She spends lots of money taking care of her skin, a process that has taken on the holy aspect of a spiritual ritual and the mundane regularity of setting a morning alarm. She takes advantage of technology, both in the way she broadcasts her image and in the meticulous improvement of that image itself.

The ideal woman, in other words, is always optimizing. She is equally interested in whatever the market offers her – in the tools that will allow her to look more appealing, to be even more endlessly presentable, to wring as much value out of her particular position as she can. This woman is sincerely interested in whatever the market demands of her (good looks, the impression of indefinitely extended youth, advanced skills in self-presentation and self-surveillance). The process requires maximal obedience on the part of the woman in question, and – ideally – her genuine enthusiasm, too. This debut collection of essays announces her as exactly the sort of voice we need to hear from right now – and for many years to come.Can you see this woman yet? She looks like an Instagram – which is to say, an ordinary woman reproducing the lessons of the marketplace, which is how an ordinary woman evolves into an ideal.

In these nine interlinked essays, Jia Tolentino, the New Yorker’s brightest young talent, explores her own coming of age in this warped and confusing landscape.įrom the rise of the internet to her own appearance on an early reality TV show from her experiences of ecstasy – both religious and chemical – to her uneasy engagement with our culture’s endless drive towards ‘self-optimisation’ from the phenomenon of the successful American scammer to her generation’s obsession with extravagant weddings, Jia Tolentino writes with style, humour and a fierce clarity about these strangest of times.įollowing in the footsteps of American luminaries such as Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Rebecca Solnit, yet with a voice and vision all her own, Jia Tolentino writes with a rare gift for elucidating nuance and complexity, coupled with a disarming warmth. We are living in the era of the self, in an era of malleable truth and widespread personal and political delusion. It filled me with hope’ – Zadie Smithįrom one of the brightest young chroniclers of US culture comes this dazzling collection of essays on the internet, the self, feminism and politics.

Trick mirror essays