Of Millennials & Mirrors: An Interview with Jia Tolentino

Jia Tolentino is a nationally acclaimed writer whose insightful examinations of contemporary culture have catapulted her to fame, permeating The New Yorker’s famously persnickety readership and culminating in a successful debut essay collection, Trick Mirror: Essays on Self Delusion, released this past August. At thirty, Tolentino, an MFA graduate herself, did not seem out of place among our Oregon State cohort, with whom she kindly sat down for a colloquium and an interview (led by 45th Parallel Editor-in-Chief Nicole Horowitz) on the afternoon of October 5th, 2019.

From the first moment, Tolentino’s demeanor is disarming, flowing counter to her rising star. She mentions more than once being uncomfortable with the amount of fame she has amassed in a relatively short amount of time, even telling an anecdote about being recognized the previous day in Portland’s rose garden, speaking in a tone teetering somewhere between discomfort and dismay.

However, she seems entirely at home among young writers, giving honest, relatively unfiltered answers to our questions. She speaks about writing her book as a response to the horror she felt in the aftermath of the 2016 election, resigning herself to the affective anxiety that has plagued the country since the inauguration. “One way to be unhappy and anxious is to write a book,” she adds.

She is full of these pieces of wisdom, which are less nuggets or pearls than firecrackers: words that betray an incisive understanding of the world but not at the loss of her sharp sense of humor. “Now is a really spicy time to be a writer,” she says and carefully acknowledges the fact that many more young, sharp people should be given similar opportunities. She does not feel she deserves to stand at this platform—speaking loudly and having her voice heard—alone. 

She tells me multiple times that she sees what she does as an essayist as less an act of art and beauty and more one of travail and good fortune, stating: “I’m a very good worker but not a very good artist.” When asked about her pivot from fiction, for which she received an MFA from the University of Michigan, to her current nonfictive endeavors, she talks of an unpublished novel, the culmination of her MFA, that sits in a drawer. After, she tracks her employment journey, which spans a stint overseas as a Peace Corp volunteer in Kyrgyzstan, time in Houston prior to her MFA program, and culminates in a string of positions creating content at Hairpin, Jezebel, and eventually The New Yorker.

I ask her about reputation. What does it mean for someone who is young, a person of color, and a non-native New Yorker to be employed at such a publication? If she’s ever felt any anxiety over crumbling the old guard, she hides it well. “I haven’t really thought about that,” she says, “maybe it would have been different if I was doing this five years ago.” But she is aware, to some degree, of her newfound positionality, as well as refreshingly flippant on the subject—posting a shot on Instagram of her New Yorker article titled “Please, My Wife, She’s Very Online” astride a picture of Borat with the caption: “It’s frankly absurd that I’m employed.” This reveling in her ability to successfully permeate old guard institutions is perhaps a part of her millennial ethos. 

It is indeed uncanny the way in which my colleagues and friends can see themselves in Tolentino’s work. This one latches on to her religious megachurch upbringing and subsequent anti-religious reckoning; that one attaches to the keen way in which she points a scalpel at internet culture, the commodification of the self. I myself align most closely with her work concerning the culture of optimizing (one of her essays being about barre classes, kale Caesar salads, and athleisure) as well as her more personal narratives about identity, security, and literary criticism. When I ask her what she sees as the relationship between a nonfiction essay and a work of academic social criticism, she says there is not really a difference to her. “It’s all about having the right tools to say what you want to say,” she claims. “I tend not to think about genres that much.” When I ask her about personal narrative, what she’s willing to share, and Trick Mirror’s balancing act, perfectly poised between social criticism and self-reflection, her answer is similar. “I see my own experience as a tool for getting at something bigger,” she says, explaining that for her, memoir is never about memoir but rather invoking the self as a lens through which to unpack a larger question. We talk through a metaphor about a car, about the self being merely the driver, though the specifics get lost in conversation. Still, there is something distinctive about the way in which I personally feel so in sync with Tolentino’s way of speaking and navigating the world, though we share few experiential commonalities.

So, if not to my cohort and I directly, who is Tolentino actually addressing in her essays? “Write as if you have a lot of respect for your reader.” “Write to your smartest, funniest friend.” “Don’t waste their fucking time,” she says, citing that in this day and age of rampant fake news, “everyone’s bullshit meter is really high.” 

Things move to talking about reading, which she says she does constantly, “almost exclusively for pleasure,” and about editing, which Tolentino takes very seriously. “Editing is really good for training your writing,” she says and comes back to it again and again, citing her time at Jezebel and its nearly constant need for new content as vital in the creation of her own writerly voice and ability to adapt it to the needs of the piece. The “reading constantly” thing smacks of MFA grad advice, which she, as with everything else, doles out in piquant bites. “Treat it like a nine-to-five,” she says, when I ask about how to make the most out of an MFA. “Probably no one will pay you to write like this again.”