Lifting the Glass: A Look Behind the Trick Mirror with Jia Tolentino
by Nicole Pagliari
Illustration by Cailin Hall
Jia Tolentino
Illustration by Cailin Hall for Fools Magazine
When Jia Tolentino, New Yorker staff writer and Magid Center’s Visiting Writer-in-Residence, took her place before the podium at Prairie Lights to read from her newly published essay collection Trick Mirror, she gave the plastic chair-bound audience more than just the words printed on pages before her. Rather, she privileged us with “A path toward transcendence—a way of accessing an extrahuman world of rapture and pardon that… is as real as it feels.”
Danny Khalastchi, director of the Magid Center at the University of Iowa prefaced Tolentino’s reading by saying that not only have Tolentino’s economical essays “reinvented the position of the eye and the I,” but also that she has graciously “placed in our line of vision that which we had always thought but never seen.”
Every eye in the room was on Tolentino as she rose from her seat. A single thought entered our collective audience consciousness, the ‘I’ silenced. She’s here. “That was so generous I want to die,” Tolentino said, smiling as she shuffled her papers around on the podium, “But these essays are not economical… I wrote a book because I wanted to write as fucking long as I wanted.”
As Tolentino read the fifth essay in her collection, “Ecstasy,” about her separation from Christianity and how it coincided with her experience with hard drugs, I couldn’t help but think about how she had recreated that sensation of being in ecstasy, of “standing outside oneself,” that she was able to find both in religion and in the actual drug MDMA. I took in those around me, with their palms pressed to identical bright yellow covers of books or fingers poised to turn pages, and began to sense that we were all there because we wanted to witness Tolentino’s seemingly effortless ability to decompress our need to understand ourselves. We had all filed in an hour before the event began, plopping ourselves into chairs as fast as the bookstore staff could set them out because, more than anything, we wanted to know if the face behind the trick mirror could still provide the same amount of relief even if the glass was yanked away.
When I was seven years old, the first High School Musical premiered on Disney Channel. A few weeks after the movie premiered, my grandmother, a frail Filipino woman who oftentimes cannot reach things on top of her refrigerator, saved an issue of the newspaper she bought whenever she went to the oriental market near her house. The article was about Vanessa Hudgens, the leading actress who played Gabriella Montez in High School Musical. The article gushed about Hudgens, trumpeting her Filipino roots and praising her newfound role as an icon for young girls. I clipped out the article and brought it home.
For months after, whenever my friends and I reenacted the movie, the brick walls of the church that bordered the parking lot where we had recess serving as the backdrop for our paved stage, I demanded that I play the coveted role of Gabriella. “She’s Filipino, it wouldn’t make sense for you to play her,” I scolded a semi circle of freckles and blue eyes. They protested heavily, demanding reasons for why they couldn’t play the leading female character of the most popular movie amongst fourth graders. But I was adamant. Finally, finally there was a character, a main character who looked like me. Nevermind that she was a math whiz and sang in musicals while I could barely do long division and was asked to sing quieter during the annual Christmas concert. Vanessa Hudgens was Filipino, therefore, I had dibs.
Vanessa Hudgens was Filipino, therefore, I had dibs.
Five years later, when Gabriella almost rejected a spot in an early admissions program to Stanford just to spend prom with her boyfriend, I became less enthralled with her character. When I realized that her last name –Montez– was more likely Hispanic than Filipino, I was baffled. I wondered when my signpost for Filipino female success had dissolved, or if she had never really been the symbol I was looking for anyways. When was that symbol going to show up?
She’s here. Jia Tolentino is a phenomenal writer before she is a second-generation Filipino or Canadian or American woman. However, the part of her identity that rests in being raised by Filipino immigrant parents resonates with me, makes me want to jump up from my seat and scream “I have to play her” at my peers, both back at that church parking lot and sitting beside me in Prairie Lights nodding along to the cadence of Tolentino’s voice. But, as Khalastchi warned in his opening statement, Tolentino reinvents the position of the “I” even as we are bringing it into focus.
When Lynne Nugent, managing editor for The Iowa Review, asked what advice Tolentino would give aspiring writers who wanted to follow in her footsteps, she gave an answer that was characteristically self-aware of both the raw talent that she had honed over the years and her positional luck in a hard-to-crack industry. “In college, I was going to keggers and just trying to play beer pong,” Tolentino recalled, “But I was always writing because that’s what you do when you love writing… You can’t stop.” She recounted stories of manuscripts hidden in drawers and never-read pages, acknowledging that sometimes writers pour their hearts into pieces that never get published. She went on to advise, “You just have to prepare yourself for if and when that luck hits you.”
When asked how she mitigates her exposure to the internet, and whether or not she sets boundaries, Tolentino chuckled to herself. “My favorite thing to say to someone is ‘I have no opinion at all about that.’” Tolentino again acknowledged that she was fortunate enough to be in a position to write about what interests her, and that privilege resulted in her ability to prioritize quality over quantity as well as distance herself from facets of the internet and pop culture that she simply is not interested in. “I have found,” Tolentino said, moving closer to the microphone as if she was sharing a secret, “That if the two opinions you have are hefty, no one will notice that you didn’t say shit about anything else.”
“I have found,” Tolentino said, moving closer to the microphone as if she was sharing a secret, “That if the two opinions you have are hefty, no one will notice that you didn’t say shit about anything else.”
And just like that, the hour was up. Tolentino only took two student questions in which she explained that for this particular essay, she relied heavily on herself as the main authoritative voice because her journey from finding ecstasy in religion to finding ecstasy in MDMA had been all her own. The congregation rose from their plastic pews, blinking, barely stretching their arms before crowding into a line for Tolentino to sign their copy of Trick Mirror, the covers slick with palm sweat. An almost reverent hush fell over the room. Small groups of patrons huddled together, discussing the essay or standing lost in contemplation, taking a couple of steps towards the table where Tolentino was signing books every few seconds. “You don’t have to believe a revelation to hold onto it,” Tolentino had said at the end of her essay, “To understand that something inside it was real.”