92 | Rolling Stone | August 2019
FROM LEFT: FERNANDO DECILLIS/NPR; BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGESBooks
JIA TOLENTINO’S FRACTURED REALITY
A wide-ranging essay collection from a young writer who takes
on our warped modern sense of self By BRENDAN KLINKENBERGJ
IA TOLENTINO is only 30,
but she’s already being
hailed as a “voice of her
generation.” She got her start on
the internet, writing for sites like
the feminist blog Jezebel. Now,
at The New Yorker, she’s become
a must-read cultural critic, an
artful, concise stylist with a
knack for bringing her own
story to bear on the works she
engages. That’s all on display in
Trick Mirror, her tour de force of
a debut essay collection.
“I wrote this book between
the spring of 2017 and the fall of
2018,” she tells us early on, “a
stretch of time when daily ex-
perience seemed both like a
stopped elevator and an endless
state-fair ride, when many of us
regularly found ourselves think-
ing that everything had gotten
as bad as we could possibly
imagine, after which, of course,
things always got worse.” To ex-
cavate that sense of chaos and depletion, she dives
into everything from YA fiction to SoulCycle, as well
as social media, religion, and marriage, evoking our
fractured reality from the inside.
“Reality TV Me,” a recollection of Tolentino’s
time as a teenager on the reality show Girls vs. Boys:
Puerto Rico, is less about the vagaries of early-2000s
television than the ways we choose the stories to tell
about ourselves. “The I in the Internet” morphs from
a history of first-person writing online into a polemic
against the way the internet
has emboldened the bad-faith
right-wing ideologues.
In tackling foundational as-
pects of modern life, Tolentino
has drawn comparisons to
great essayists of the past, most
notably Joan Didion. For To-
lentino, the distortion of our
common experience can be
traced to one element: Every-
one seems not just willing but
determined to delude them-
selves. “The pipe dream,” she
writes, “is becoming the dom-
inant structure of aspiration.”
It’s what makes us easy marks
for the likes of Mark Zucker-
berg or the promoters of Fyre
Fest or Donald Trump. Tolenti-
no isn’t being judgmental; she’s
as capable of self-deception as anyone: “When I feel
confused about something I write about it until I turn
into the person who shows up on paper: a person
who is plausibly trustworthy, intuitive, and clear.”
That desire to find a real self is one reason her
writing gets better as she moves into more autobi-
ographical territory. In “Ecstasy,” the collection’s
centerpiece, she writes about growing apart from
the Houston megachurch she was raised in; the story
becomes a woozy epic about drugs, Houston’s semi-
nal chopped-and-screwed hip-hop music, and trying
to discover what spiritual devotion really means. “I
don’t know if I’m after the truth or hanging on to its
dwindling half-life,” she writes. Watching her grasp
for it can be a thrilling experience.Tric k M i rro r
Jia Tolentino
RANDOM HOUSE
4Re-Reporting a Civil-Rights Atrocity
DEEP LISTENINGOn March 9th, 1965, civil-rights worker James Reeb was
beaten to death by a mob in Selma, Alabama. His attackers
were acquitted by an all-white jury who bought the prepos-
terous claim that the murder was orchestrated by activists
to create a “martyr” for their cause. On the podcast White Lies, hosts Chip
Brantley and Andrew Beck Grace ask Alabama to reckon with its history. The hosts
track down a witness who admits to lying on the stand, and uncover other
darker secrets. They also find many locals who still cling to the defense’s
theory. “I always will believe it,” says one juror, proving the show’s point that
some pasts, no matter how ugly, never die. ANDREA MARKSELVIS PRESLEY performed
636 concerts at the Las Vegas
Hilton International show-
room between July 1969 and
December 1976, a staggering
achievement that played a huge
role in rebooting his career
after years of B movies and
schlocky soundtracks. The starpower and extravagance of that
historic run also ushered in a
new era of entertainment in
Las Vegas, setting the stage for
Celine Dion, Elton John, Brit-
ney Spears. “Elvis’ comeback at
the International established a
new template for the Las Vegas
show,” entertainment historian
Richard Zoglin writes in Elvis in
Ve ga s. “No longer an intimate,
sophisticated, Sinatra-style
nightclub act, but a big rock-
concert-like spectacle.”
Zoglin places Elvis’ concerts
at the pinnacle of the city’s rise
as the capital of American en-
tertainment. While the section
on Elvis’ shows is surprisingly
abbreviated, what emerges is
a fascinating history of Vegas
as “gambling capital, celebrity
playground, mob hangout,
entertainment Valhalla,” with
cameos by everyone from
Abbott and Costello to the Rat
Pack, whose boozing excess is
chronicled in detail. The book
culminates with Elvis’ pivotal
shows, energetically rendered
using firsthand accounts of
people who were there. “Every-
one,” says one woman, “was
dumbstruck.” ANDY GREENEHow the King
Made Sin City
His Empire
Elvis in Vegas
Richard Zoglin
SIMON & SCHUSTER
#White Lies
CREATED BY NPR
#Brantley
(left) and
Grace in
Selma,
Alabama