March 2020 | Rolling Stone | 73
WHENEVER SHE’S WORKING on an essay,
Jia Tolentino pretends nobody will read
it. “I don’t know if it’s a self-protective
impulse, or like a chip missing, but I
tend to only think about making myself
happy,” she says. “The reward is satisfying whatever itch
made me write in the first place.”
But as an increasingly high-profile essayist for The New
Yorker and the bestselling author of 2019’s Trick Mirror:
Reflections on Self-Delusion — a now-seminal text for mil-
lennials stumbling through late-stage capitalism and social
media malaise — it’s getting harder to pretend she’s writing
into a void. “I’m kidding myself a little bit,” she says. “I
need to kind of admit people read what I write.”
Tolentino, 31, started her career with the Hairpin before
moving to Jezebel. A witty 2014 evisceration of the song
“Rude” by Canadian reggae-fusion band Magic! forecast in-
ventive Tolentino takes to come. “It’s the aural equivalent
of a man listening to reggae for the first time in his race-car
bed, slowly fucking the hole in a Kidz Bop CD,” she wrote.
“I stand by that blog post,” she says. “I hate that song.”
In conversation and writing, Tolentino’s thoughts —
almost always candid and self-deprecating — seem to
sprawl. A single essay roves from C.S. Lewis to DJ Screw
to MDMA, but she spools them together into a big-picture
theme. In Trick Mirror, she returns again and again to self-
hood, and how our identities are warped by the constant
performance and monetization of them in the internet age.
“I just have this natural suspicion about any narrative we
make up about ourselves,” she says.
The daughter of Filipino immigrants, Tolentino was
raised in a Houston megachurch community, but says her
parents gave her the freedom to follow her interests. “I
never felt supervised, but I always had a ride to wherever
I needed to go.” From early on, writing was how she pro-
cessed ideas, she says. Sometimes a concept would snap
into focus; other times she’d feel challenged. She wants
readers to feel similarly destabilized — in a productive
way. “I like it when writing can help you feel that you are
capable of changing,” she says.
The success doesn’t seem to be going to her head —
she’ll try to shut down any feelings of awe you might have
for her by reminding you how much weed she smokes. The
comparisons to Joan Didion are flattering but make her
uncomfortable. “I think it’s just because she wrote about
systemic dread bubbling up, and so do I,” Tolentino says.
“The joke I started making on the book tour is that it’s a
disservice to both of us, because she’s a better writer, but
I’m obviously a way better hang.” ANDREA MARKSJia
Tolentino
A self-deprecating essayist who captures
the ‘systemic dread’ of her generationESTHER PEREL
A therapist who’s redefining how we connect
and communicate — at home and at the office“LOVE AND WORK are the two pillars of our life,” says Esther Perel
in the prologue of her new podcast. And we’re bad at communi-
cating in both of them. As the office increasingly becomes our sec-
ond home, and social movements like #MeToo reshape how we
interact, a lot of people need help navigating the changing land-
scape. That’s where Perel comes in. The Belgian psychotherapist
rose to fame with her bestselling books on intimacy and Where
Should We Begin?, her 2017 couples-therapy podcast. But when she noticed patients using
words like “vulnerability” and “trust” while discussing their work lives, she knew a cultur-
al shift was afoot. “In 1960, the primary reason for work was to make sure you had food
on the table,” Perel says, “not that you were going to develop, experience fulfillment, be
excited when you wake up in the morning.” Her latest podcast, How’s Work?, finds her
counseling people who work together in everything from setting boundaries with man-
agers when you feel unsafe to maintaining a business when your partner becomes your
ex. The core of it, she says, is helping colleagues understand they have a “relationship ré-
sumé,” too. “You bring your whole self to work,” she says. “Your family, your culture. So
let’s put [it all] out there, because it will help people work better together.” HANNAH MURPHYJIA TOLENTINO BY Molly Matalon | ESTHER PEREL BY Markus Burke