Over the summer, when we were still allowed to leave the house, I was working in a very hip bookstore in my very literary college town, and there was one book that stayed at the top of our bestseller list for multiple weeks: Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino.
At the time I had never heard of Tolentino, but she is a writer at the New Yorker who is also an alum of the MFA program at the university where I currently work. In other words: she is a Big Deal here. An essayist for the instagram generation: mid-30s, stylish, slightly awkward, smart. She came to give a reading at the bookstore which produced a sold-out crowd, and I heard gushing reviews of her performance for weeks after. I was surprised to learn that her book was a series of essays: these are not typically bestsellers.
Essays are my favorite genre of writing. They are by nature concise and provide direct access to the mind of a writer: you don't just get a story or description or facts, you also get an argument. When they are good, even the most dispassionate, academic essays (e.g., Marilynne Robinson's), are personal, in that they demonstrate how the writer thinks about the world.
At the time I had never heard of Tolentino, but she is a writer at the New Yorker who is also an alum of the MFA program at the university where I currently work. In other words: she is a Big Deal here. An essayist for the instagram generation: mid-30s, stylish, slightly awkward, smart. She came to give a reading at the bookstore which produced a sold-out crowd, and I heard gushing reviews of her performance for weeks after. I was surprised to learn that her book was a series of essays: these are not typically bestsellers.
Essays are my favorite genre of writing. They are by nature concise and provide direct access to the mind of a writer: you don't just get a story or description or facts, you also get an argument. When they are good, even the most dispassionate, academic essays (e.g., Marilynne Robinson's), are personal, in that they demonstrate how the writer thinks about the world.
All this to say: I was excited to read Tolentino's work. Unfortunately, I ended up hating it more than I thought possible. I disliked the book so much I found it difficult to explain why without sounding unhinged. Somehow, she manages to make even the most fascinating personal experiences stultifyingly boring. Imagine something incredible happened to you: like, you cured cancer! And in an essay about that experience, you focused primarily on why you needed to wear a lab coat to work. Worse, Tolentino confuses the most basic terms and ideas—I remain genuinely concerned that she does not understand the difference between a marriage and a wedding, despite writing an entire essay on the topic.
And reading the reviews made me feel insane, because every single one was unequivocally positive. Tolentino is the voice of her generation! A visionary! A genius! This view included every major book review outlet and all of my coworkers at the bookstore. Hating the book began to feel downright heretical. When a customer would ask for my opinion before buying it, I would lie and say I hadn't read it. My coworkers, with whom I had discussed the book extensively, found this hilarious.
After selling hundreds of copies and reading dozens of glowing reviews, I started to worry that I was the problem. Tolentino had clearly touched a nerve, and maybe this was a sign that her work was actually brilliant? Were banality and confusion her whole point, and I was missing the joke? Aren't love and hatred closely intertwined? If the book was truly bad, wouldn't indifference be a more reasonable response?
Ultimately, I think not. What drove me nuts was not the book itself, but the gushing response from people who should know better. And today, many months later, I finally, finally found a negative review! Just reading it made me calm. In a way, I'm grateful to Tolentino for writing such a terrible book, if only to give me the experience of feeling so strongly contrarian about it. Loving something everyone else loves is a nice feeling, but finding the one other person who hates something as much as you do is truly wonderful.
2 comments:
LOL she was an undergrad here and she is a heroine to all the activist undergrads. I took that alone as a reasonable sign that she was probably Not That Good. Also, wasn't she a writer for Jezebel, or maybe Gawker for a while? These are not places to learn how to become a great writer.
Yes, she writes about going to your school, but don't worry! She also got into Yale. Sigh.
I thought that writing for Jezebel and Gawker just meant you were someone who was interested in writing and happened to graduate from college around 2007. But as it turns out, you're right, it says more than that. To be fair, though, it's not that she's a terrible writer, it's that she's a terrible thinker. Which I guess fits with the Jezebel brand.
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