a place of maximum entanglement: A Conversation with jia tolentino

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at the New Yorker, the author of the essay collection Trick Mirror, and a screenwriter. Formerly, she was the deputy editor at Jezebel and a contributing editor at The Hairpin. She grew up in Texas, received her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia, and got her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. In 2020, she received a Whiting Award as well as the Jeannette Haien Ballard Prize. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine and Pitchfork, among other places. She lives in Brooklyn.

On October 9, 2024, The Interlochen Review editors Quinn De Vecchi, Andi Erickson, and Blondine Moree sat down with Jia to discuss her essay collection Trick Mirror, her perspective on self-identity and the internet, and how her religious childhood shaped her as a writer.

Quinn De Vecchi: In your introduction, you talk about how you become a different person when you write nonfiction, and then in “The I and the Internet,” you talk about how when people are online, they become these different versions of themselves. I was really interested if you would say writing specifically nonfiction is almost the same as social media or using the internet in the sense that each time you do it, you're putting on a mask to portray it to an audience?

Jia Tolentino: I don't think they're the same, but I think that they are versions of the same process in the same way that making friends in real life is a version of the process of making friends on the internet, but one is distorted by economic incentives in a way that the other is not. Talking about writing first, I believe that you can and have to write as the person you are. I write as the person I am, pretty open, pretty direct, I'm personality forward and I can't not write like that because that's who I am. I have colleagues that have a more cool, cerebral, intellectual thing, and they write as the person they are. If you're restrained, you write with restraint. If you're not, you write without restraint.

You have to translate who you are onto the page, and in that translation there may be some element of performance, but I think performance itself is inherent to everything we do in the world, and it's not inherently false. I also think that in the process of writing, you can become a version of a person that you would like to be–you can become more perceptive, you can become smarter, you can become a closer observer. You have to make yourself into someone that is clearer and better, more patient, more perceptive. I think of writing as a practice and a technology and a paradigm where you get to practice this thing, which is one of the purposes of being alive, being honest to who you are, but also pushing into your negative capability, pushing into a version of yourself that doesn't exist yet.

In the version of this process that’s entangled with surveillance capitalism and social media, you come to it as the person you are, and then the person that these platforms demand you be is not structured by this open-ended question of who you might become and how you might be better. Who you become on these platforms is entirely structured by what those platforms want you to be, appealing to other people in ways that can attract great quantities of quantified approval. These platforms want you to be a certain kind of person that can attract a certain kind of attention and provoke certain kinds of reactions that will cause other people to stay on the platforms for longer. The incentives of the platform impose themselves on that process. With writing, you are in control of the person that you become. So they're similar, but I separate them.

Andi Erickson: In your essay, “The Cult of the Difficult Woman,” you criticize what feminism has become, something for corporations to exploit, something malleable. What tools do you use to articulate an argument that both destabilizes the feminist movement and rewrites the way it could be?

JT: It's so funny, I have not read this book since I published it. I have not looked at that essay since 2017. And I feel kind of vindicated by the fact that I was right. The girl bosses are dead, you know? Like, let's make a show about Pamela Anderson and make her this complex feminist, everyone's over that. Everyone could feel that that was false, and that's what that essay was about: what is all of this feminist reclamation, what are we talking about here, and for what?

How do I write something that destabilizes feminist dogma while also reaffirming [the necessity of feminism]? Ellen Willis, who wrote for The Village Voice in the ‘70s, ‘80s, was one of the best at critiquing the feminist movement as a feminist. I worked at a feminist publication, and that really seemed like that was the whole point: if this ideology has a strong foundation, that gives you the freedom to critique it, and it's worthy and strong enough to withstand the critique.

I think it's a very obvious mistake that people see feminism as a representation-forward, let's look at a few shiny stars at the top thing rather than as a material form of class analysis that should really be focused on the people at the bottom. I never worried about doing that [critiquing feminism], because my commitment to feminism, which I think of as mostly a system of material redistribution that doesn't exist yet, wasn't in doubt for me. So I was like, I can critique this thing that's so obviously stupid as much as I want.

AE: I wanted to ask you what you thought about social media and this whole side of social media that is now promoting the girl economy as people call it, where they're saying girls have more power, but it's only this aspect of social media where you have to market yourself for it.

JT: It's complicated. I'm not sure if the version of this that I see is the version of it that you see just because of the seventeen year [age difference], but Sally Rooney talks about this in a New York Times Magazine interview she did recently, and I felt it around this book. I'm very wary of any sort of paradigm that centers on an ideal, and there's so much idealization that gets thrust upon girls and young women in a way that I find inherently suspect.

