Using our Library Voices
Using our Library Voices
Reading Room Radio: Trick Mirror
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Nine essays. One uncomfortable question: are we the problem?
Title: Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-delusion
Author: Jia Tolentino
Reviewed by: Beth K.
Created by the Podcast Team at the Harris County Public Library.
www.hcpl.net
Podcast Team Members include: Beth Krippel, John Harbaugh, Mary Mink, Dylan Smith, Sadina Shawver, Alinda Mac, John Schaffer, Jennifer Finch, Katelyn Helberg, Darcy Casavant, Darla Pruitt and Nancy Hu
Welcome to Harris County Public Library's Reading Room Radio, where your to-be red pile gets a little more exciting one micro podcast at a time. Hi, it's Beth. If you ever caught yourself scrolling through social media, chasing that next little hit of dopamine, or getting swept up in someone else's righteous or not so righteous rage, and then kept scrolling anyway, this book was written for you. Trick Mirror Reflections on Self-Delusion is an essay collection from Gia Tolentino, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and one of the critics of culture today. This book was published in 2019 and it became a New York Times bestseller almost immediately. It's a book of about nine essays. They range pretty widely in subject matter: the internet, reality television, institutional marriage, scam culture, and it does have a lot of emphasis on particular pressures placed on women to constantly, you know, optimize themselves. So what kind of holds all of these together, though, is more about the systems that are in place and how much they are influencing our lives, and then that feedback loop where we then support the systems that then influence our lives. And Tolentino doesn't let herself off the hook. In this, she has an essay called The Eye in Internet, and it examines how the internet rewired the way we kind of perform or create identity. And she looks at herself on that because her career is built in a large part on the dynamics she's critiquing. So she's not above kind of turning the lens on herself that she is looking at how this type of culture has built her career. So there's also the essay Always Be Optimizing, which looks at the wellness culture and how that transformed self-care into kind of performance and almost a second job. Now it focuses particularly on women, but I think you and I can agree that men are in that kind of influence circle as well. The essay is both funny and also devastating. We think about the wide range of how people are always packaging themselves and their lives to be shared on social media. Now, the essays sort of sprawl. There are times when there are detours, and then there's moments where you're kind of flipping forward to see how much longer that particular essay is. But then when you get pulled back or in your okay, it's four more pages, and then it does sum itself up well. It has good conclusions and it gets there, but there are moments where you feel like it's stretching just a little longer than perhaps you would want. But the writing itself is really, you know, dynamic. It is language of today, so there are some stronger language used. There are modern idioms and internet slang used throughout, but most readers will understand the terminology. So Trick Mirror is not a book that's going to hand you solutions, though. It really is a critique, an examination, where it is meant to be more of a chat where your friend is sharing a story about what they've observed and how that's impacting modern culture. I do recommend the book. There's interesting observations, and you know it's uh it's a pretty quick read, actually, even if there are moments where you feel like the story's meandering a little bit. So give it a try. That is Trick Mirror Reflections on Self Delusion by Gia Tolentino. I hope I said the last name correctly. Let me know what you think.