Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusions
Author: Jia Tolentino
Genre: Non-Fiction / Essays
Date: 19 September 2021
Rating: 3 stars
Review: If you don’t know about this book you’ve probably been living under a rock for the last year. It is on every Bookstagrammers page, Dua Lipa posted a picture of it and the number of times I have seen the cover of this book is up there with Red, White and Royal Blue and Colleen Hoover’s It End With Us. Funnily enough, it can also be said that if you don’t already know a huge chunk of the information presented in this book then you absolutely have been living under a rock for a lot longer. For such a highly regarded book, a lot of the content in it is just well-researched, rehashed opinions supported by quotes from authors and other journalists. I am not someone who reads a lot of essays or nonfiction, nor am I someone who knows a lot about America’s recent history but still reading this book felt a little like I was given information I already know in a new package. I’m going to get to being nasty in a while, first let me go through the things I liked.
I love the idea of the name, Trick Mirror. Someone on Goodreads said that it is in reference to mirrors that change their reflection depending on how you look at them, never quite reflecting the truth. I think I am more in awe of that concept for the name of the book than I am of the actual contents of the book. I went in expecting a book that delved deeper into the multi-faceted ways in which modern feminism and capitalism can be looked at through the lens of a millennial. In a way that is exactly what I got but it was in no way satisfying. I like her writing style and voice even though I feel like she quotes from obscure books a little too often. I think I’ll be able to read nonfiction much faster if it was always written by her. The essay that I found most interesting to read was one of the seven scams. I say that knowing completely well that my lacking knowledge of American history is what makes it possible for me to like it so much. Anyone else who is better acquainted with the events mentioned in this essay will find it to be a pretty boring read. My amusement with this chapter could also be because of the fact that I watched an episode of Brooklyn 99 right after reading the book that mentions that the Vulture knows the ‘guys from the Fyre festival’ and he thinks ‘it was all the fault of the island people’. Obviously. I am a sucker for a good Brooklyn 99 easter egg. I also found the chapter on sexual assault and the UVA rape case to be interesting. I read Chanel Miller’s Know My Name this year and found it to be heart-wrenching yet powerful and hopeful so this chapter felt like revisiting that book. But once again I could see that anyone who was acquainted with the Rolling Stones article she talks about and the consequent controversy would find nothing new in this chapter.
You know how sometimes people say that I love the author so much that I would read their grocery lists? This is exactly what I say about my love for Sharon Bolton and Anuja Chauhan. Well, there are parts of this book that feel exactly like doing that and let me tell you it is not as fun as one would expect. In her discussion about Amazon, she includes a list of things available on Amazon and the price of each item just to prove that almost everything is now available on Amazon, something that anyone who has gone through the last couple of years already knows. Then in the last chapter where she talks about her misgivings about the wedding industry and why she does not want to get married she has a list of things that a bride does before the wedding, complete with the expenses for each step. It is fun to read this when it is a sarcastic tweet meant to get a few laughs but in a chapter of a well-acclaimed book it gets tedious.
I think my biggest complaint, and what seems to be the complaint of several other readers with this book, is that at no point is there a strong thesis. A lot of times I would read the chapter and then wonder what the point of it was. The most memorable chapters in the end were not the ones that I liked reading or got a lot of information from but the ones that came from personal experience like Reality TV Me, which was boring and stretched out and Ecstasy, which felt like a maze I was trying to get out of. When a book is so hyped you go in with a lot of expectations and I think, for me, this was the pitfall of Trick Mirror. I didn’t learn a lot after reading the book. It is rare for me to pick up a book of essays but when I do I expect to get a lot out of it and that didn’t happen this time.
Having said that, Jia Tolentino is a confident and talented writer. She is better at articulating some of the thoughts I have, especially in the essay Pure Heroine. Although she is a bit of a snob about some books. This coming from a snob myself is a big thing. I think I would like to read more from her in the future but I really hope the ideas are a little fresher the next time.