When my book came out, a lot of these forces buoyed it, this perpetual pop cultural interest in girlhood and thinking about it and writing about it and the fact that all pop music [and] culture belongs to the girlies right now. I think that's something every person navigates in their own way, but everyone should be quite conscious of what is presented to girls as power, because the earlier that you can be maximally suspicious of that and try to slip outside of it, even as you're kind of a part of it, that feels like a really important process.

Blondine Moree: In “Ecstasy,” you touch on the connection between experiencing Molly and the feelings one can find in Divinity. Do you think your experience with Ecstasy pushed you towards leaving the church, or was it just another step on a path that was already going to happen?

JT: A step on a path that was already going to happen. The animating question behind that essay was a private question in my head: why did I stop believing in God and start doing drugs and feel like nothing was either lost or gained? That seemed very confusing to me. I literally felt like nothing had been lost or gained. And I knew that probably wasn't true and a lot more complicated than I thought.

AE: Many of your essays in Trick Mirror return to biblical or political references as you explore and define them. These two things are deeply intertwined in current culture and our government. What role do these recurring images play in your writing? Do you see yourself repeating other images in similar ways?

JT: Biblical imagery is one thing. But the politics stuff, that's situating these things that I'm writing about in the governing framework of the time. It might come out as imagery, but what it is is trying to ground what I'm talking about in the context of the particular version of America that produced them. So those things are present for different reasons. One is for a structural context and one is just because that's how my brain works.

I write a lot about abortion, which is kind of the fulcrum of those two things and the place where the religious stranglehold on American politics is the clearest. I definitely do think that because of the way I grew up, I will tend to see things through the kind of language and imagery that I grew up around, in a borderline psychotic, cloistered, ultra-conservative, ultra-religious environment that has proved to be a much more controlling influence on all of American politics than I ever understood while I was there. It doesn't feel like it should still be relevant, but in fact, the kind of thing that I grew up in is like Project 2025. It's where the whole country is going. Texas is this massive incubator for radical conservative policies that are going to get pushed everywhere in so many ways.

BM: Megachurches and cults are similar in many ways, but they differ in how intimate they are. Megachurches are bigger, cults are smaller. Would you describe your experience going to school and church at the Repentagon as cult-like? Do institutions like the Repentagon incline people toward seeking out other forms of divinity because of how they have corporatized and standardized the connection to spirituality?

JT: I actually think people are quite happy with a standardized and corporatized relationship to divinity. I think that's kind of preferable. It's less intimate and it's safer, it's sanitized, it's prescriptive and neat in a lot of ways. I think that most people would prefer a sanitized, corporatized version of anything.

I mean, I do think they're quite different. One of my friend’s definition of a cult is when you have to fuck the main guy, and there wasn't any of that. But there's obviously a version of that in the configuration of theology around a girl's relationship to Jesus, for sure. I actually don't find cults very interesting because I grew up in that church. I'm like “Yeah, I know.” The cult around Trump, the cult around Elon Musk, the cult around anybody. I think it was maybe growing up in that environment that gave me such a strong aversion to figureheads and totemic leaders. I don't feel it in any way. I've basically never felt it about any politician.

I don't feel it about Beyoncé. Any of these versions of people, Joan Didion, whatever; these cult objects in various ways…I get why people are looking to designate a person in a position of absolute authority, and I feel permanently averse to it, which I think is good.

BM: So, right now, there's kind of a wave of true crime series going on. How do you feel about coverage of cults? Because cults are almost seen as these interesting pockets of true crime.

JT: They're alike to me in that they are not interesting, because it's all the same story. Just in the same way that true crime, as it's covered, is all the same story. I find true crime to be the white woman's version of Joe Rogan. If you're really interested in true crime, I'm like, “That's deeply suspicious.”

It's this white woman exceptionalism SVU thing where it's like—“I'm in danger, I'm so beautiful,” you know? And it's just obsessing over dead, white female teenagers in a way that I find just so abhorrent and so connected to centuries of political violence and erasure. So, I hate true crime. But I'm merely bored by cult stuff.

QD: I know that you've written an extreme amount of essays in the past, and you've been the editor of various publications. I was wondering how the idea of self-delusion came into existence with this collection specifically, because in your acknowledgments, you mentioned that those essays that you've written in the past at other places spurred this on.

