Trick Mirror

Chapter 1

The I in the Internet

In the beginning the internet seemed good. I was in love with the internet the first time I used it at my dad s office and thought it was the ULTIMATE COOL, I wrote, when I was ten, on an Angelfire subpage titled The Story of How Jia Got Her Web Addiction. In a text box superimposed on a hideous violet background, I continued:

But that was in third grade and all I was doing was going to Beanie Baby sites. Having an old, icky bicky computer at home, we didn t have the Internet. Even AOL seemed like a far-off dream. Then we got a new top-o -the-line computer in spring break 99, and of course it came with all that demo stuff. So I finally had AOL and I was completely amazed at the marvel of having a profile and chatting and IMS!!

Then, I wrote, I discovered personal webpages. ( I was astonished! ) I learned HTML and little Javascript trickies. I built my own site on the beginner-hosting site Expage, choosing pastel colors and then switching to a starry night theme. Then I ran out of space, so I decided to move to Angelfire. Wow. I learned how to make my own graphics. This was all in the course of four months, I wrote, marveling at how quickly my ten-year-old internet citizenry was evolving. I had recently revisited the sites that had once inspired me, and realized how much of an idiot I was to be wowed by that.

I have no memory of inadvertently starting this essay two decades ago, or of making this Angelfire subpage, which I found while hunting for early traces of myself on the internet. It s now eroded to its skeleton: its landing page, titled THE VERY BEST, features a sepia-toned photo of Andie from Dawson s Creek and a dead link to a new site called THE FROSTED FIELD, which is BETTER! There s a page dedicated to a blinking mouse GIF named Susie, and a Cool Lyrics Page with a scrolling banner and the lyrics to Smash Mouth s All Star, Shania Twain s Man! I Feel Like a Woman! and the TLC diss track No Pigeons, by Sporty

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Raised in Texas, she studied at the University of Virginia before serving in Kyrgyzstan in the Peace Corps and receiving her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. She was a contributing editor at The Hairpin and the deputy editor at Jezebel, and her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Grantland, Pitchfork, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.

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

Dazzlingly wide-reaching essays. Vanity Fair 

The millennial Susan Sontag, a brilliant voice in cultural criticism. . . She remains engaged with her subjects even as she scratches her head and wonders why we do what we do. Even better: She writes like a dream. The Washington Post

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