Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

The title of Tolentino's collection references a "trick mirror," which reflects a distorted image back to the viewer. Tolentino references mirrors at several points in these essays. However, this symbol is best understood as a cultural artifact that reflects the viewer in a distorted way. In this reading, the mirror appears in the form of the internet, reality TV, the ideal woman, the literary heroine, drugs and religion, scams, narratives about campus rape, labels such as "difficult" for women and the language of feminism more generally, and contemporary weddings. 

While Tolentino explores her own experience with reality television at length in "Reality TV Me," she also discusses it as a cultural touchstone throughout these essays. She describes, for example, the ways in which reality shows affected user's behavior on sites like Facebook and Amazon. She also describes how it affected popular conceptions of weddings in the 2000s. Ultimately, Tolentino depicts reality television as a type of programming that may have once reflected a certain version of reality but that has come to affect reality itself by influencing our behavior.