Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
A review of Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino.
“The default assumption tends to be that it is politically important to designate everyone as beautiful, that it is a meaningful project to make sure that everyone can become, and feel, increasingly beautiful. We have hardly tried to imagine what it might look like if our culture could do the opposite—de-escalate the situation, make beauty matter less.”
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino (2019). Published by Random House.
As an avid reader of The New Yorker whenever I can get my paws on one of the flash sales (which are frequent, it depends on how broke I am that month to be frank), I recognize the name Jia Tolentino almost immediately. She’s a staff writer over at The New Yorker and I’ve read quite of few of her pieces throughout the years. This book, Trick Mirror, also has major hype. Obama had even put it on one of his readings lists, it has thousands of reviews on Goodreads, and it was literally everywhere when it came out in 2019. As I was looking for something to read at the library, I saw this on the shelf, and recognized it immediately due to the hype it had. And so I checked it out and read it within two hours (this seems to be a common theme, me just sitting and ploughing through books nowadays).
Trick Mirror is a nonfiction essay collection, one that borders into cultural criticism territory. Some of these essays are more academic in nature, delving into the world of social media and its psychological impacts, or examining heroines throughout film and literary history (most, if I may say, are white). These are all hot topics in today’s world, making this a relevant read if you want to educate yourself a bit more.
With that being said, let’s dive into this book review.
Content
I found the strongest essays in this collection to be the ones where Tolentino is actually talking about herself the majority of the time. One of these essays is about how when she was in high school, she auditioned for a reality television show as a joke and then was flown to Puerto Rico to be actually on the show. Personally, I found these essays, despite how little of them there were, to be the true skeleton of the book. While she delves into a little about herself during the academic essays, she doesn’t do it enough, which loses my interest as a reader. I found myself skipping some pages here and there because I was bored with the content the book was providing.
Now that I’ve mentioned content: I didn’t like this book very much. Why? Because Tolentino was rehashing topics and themes I already knew in a way that wasn’t new. I feel as if this book is more of a primer for someone who doesn’t know a lot about say, academic research into social media or the Internet and how it affects women’s bodies. For me, as someone who already does a lot of research and writing within this realm, I want to see more of her in the book. How does this impact her? Why is this more relevant on a personal scale? Why should we care?
The writing itself was very good. Tolentino did her research and it shows because she is capable of conveying everything in a clear, effective manner. I felt very in the moment when it came to the personal essays, which is such an appealing quality when reading them, since some personal essays you can feel very removed from during the reading process. I didn’t feel that at all with this book. The one thing that really got on my nerves, though, was that she over-explains quite a few things in the book in a way that makes the reader look or feel kind of dumb. If you say there’s a lot of one thing, you don’t need to list everything out. That’s kind of excessive at the end of the day.
Overall Thoughts
This book clearly is for a specific demographic in my eyes. If you don’t know anything about the birth of, say, the Internet or Facebook, and that’s what you’re interested in, this may be the book for you. In the essay “Pure Heroines,” it feels like a shallow analysis just listing all the different kinds of feminine heroes in film and literature with the overarching context of de Beauvoir sprinkled in there. As someone familiar with, say, The Virgin Suicides, I don’t need pages of superficial commentary I already know. If you’re into feminist theory and have read that book, you don’t need Tolentino parroting about how it’s the male gaze and narrated by a bunch of boys trying to sexualize the Lisbon sisters. I know that already & it just didn’t add anything new to the conversation. The strongest essays, in my humble opinion, are the personal essays, but there’s not enough of them in here. At the end of the day, it reads like Internet writing mostly bundled into an essay collection.