JT: It's a subject I'm interested in in general. It feels fundamental to the project of being alive, to figure out how we could be getting it so wrong, and what fundamental misperceptions about us and our world might be driving us. I think this is true of people in every place in the political spectrum. You look around the world and you're like, “Wow, everything's so fucked up. How are we participating and how are we living in a world that's so fucked up?” And the answer to that question on an individual level is really interesting to me.

As someone that's interested in structural critique and who's constantly seeing the world through that lens, but is also constantly participating in structures that I find destructive and abhorrent, the question is—how does that happen? And there are some historical and political and material answers to that, but I'm pretty interested in the internal answers to that, too. What is the thing deep inside us that gives us so much to critique, that allows us to continue producing a world that is wrong? And so, in some way, that has been a repeated subject of mine.

Part of this came out from writing on the internet of the last decade where everyone was on social media for the first time. There were these forms of writing on blogs and stuff, where everyone was just trying to show that they were right all the time. And that's still a dominant form of speech. It's not an internet thing, everyone always wants to prove they're right. But I was so surrounded and steeped in it. I'm much more interested in trying to figure out how I'm wrong than how I'm right, and all of these things just came out in wanting to explore these ideas at greater length than I could do on the internet. [My essays] are all 10,000 words long. You can't do that on the internet.

AE: I have a similar question. In your book, there's a teaser text that reads, “reflections on self-delusion,” so I wanted to know how you see your current and past self reflected in different ways in each of your essays.

JT: I try to write from a place of maximum entanglement. Each essay is critiquing something. When I place myself in there, either for purposes of honesty, establishing authority, or craft-wise (for example, if I need to plant myself in this 10,000-word book report to make people follow along or else no one's going to read it) I try to place myself as the person that was most attracted to and entangled with all the things that I was writing about. So that it would be written from a place of, “I'm in the middle of this with many of you.” Of course, part of the reason I was writing them was to disentangle myself from all of them. But none of that disentanglement shows up on the page, for strategic purposes.

It's a weird thing. I froze myself in this book as I was in 2017 when I wrote it. I don't find any of this nearly as attractive as I did when I started. I think I finished that optimization essay and I was like, “Great. I don't care about any of this shit anymore.” And same about the internet. I finished the internet essay and immediately blocked myself off of the internet in many ways. I froze myself at a moment of maximum entanglement with all these things and then I walked away from it. But none of the walking away is on the page.

And my life is so different now. My book came out, I had a baby a year later. I had another baby three years after that. It's an older version of me. But at the same time, as I realized when I was reading my old high school journal and reading my little blogs on my website when I was eleven, I wrote the same way when I was a kid that I do now in a lot of ways. There's something kind of reassuring and also kind of sickening about that.

BM: In your essay “Ecstasy,” you touch on a wide variety of topics that all circle around your hometown of Houston. How would you say your experience growing up in the Deep South influences your writing?

JT: So much. I was just at a wedding with a friend who's from Texas, too. And we were having a 3 a.m. conversation about [how] we were so molded by it. The way that I think about purpose and achievement and good and bad, it's so structured by growing up in the church. But, in good and bad ways, I was more or less alone in most of the rooms I grew up in. It gave me a sense of exceptionalism that was good in some ways, bad in others.

I was often one of the only non-white people; I was on scholarship; I was one of the only people that had any interest in any sort of creative thing, and one of the only people that had any sort of non-conservative leaning politically. And, in retrospect, that sense of default exceptionalism was good for my sense of ambition. I was like, “Well, I have to get far away from here.”

But I think it's also bad for young egotistical children to be given a sense of exceptionalism in this way. Media is full of non-white people who grew up being the only non-white person in the room, and I think that's so bad for media, and I'm one of them.

I think, overarchingly, the thing that I feel very conscious of this background giving me was that it made me really comfortable with [discomfort]. I'm not uncomfortable being in a room full of Trump supporters. I'm not uncomfortable being in extremely strange environments or rooms where everybody might disagree with me or find my political views really abhorrent. And I think that is good training for writing in a lot of ways.

I'm aware on a subconscious level that there's a whole world that thinks the beliefs that I adhere to are horrible, and that's a good thing to be conscious of as a person that now lives in socialist Brooklyn. It's like growing up with a fluency in a different language that I'm realizing a lot of people around me don't have.

BM: What was the transition from Houston, the Deep South, then to a college in Virginia, and then now New York like? How was that transition for you personally?

