“I think it’s just because she wrote about systemic dread bubbling up, and so do I,” Tolentino says.

The comparisons to Joan Didion are flattering but make her uncomfortable. The success doesn’t seem to be going to her head - she’ll try to shut down any feelings of awe you might have for her by reminding you how much weed she smokes. “I like it when writing can help you feel that you are capable of changing,” she says. She wants readers to feel similarly destabilized - in a productive way. Sometimes a concept would snap into focus other times she’d feel challenged.

“I never felt supervised, but I always had a ride to wherever I needed to go.” From early on, writing was how she processed ideas, she says. The daughter of Filipino immigrants, Tolentino was raised in a Houston megachurch community, but says her parents gave her the freedom to follow her interests. “I just have this natural suspicion about any narrative we make up about ourselves,” she says. In Trick Mirror, she returns again and again to selfhood, and how our identities are warped by the constant performance and monetization of them in the internet age. Lewis to DJ Screw to MDMA, but she spools them together into a big-picture theme. In conversation and writing, Tolentino’s thoughts - almost always candid and self-deprecating - seem to sprawl. “It’s the aural equivalent of a man listening to reggae for the first time in his race-car bed, slowly fucking the hole in a Kidz Bop CD,” she wrote. A witty 2014 evisceration of the song “Rude” by Canadian reggae-fusion band Magic! forecast inventive Tolentino takes to come.

Tolentino, 31, started her career with the Hairpin before moving to Jezebel. “I need to kind of admit people read what I write.” “I’m kidding myself a little bit,” she says. “The reward is satisfying whatever itch made me write in the first place.”īut as an increasingly high-profile essayist for The New Yorker and the bestselling author of 2019’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion - a now-seminal text for millennials stumbling through late-stage capitalism and social media malaise - it’s getting harder to pretend she’s writing into a void. “I don’t know if it’s a self-protective impulse, or like a chip missing, but I tend to only think about making myself happy,” she says. Whenever she’s working on an essay, Jia Tolentino pretends nobody will read it.

Trick mirror jia tolentino