Jia Tolentino at the Cosmos Book Club by Johanna Dong

2019 is truly the year of Jia Tolentino. Though many are already familiar with her work as a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she covers an impressive range of whatever topics catch her eye—recent book releases, Fyre Festival, the surreal Chinese performing arts group Shen Yun, TikTok—her first book Trick Mirror was released earlier this summer to near-universal acclaim. The essay collection is signature Jia: incisive, lyrical, funny as shit. It is mostly, as Tolentino described at a book club event I attended, “punishingly zeitgeist-y”—the bulk of its content is dedicated to contemporary phenomena such as social media’s facilitation of self-delusion, modern-day scammers, and the culture of eternally optimizing one’s body and life. 

The book’s full title is Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, and in the introduction Tolentino explains, “These are the prisms through which I have come to know myself. In this book, I tried to undo their acts of refraction. I wanted to see the way I would see in a mirror. It’s possible I painted an elaborate mural instead.” Such a premise naturally makes for an excellent book club discussion, which I found out firsthand when attending the September gathering of Cosmos Book Club. A small organization by design, Cosmos caters specifically to self-identifying Asian women and nonbinary individuals, and meets every one or two months at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop space in Chelsea. 

The event with Jia Tolentino was my first time attending a Cosmos meeting, though I had heard of the book club previously, having worked as an editorial intern at the AAWW in 2018. The club meeting was small, capped at about thirty attendees, and we spent the first hour and a half discussing in small groups what we found interesting in Trick Mirror (the answer: just about everything). Tolentino herself joined us in person for a Q&A in the latter hour. As soon as she began to speak I was reminded of one of my favorite quotes from an article she wrote years ago for The Hairpin, in which she absolutely savaged the (at the time) popular song “Rude” by Magic!: 

“‘Rude’ is like a Dorito bag that got stuck on a spike of the crown of the Statue of Liberty: it’s a pop object with no content and only as much form as is necessary to deliver brief chemical gratification, which, through an unlikely ascension, becomes newly visible as a pure expression of tragedy, degradation, and American garbage.”

Tolentino’s humor was just as evident in person. “Someone the other day told me my personal brand was authenticity and I was like, ‘fuck me,’” she revealed while speaking on her essay about, well, authenticity, in an age wherein the Internet has become all-encompassing. 

What makes Tolentino’s takes on pop culture and political moments unique is her admittance of complicity in all of it. It was the point to which the Cosmos attendees and Tolentino herself kept returning: as a writer for a partially digital publication, as a millennial, as a woman, as an active participant in American culture, she does not exempt herself from criticism. 

When I went up to Tolentino after the discussion to ask her to sign my copy of Trick Mirror, I said, in reference to her New Yorker article about the surge of people asking celebrities online to do things like run them over with a truck, “Jia, I just wanted to say thank you for stepping on all our necks with this book.” She laughed, told me to watch the new movie Hustlers, and signed my book with “To Johanna — Step on my neck!”