUTINELY,
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.Tolentino’s debut
book of essays,
Trick Mirror, touches
on everything
from reality TV and
optimization to the
enduring wackiness
of weddings.CONTINUED ON PAGE 359