About Jia Tolentino
Jia Tolentino is a Canadian-American essayist and staff writer at The New Yorker, and the author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2019), a bestselling collection of essays about the internet, self-optimization, scams, marriage and contemporary feminism. She is a widely read cultural critic who writes about how technology and money shape the ways people see themselves.
Tolentino was born in Toronto in 1988 to parents from the Philippines and grew up in Houston, Texas, where she attended an evangelical megachurch and a small Christian school. She studied English at the University of Virginia as a Jefferson Scholar, graduating in 2009, then spent a year in the Peace Corps in Kyrgyzstan and earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. Her first published short story won a fiction contest and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
She began writing for The Hairpin in 2013 as a contributing editor and in 2014 moved to Jezebel, where she became deputy editor. After about two years there she joined The New Yorker as a staff writer. Her work for the magazine ranges from personal essays and criticism to reported features, including her widely read 2019 piece on "Instagram Face" and her 2021 reporting, with Ronan Farrow, on the conservatorship of Britney Spears. She received a National Magazine Award in 2023 for her writing on abortion. She has also worked as a screenwriter.
Trick Mirror, published by Random House on August 6, 2019, gathers nine essays, among them "The I in the Internet", "Always Be Optimizing" and "The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams". It debuted at number two on the New York Times nonfiction list, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and has been translated into fourteen languages. In 2020 Tolentino received a Whiting Award for nonfiction and the Jeannette Haien Ballard Prize.
What Jia Tolentino is known for
- Staff writer at The New Yorker
- Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2019)
- "The Age of Instagram Face" (2019)
- Former deputy editor of Jezebel
- Whiting Award for nonfiction (2020)
Works by Jia Tolentino
1 essay to practice
More notable works
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
Book · 2019
Nine essays on the internet, optimization, scams, marriage and feminism; a New York Times bestseller and NBCC John Leonard Prize finalist.
The I in the Internet
Essay · 2019
The opening essay of Trick Mirror, about the self and life online.
Always Be Optimizing
Essay · 2019
A Trick Mirror essay on the pressure to make bodies and lives ever more efficient and attractive.
The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams
Essay · 2019
A Trick Mirror essay that reads the 2010s through a series of frauds and grifts.
How Men Like Weinstein Implicate Their Victims
Essay · 2017
A New Yorker essay from the early weeks of the #MeToo reporting, one of several pieces she wrote on the movement.
Jia Tolentino’s writing style
Tolentino combines cultural criticism with personal narrative. Her writing is characterized by sharp analysis of cultural phenomena, weaving together personal experience with broader social commentary. She excels at examining complex cultural dynamics through multiple lenses.
- Long, accumulating sentences
- She builds descriptions clause by clause, as in the Instagram Face essay's portrait of a face with poreless skin, catlike eyes and full lips, stacking detail until the picture turns absurd.
- Reporting inside the essay
- Her essays often begin with a trip or an interview; the Instagram Face piece starts with her booking a flight to Los Angeles and quotes makeup artists and a colorist, so cultural argument rests on things people actually told her.
- Deadpan punchlines
- Long, careful passages are punctured by flat, funny lines. In the Instagram Face essay a colorist sums up the look as "a sexy . . . baby . . . tiger," and she lets the quote do the joking.
- Implicating herself
- She examines her own complicity in the culture she critiques, which the Whiting judges singled out, so the essays read as self-interrogation rather than lectures.
- Precise context and numbers
- Among the jokes she drops in launch dates, regulatory history and prices, which ground her claims about the culture in checkable fact.
How to write like Jia Tolentino
Tolentino's essays begin with a question she can't easily answer, often about something she participates in herself. To write like her, choose a cultural habit you are part of, such as a platform, a beauty routine or a shopping ritual, and report on it: talk to people who work in it, look up when it started and what it costs. Then write long, carefully built paragraphs that move from the specific scene to the economic and technological forces behind it.
Let your sentences run when you are describing, then cut them short when you want to land a point. Be funny without being glib, and be honest about where your own choices fit into what you are criticizing. Her essays end not with a neat answer but with a clearer statement of the contradiction.
The quickest way to absorb these habits is to retype one of Jia Tolentino’s essays above, word for word, then write a paragraph of your own in the same voice. New to this? Read what copywork is and how to do it.
Frequently asked questions about Jia Tolentino
- Who is Jia Tolentino?
- Jia Tolentino is a Canadian-American writer, born in 1988 and raised in Houston, who is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She was previously deputy editor of Jezebel and a contributing editor at The Hairpin. Her 2019 essay collection Trick Mirror was a New York Times bestseller, and she won a Whiting Award in 2020.
- What is 'Trick Mirror' about?
- Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (Random House, 2019) is a collection of nine essays about the ways people deceive themselves in a culture shaped by the internet and money. Topics include online identity, the push to optimize body and life, the scams of the 2010s, marriage and the image of the 'difficult woman'. Tolentino chose an organizing question for each essay before writing it.
- What does Jia Tolentino write for The New Yorker?
- At The New Yorker Tolentino writes personal essays, cultural criticism and reported profiles. Well-known pieces include "The Age of Instagram Face" (2019), reporting on Britney Spears's conservatorship with Ronan Farrow (2021), and essays on abortion and Roe v. Wade, which earned a National Magazine Award in 2023. She has also profiled musicians and actors.
- What is Jia Tolentino's 'Instagram Face' essay?
- "The Age of Instagram Face," published by The New Yorker in December 2019, examines how social media filters, photo-editing apps and quick cosmetic procedures have pushed many influencers and celebrities toward one uniform face. Tolentino reports from Los Angeles, interviews beauty professionals and links the look to how images perform on phone screens.
- What is Jia Tolentino's writing style?
- Tolentino writes long, layered sentences full of precise detail, broken by short deadpan lines. She mixes reporting and interviews with personal reflection and cultural analysis, and she often questions her own role in what she criticizes. Kirkus Reviews compared her to Joan Didion, and her essays often think their way toward a conclusion on the page.