Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion is a 2019 essay collection by Jia Tolentino, a journalist and cultural critic best known for her book reviews, personal essays, and analyses of the millennial generation in publications such as The New Yorker and Jezebel. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize or Best First Book, Trick Mirror's essays analyze different aspects of culture and society and the resulting distortions of self that they produce. This guide refers to the 2019 Kindle version of the text (ASIN : B07L2JGLZ9).

Tolentino introduces her own work, contextualizing it as writing produced in the context of the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath. She then begins the collection with "The I in Internet," which traces the development of the internet in terms of its social and psychological effects, as well as Tolentino's own use of it. Tolentino focuses on her personal history in "Reality TV Me," which describes her time on a reality show as a teenager.

Tolentino uses a combination of personal narrative and analysis of larger social trends in "Always Be Optimizing," in which she describes society's current ideal woman and the ways in which athleisure trends reflect her. The following essay, "Pure Heroines," also focuses on women; here, tracing the life cycle of the literary heroine from girlhood to adolescence to adulthood.

In "The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams," Tolentino positions scamming as the action that has defined the Millennial generation, referencing how these scams have affected her life from college to the present day. She examines her own alma mater in "We Come from Old Virginia," which analyzes relationships between sex and power institutions at the University of Virginia.

The final essays return to issues of feminism and womanhood. In "The Cult of the Difficult Woman," Tolentino crafts an argument about the dangers of celebrating "difficult" women, as feminists have lately done. Finally, in "I Thee Dread," Tolentino examines her own attitude towards weddings, weaving in historical and cultural perspectives on the institution.

Throughout the essays, Tolentino explores a range of topics from the rise of the internet to campus rape. However, in doing so, she consistently circles back to and builds upon central themes. These include the intersection of the personal and political, the malleability of identity, the mutual relationship between images and reality, the failures of popular feminism, and the absence of easy answers.

Reaction to the book was widely positive. In her New York Times review, Maggie Doherty noted that Tolentino “writes with an inimitable mix of force lyricism and internet-honed humor. She is the only writer I’ve read who can incorporate meme-speak into her prose without losing face” (Doherty, Maggie. “Jia Tolentino on the ‘Unlivable Hell’ of the Web and Other Millennial Conundrums.” The New York Times, 5 Aug. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/08/04/books/review/jia-tolentino-trick-mirror.html). However, there were detractors. Writing for the London Review of Books, critic and novelist Lauren Oyler wrote that “the idea in Trick Mirror is that we are poor interpreters of ourselves, and because Tolentino makes everything about her, this means she is pretty bad at interpreting other stuff too” (Oyler, Lauren. “Ha Ha! Ha Ha!” London Review of Books, 22 Jan. 2020).