Navigating Self-Delusion: An Interview with Jia Tolentino
by Gabbie Meis
Photos by Vivian Le
Vivian Le for Fools Magazine
I heard Jia Tolentino before she entered the room–her black boots clipping against the wooden floor in the back of the Dey House, home of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The 31-year-old journalist for The New Yorker and best-selling author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, was this semester’s Visiting Writer-in-Residence of the Magid Center for Undergraduate Writing. Her essays span from losing religion in the Houston megachurch community in which she was raised to how she combats, and is complicit in, “optimization” – from Sweetgreen to Barre class, she maps her commute through capitalism. No topic is out of range for Tolentino; her beat is far and wide, the only specification being: she’s at the point in her career where she can write about whatever she wants.
Just as confidently as she does with her writing, Tolentino made the large, open library of our meeting into a home quickly, brewing herself a cup of tea with the communal equipment at the back of the room I hadn’t been courageous enough to touch in my four years at university. She took the seat across from me, spreading out her many totes and casting off her leopard-print jacket as the water for her tea warmed.
I struggled to find the words for how to introduce myself, now that she was sitting in front of me, offering to make an extra cup. I graciously declined and busied collecting myself for our discussion. Tolentino is just a decade older than me, but I felt infinitely warmer and wiser just by being in her presence.
Despite writing about herself often in her essays, the world knows very little about Tolentino. Within Trick Mirror, she carefully and specifically uses her own experiences to criticize “irresolvable conflicts between desire and precedent or between one system and another and escalation.” This image projects only a small portion of how she sees herself, and yet qualitatively, all her “confident and happy and stupid” self. She refuses to take herself too seriously. She doesn’t see herself as the “next great Joan Didion” that some critics have raved her to be, and yet, this separation–humility, maybe–makes Tolentino’s writings all the more desirable to her readers.
Vivian Le for Fools Magazine
After writing about the commodification of her identity, Tolentino’s personality has, strangely, been commodified by her readers and the industry itself. As a millennial woman, she engages naturally but selectively with her profile. She schedules her social media presence: every three days for Twitter and every two weeks for Instagram for her some-collective-200K followers.
Because of this relationship Tolentino has with the economy of her online presence, she seeks to be as honest as possible with her readers. The image they create from reading her work, while often a trick mirror for themselves, is also not that different from who she is. She shares how she was met with anxious hands, passing her their book to sign, and for some, tears blurring vision. Readers have iconized Tolentino, while also holding her as a close friend; meeting her is a reunion.
“I think it’s really easy, because of things I’ve done of my own volition, for people that don’t know me to feel like they know me very well. I had a bit of a freak out about that, and I was like wait–but then I got over my freak-out, and I was like okay, whatever. The person that they think they know is actually, unfortunately, you. There’s not really a difference. And for some reason, realizing that made that feel less weird–and made it feel weird in a tight way, that someone could think of me as someone they know.”
When she first set out to put this collection together–and as is generally true of her writing–Tolentino didn’t often think of her readers. Despite being a staff writer for The New Yorker and a popular internet writer, she had no notion of how popular her book would become. For Tolentino, appealing to an audience or even anticipating one is an act of self-consciousness.
“I feel like self-consciousness is such a disaster. We’re all self-conscious to some degree, you know, and probably, subconsciously I’m much more self-conscious than other people, but I’ve always thought that to think about your audience too much is to play a losing game. In everything I write, I do hope to make something clearer for people who read it. That’s the best–and all I can hope for. That’s what writing does for me: when something’s knotted together in my mind and confusing, by the time I’m done writing, it’s clearer. And hopefully, that’s what someone who reads it takes away.”
Still, Tolentino’s work is rooted in the collective. Although told through her perspective, the concepts she explores–optimization, self-actualization, the looming terror of capitalism–are near-universal experiences. She’s found, through the response to Trick Mirror, people are looking for real answers, something explicit. There’s no individual response to any of these, no one way to solve the big questions of life, but Tolentino wants to give her readers a “framework to puzzle things out for yourself.” She can’t provide the answers because she doesn’t have them, but she can, and does, lay herself bare for her readers. Next, Tolentino is learning how to write more for them, intentionally dissecting her audience while tilting their view on what it means to be oneself.
Tolentino shared stories of meeting these unanticipated readers–many, fans–on book tour and on other college campuses. She discovered these readers were already ready to give her what she was trying to give them: I’m really fucked up about this one thing, and I need to talk about it. Tolentino’s work, now, feels almost unprecedented in its ability to ignite a fiery, viral discussion. Her stories, despite being intimately personal, adapted a sort of universality as her book gained popularity. Tolentino attempted to put together what about the collection, her work, created that; “part of it is that whoever comes through is pretty close to the actual me, as close as I can render it, and I think there’s some version of honesty in that. I don’t know–I think I’m very obviously just a person trying to figure shit out, who I think maybe a lot of people can relate to–and I hate the lens of relatability, but I’m someone who is continually just trying their best in public with very obvious weak points and deficiencies and culpabilities and flaws–but also with steady effort. I don’t know. When I think about the question, I feel a sort of impermeable cloud of you can’t know.”
Despite trying to work through these complex issues of time and identity, Tolentino doesn’t like to think about the future. She wants to exist in the present as much as possible, making individual decisions to give herself and her community freedom in these systems that work to confine people as much as possible, while still recognizing the power of collective engagement.
“I think I wrote this book to hammer home, at a cellular level for myself, that there are no individual solutions to these problems… it’s hard for my brain to understand the degree to which individual effort is both crucial and fucking useless. I think our brains, neoliberalism, get us to think we can figure our own way out, but we absolutely can’t. There’s no individual way out of anything, and I think, weirdly, that sort of vastness of scale also helps me think about the ways in which my individual actions do matter.”
When we take this advice of Tolentino, using each decision as an opportunity to step away from capitalist obligation and into those of love and care, we enter this conversation Tolentino’s writing primes for us.
Vivian Le for Fools Magazine
She continues, “I often think, in terms of the earth’s time, we’re one breath and we’re not even alive–and I find that really galvanizing. I find the prospect of meaninglessness to be incredibly invigorating, and it makes me want to do more things because it doesn’t matter anyway. You might as well do shit. I still feel that feeling I wrote about in the intro [to Trick Mirror]: that I’ll never feel sure about anything again. But I think that’s just how my brain’s going to be: just unsure.”
Tolentino and her work offer a sounding board onto which we’ve learnt to cast our own thoughts and delusions to better understand ourselves. We’re all thinking about the same things all the time–and instead of offering the world answers, Tolentino gives us a new pathway to consider how the world works. On the future, she remarks, “it’s sort of a delusional response to feel sure or clear.” Instead, her essays explore and reflect the universality of nihilism and, oppositely, earnest attention in this moment and time. Although she doesn’t foresee writing a book anytime soon, Tolentino’s work can still be found regularly in The New Yorker.