Jia Tolentino: Trick Mirror with Doreen St. Félix

Jia Tolentino is a peerless voice of her generation, tackling the conflicts, contradictions, and sea changes that define us and our time. Now, in this dazzling collection of nine entirely original essays, written with a rare combination of give and sharpness, wit and fearlessness, she delves into the forces that warp our vision, demonstrating an unparalleled stylistic potency and critical dexterity.

Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly through a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Tolentino writes about a cultural prism: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the advent of scamming as the definitive millennial ethos; the literary heroine’s journey from brave to blank to bitter; the punitive dream of optimization, which insists that everything, including our bodies, should become more efficient and beautiful until we die. Gleaming with Tolentino’s sense of humor and capacity to elucidate the impossibly complex in an instant, and marked by her desire to treat the reader with profound honesty, Trick Mirror is an instant classic of the worst decade yet.

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 the contributing editor at The Hairpin and the deputy editor at Jezebel, and her work has appeared in the The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Time, Grantland, Slate, Bon Apetit, SPIN, Pitchfork, and FADER. She lives in Brooklyn.

Doreen St. Félix is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She was previously a staff writer at MTV News, and an editor-at-large at Lenny Letter. In 2016, St. Félix was named one of Forbes’s 30 Under 30 in Media. In 2017, she was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, and, in 2019, she won in the same category. Her writing has appeared in the Times Magazine, New York, Vogue, The Fader, and Pitchfork.

This event is free and open to the public.