JT: I applied mostly to schools in California and the Northeast. Then I got a scholarship at UVA, which is the real reason I went there, but I also felt comfortable there in a way that I didn't at more foreboding New England schools. And I think subconsciously there was something in me that knew that it would be good to have a middle step, and UVA felt so liberal to me when I got there. In retrospect, it's so conservative, but coming from where I came from, it felt so progressive. And I'm very thankful for that sort of four-year stop, and then I was in the Peace Corps, and I was back in Houston, so I had this intermediary time to grow and slowly adjust my own sense of my own politics in a way that felt gradual. It didn't feel abrupt, and it didn't feel shocking. It felt kind of inevitable, and it was nice to have UVA as a place that was a safe haven for what I thought of as liberal impulses and then was conservative enough to push me further left.

QD: In your opening piece, “The I and the Internet,” you talk about how you grew up without the internet and then suddenly gained it, and I was wondering how it felt to write and publish this essay in an age where now two generations have grown up with the internet—how it felt to include it while everyone else didn't grow up with that, if that makes sense?

JT: I wasn't expecting anyone to read this book, so I wasn't thinking about what anyone would think when they read this. I thought, “Oh, maybe a couple thousand people will buy this, like, on the coasts, you know?” Because that's what happens to most books. UVA also had a really good creative writing program, and I studied under Deborah Eisenberg and Ann Beattie, these masters of short fiction. I understood that most books sell 3,000 copies, that's the average. I thought maybe it would do a little better than that, but I really was not thinking that younger people would be reading this.

The website where I used to work, The Hairpin, there was a guy, Alex Balk, that I worked with on a brother website called The Awl, who once wrote something like, “Whatever you're mad about on the internet right now, in ten years, it'll look like fucking Shakespeare.” And at the time, when I was twenty-two, it was like, haha. And the extent to which that is true is so scary. The dumbest shit that's going on right now, ten years from now, it's going to be so much worse. Like, the report published online where this Republican congressman had to issue a report being like, “No, we're not controlling the weather, Hurricane Helene wasn't planned to harvest uranium from Chimney Rock in Arkansas,” that will look like Shakespeare, whereas right now it looks like the death of civilization.

The rapidity with which the internet changes, and with which the very recent internet feels like a forgotten artifact—it made sense [to include that stuff] in an essay about the internet. And the animating question for this essay was “Why did the internet seem good at one point, and why did we all think the internet was going to be good?” Because we did, at one point, and now it's bad. And you guys probably have [grown up with] a sense that it's mostly bad, right?

AE: There's this culture around older people telling us that it's bad, and then there's this other culture of being teenagers and being like, “No, it's not bad.” But we know it's bad.

JT: It was so different for me–the internet we were on early on, it was different. We weren't being stalked and manipulated by tech companies in the same way. It was really pretty free and open source. It was a lot more hidden. You could be there, and no one was watching you. It wasn't until I was a senior in high school that we were starting to watch each other on the internet. And that shift seems really important to me.

The millennial generation is sort of an interesting case study. I was a freshman in high school when 9-11 happened. We learned about institutions while they were functioning. And then our whole adolescence and young adult life was just watching them crumble. Whereas, you guys, you were born into post-recession, post-Occupy, post-everything.The discourse about the structural degradation of America was flowering in your youth.

Millennials still use Instagram in this very corny, earnest way, because there's part of us that still believes, because of our experience being the first people on Facebook, “What if it can still be good?” There's an earnestness about the way that my generation uses the internet that points to this experience of being inducted into one thing and then having it change just as you were developing your own self-image. There's going to be a version of this with every generation.

BM: Often in your essays, there is a dip from the hard facts of reality into a more lyrical scene. As an example, near the end of your essay, “Ecstasy,” you touch on the funeral of DJ Screw, but then you begin to pull away from the funeral home and you describe the influence of Screw's music in a deeply beautiful metaphor. When did you decide to make these shifts from concrete to abstract, and how do you think they influenced the reader?

JT: I don't think about the shifts at all consciously. At some level, it's a subconscious strategy. It's akin to when I place myself in there and when I don't. If you're going to deliver a lot of information, you have to personalize it, and you have to make it feel urgent in some way.

If you're going to be talking about the funeral of someone that many people have not heard of, nor do they care about, you have to show them why it's important to you and what it feels like in your brain and what you're imagining. And if you were there, what it actually did feel like to you.You have to show people how it is in your head. That's the whole thing that we're all trying to do. That shift is the only way that I understand anything. The moment has to flower into that. Otherwise, I just instantly forget it. This is really not at a conscious level.

