trick mirror reflections on self delusion

More often than not, the essays here end up concluding with a well-articulated shrug of the shoulders. It's this kind of constant self-awareness and inward inquiry that give Trick Mirror its most chewable moments. 'I don't know what to do with the fact that I myself continue to benefit from all this: that my career is possible in large part because of the way the Internet collapses identity, opinion and action,' she writes. As somebody who could be considered very online even during the early days of the internet, and who is now dependent on the internet for her livelihood, there are few forced to navigate it's machinery the way is. Her best pieces read like viral Twitter threads written by the Frankfurt School, seamlessly blending cynical humor with academic rigor. Tolentino finds.little truths in just about every corner of American cultural life. a collection that feels somehow riskier than usual output, unburdened by the demands and constraints of a big, mainstream publication. It is because she is a self-confessed unreliable narrator that we trust her. Her entire diagnosis of the ills of the world would be invalid if she pretended, like a bad psychoanalyst, to be immune to what she describes. Tolentino would not be such a gifted diagnostician if she did not at moments seem to hedge her bets on these matters.

Tolentino is especially cogent on how sex muddies the waters of reason and seems to have the power to turn the faintest hint of progress on its head. But only if you are blind and foolish enough, or have beauty and eloquence to spare. Just for a second, it can tempt you with the insane idea that you might be able to pole-vault over the horrors and injustices of the day. Sometimes the energy and verve of Tolentino’s writing can feel slightly manic, oddly in sync with what it claims most passionately to hate. It is easy to be lured by the exhilaration-the fun, even-of these essays, and to miss the depression, not to say nihilism-a word Tolentino uses-that runs beneath the stream. Tolentino always has her eye out for the ugly history, the stain on the carpet that so many refuse to see. Tolentino knows she is implicated in the world she lays out here with such merciless precision. But having it both ways simply increases the difficulty of deciding where, in all of this, she belongs, and her awareness of this truth constitutes the unsettling core of her book.

Tolentino wants to have it both ways-to preserve her integrity while going along with the game. In this collection of always trenchant and at times luminous essays, establishes herself as the important critical voice she has been on her way to becoming for some time, although comparisons with Susan Sontag and Joan Didion seem to me unhelpful-as if, for a woman writer, theirs are the only hills to climb.

Trick mirror reflections on self delusion