![]() ![]() ![]() The other essays and ideas seemed to ripple out from there. I felt it started with this heartbeat essay, “The I in Internet.” That brought so many of the major themes: selfhood, self-delusion versus self-actualization, and feminism-all framed by the internet era. Lucie Shelly: Before we dig into individual essays, I thought we could talk about the collection as a whole. ![]() On a WiFi call across an ocean and a five-hour time difference, Tolentino and I spoke about what the internet has done to writing, to identity, and to feminism. All of these essays are new, though, and the writing is the kind to which you will look, and look again. Trick Mirror is Tolentino’s first book, but many will know her work from The Hairpin, where she got her start while still pursuing an MFA, or from Jezebel, or from the New Yorker, where she is a staff writer. In short, they take the chaotic blaze that is the current era and disperse it into something illuminating. They talk about drugs and religion and music and scamming. They retrace the falsified Rolling Stone story of a rape at UVA, Tolentino’s alma mater, and they revisit the author’s stint on a reality TV show as a teenager. They consider the internet’s refraction of selfhood: the self as “the last natural resource of capitalism,” as something to be weaponized, as a state of constant performance. The essays place the disciples of Lululemon in the same frame as heroines from Greek mythology. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |