Dissecting the profile as the basic building block of social media, she writes, “The everyday madness perpetuated by the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions personal identity as the center of the universe.” The ubiquity and fury of trolls, she believes, is in response to the internet’s exultation of the ever-appealing, overexposed self, the creation of which is a skill central to traditional femininity-in other words, an ability women have been trained in from an early age. In her big opening essay on that inexhaustible subject, “The I in the Internet,” Tolentino’s insights are sterling.

“The last few years have taught me to suspend my desire for a conclusion,” she writes, “to hope primarily that little truths will keep emerging in time.” The pleasure in reading her work comes in following her mind as she figures things out-or, as often as not, admits that she hasn’t quite figured it out yet. “There’s a part of me,” she writes of the accuser and the writer of that piece, “that feels as if Jackie and Erdely inadvertently sentenced me to a life of writing about sexual violence-as if I learned to report on a subject so personal that it imprinted on me, as if I will always feel some irrational compulsion to try to undo or redeem two strangers’ mistakes.” Although in 2017 Tolentino herself declared “the personal-essay boom is over,” in truth, she only meant the once-commonplace exploitative confessions cranked out by what Slate’s Laura Bennett dubbed “ the first-person industrial complex.” For her part, Tolentino doesn’t have much in the way of private trauma to process.

It was triggered by the infamous 2014 Rolling Stone feature based on an account of a fraternity gang rape at UVA that was later discredited. The strongest pieces in Trick Mirror have to do with the commodification of the self.Įven that awakening had its Tolentino-esque switchback.

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