Reviews
"In Trick Mirror , Jia Tolentino's thinking surges with a fierce, electric lyricism. Her mind is animated by rigor and compassion at once. She's horrified by the world and also in love with it. Her truths are knotty but her voice is crystalline enough to handle them. She's always got skin in the game; she knows we all do. Her intelligence is unrelenting and full-blooded, a heart beating inside every critique. She refuses easy morals, false binaries, and redemptive epiphanies, but all that refusal is in the service of something tender, humane, and often achingly beautiful--an exploration of what we long for, how we long for it, and all the stories we tell ourselves along the way." --Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering, "It's easy to write about things as you wish they were--or as others tell you they must be. It's much harder to think for yourself, with the minimum of self-delusion. It's even harder to achieve at a moment like this, when our thoughts are subject to unprecedented manipulation, monetization, and surveillance. Yet Tolentino has managed to tell many inconvenient truths in Trick Mirror-- and in enviable style. This is a whip-smart, challenging book that will prompt many of us to take a long, hard look in the mirror. It filled me with hope."-- Zadie Smith "I worship at the altar of Jia Tolentino, who is undoubtedly the sharpest and most incisive cultural critic alive. Jia is a for-real genius, so damn funny it's absurd, and her ability to cut through all the noise to reveal the heart of the matter is unmatched. What a gift to the universe that, in Trick Mirror , one of the subjects is herself. This book is a master class in how to think about the world in 2019." --Samantha Irby, author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life "In Trick Mirror , Jia Tolentino's thinking surges with a fierce, electric lyricism. Her mind is animated by rigor and compassion at once. She's horrified by the world and also in love with it. Her truths are knotty but her voice is crystalline enough to handle them. She's always got skin in the game; she knows we all do. Her intelligence is unrelenting and full-blooded, a heart beating inside every critique. She refuses easy morals, false binaries, and redemptive epiphanies, but all that refusal is in the service of something tender, humane, and often achingly beautiful--an exploration of what we long for, how we long for it, and all the stories we tell ourselves along the way." --Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering "There has been such a profusion of 'new essayists' writing in English during the past decade, riding the rail between journalism and the personal essay, that the voices can merge into static. I find myself listening out for writers who still find a way to speak from some kind of peculiar interiority, heeding their instincts as much as they do any chatter or feed. One of the finest of these is Jia Tolentino. It has gotten to where, whenever something freaky happens in the sociocultural sphere, I immediately wonder what she'll have to say about it. Modern American life, especially as lived online, increasingly takes on qualities of insanity, even nightmare, and Trick Mirror has something profound to say about how that happened." --John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead "It has been a consolation these last few years to know that no matter what was happening, Jia Tolentino would be writing about it, with a clear eye and a steady hand, a quick wit and a conscience, and in some of the best prose of her generation." --Patricia Lockwood, author of Priestdaddy "Tolentino offers a millennial perspective that is deeply grounded, intellectually transcending her relative youth. She brings fresh perspective to current movements in a manner similar to that of Joan Didion in the 1960s and '70s. Exhilarating, groundbreaking essays that should establish Tolentino as a key voice of her generation." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
