Belated Notes on Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror

I am happy about the resurgence of the essay as a popular form--something that I think is a result of the early 2010s personal essay boom (which, ironically, Jia Tolentino wrote about for the New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/the-personal-essay-boom-is-over).

Tolentino’s essays remain accessible (though I use this word with hesitation. What do we mean by accessible? What are we signaling?) while also writing literary criticism and referencing scholarly works like that of Donna Haraway. At the same time, Tolentino’s politics felt of a different time. Her uncritical time at the University of Virginia, her mentions of conservative friends weddings, her casual admittance of her “politically incorrect” Pocahantas costume--feel like remnants of a time before Donald Trump was elected president, before a presidential candidate pretended to be indigenous, before a reckoning with white supremacy was forced for many prominent writers. But here, in some ways, Tolentino remains of her early 2010s college days--her love of the “3 Rebeccas” (all white women writers) and her lack of sustained engagement with any Black women’s feminism--particularly in her essays about rape culture and marriage. In “I Thee Dread,” Tolentino picks up familiar feminist talking points about weddings--the cost, the waste, the tradition of women as property exemplified by the taking of a man’s name. But here, I couldn’t stop thinking of Black women’s experiences with these same cultural practices--for whom large weddings were not a possibility for many years, for whom taking a husband’s name is in some ways an anti-racist practice. Of course, Jia Tolentino is a woman of color. But that doesn’t mean she should brush aside the experiences of other women of color in her writing. 

I admire Tolentino’s form--her use of the essay, her invocation of texts ranging from academic work to old school feminist theory to of the moment pop feminist writing. But I think her perspective in these essays--though they are personal--fails to acknowledge privilege, particularly in a genre that is being formally challenged and constructed by people of color and queer people.