I think I try to replicate the feeling of thinking on the page. That feeling of active movement. That's the thing that I'm chasing as a writer, when you're writing and you can feel something happening in your brain. Because it's different from just writing. That is the most amazing feeling you can ever have in the world, in private, just with yourself. In this book I was trying to both give myself those moments and then translate them.

BM:You were originally a fiction writer, does that influence your nonfiction writing at all?

JT: I always wrote fiction as a kid and in college and afterwards. And I'm perfectly competent at it, but I'm not good at it. I'm good enough to get someone to pay me to do it.

I did an MFA program mostly because I was just trying to figure out a way to get paid to write and write whatever I wanted. Which, when you're 21, you basically can't do that.

No one's going to pay you to write exactly what you want outside of a school format. And most people I know, it's still a lifelong game trying to figure out how you can get paid to write whatever you want. No one really gets to do that exclusively.

The only MFA programs that are fully funded are fiction ones. I had enough of a background in it that I was like, okay, I can see if I can get into one of these programs. I do think that it was enormously helpful from a craft point of view. I worked on a novel for five years and shelved it. Learning about structure and learning how to make a character feel real and how to make a scene feel real and how to be very vivid very quickly was enormously useful for nonfiction. I still read probably 80 to 85% fiction. It's my home as a reader. Immersion in fiction all the time still is hugely influential on the way I write.

AE: Each of your essays is filled with outside sources and information. How do you pull from as many sources as you do without losing your voice?

JT: I find it really embarrassing how we are always trying to invent a thought that's already been had. I try to be really conscious of my own unoriginality because one of the biggest bits of brain damage that the internet gives me personally and probably all of us is this sense of this ahistorical present. We're just so strapped to this flat, infinite present all the time. I could feel this with my college students at Bennington that I taught last semester. It was like, you guys have grown up with all information being instantly available and equidistant. And now that's how I experience information too and I think that's bad.

You need depth perception in your thinking. I feel like it's just a basic research duty to take the thought that you're having, look at it, and then try to find it in as many disciplines as you can. “Ecstasy” is the most [like that] –I read pharmacology, I read theology, I would read message board posts, I read religious accounts, religious mystics' diaries, I read poetry. I think of it like a really spatial thing, like as wide and as deep as I can.

And then with that knowledge, it's a journalistic impulse. It's really important to write from a really strong foundation, to have a really deep iceberg underneath you. You can feel when writing's not like that. It feels insubstantial, and it feels like the person looked on Wikipedia and found four things to support. You can feel that depthlessness in writing. I hate that feeling as a reader, and I didn't want to replicate it as a writer.

I think it's a way of checking myself, to know if I'm having any fraction of a new thought, to understand when it's new, and when it's just something that we've been saying for thousands of years. I find it to be a pleasure and a privilege to draw from other people's expertise. I've basically never written a purely personal essay, even though my first person is in this a lot. I'm not interested in finding out anything about myself as the main goal. I want to find something out about the world, and to do that I need a lot of help. I can't do it just with me.

AE: What do you think are the limitations of the braided essay, which utilizes one or two sources and the voice and weaves that together into an essay, versus the way you structure yours?

JT: I'm editing the Best American Essays right now, and so I'm reading all of these essays, and I've taught in nonfiction programs. I've been reading so many braided essays, and they're pretty good ones, and I'm [still] just like, oh, god. I mean, we could all probably write one in an hour–it starts with a summer when you were fifteen, everyone jumped into the lake, and then there’s a section break where you talk about five kinds of cloud formations.

I've never wanted to write one, because I think it's [often] a cop-out. I think it's motion that belongs in poetry, if anything, and not in the essay. If you're going to have the juxtaposition, and the white space, and the obscure triangulation, that can and does really work in poetry, but it feels indirect to me. I think a good essay kind of leaves you a little uncomfortable, and you make sense of it on your own. I think in essays you have to inhabit the whole thing–the whole point is to do that synthesis yourself, and to see what comes of that synthesis, rather than just placing three things side by side and waiting for an aura of profundity to grow above it.

In college, a professor very usefully cued me into the fact that you can throw your voice, you can use your voice like you're playing an instrument, and just because you're more comfortable in one range, probably you should get into another. My laziest writing is really lyrical and really heavy. Which is another reason I avoid the braided essay.