If you consider yourself primarily a reader of fiction but want to dip your toes into nonfiction, I suggest you start with essay collections. In the same way short stories serve as accessible introductions to different genres and categories, essay collections are excellent gateways into the world of nonfiction. These books run the gamut, from sober contemplations about politics and the state of the world to hilarious takes on pop culture and identity. Some of my favorite collections traipse across the spectrum, and I’m recommending one such read from one of the sharpest, wittiest contemporary voices writing about culture today.
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino
If you read The New Yorker with any kind of frequency, you’ve probably read a Jia Tolentino piece. I recommend “Elizabeth Gilbert’s Latest Epiphanies” as an amuse-bouche of her style and tone (it’s also just plain juicy). Beyond The New Yorker, Tolentino is often called-upon to deliver her thoughts on the zeitgeist because she so deftly articulates the collective vibes into punchy nuggets of truth. This is why I snatched up her debut collection when it first published in 2019, and why it became a bestseller and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of that year.
Thanks(?) to this book, I will always look at Lululemon leggings and indoor group workout classes with a faint, possibly unfair, hint of revulsion. Beyond this one squeamish scenario, Tolentino writes about big, meaty topics like identity in the age of the internet, reality television with which she has an intimate and personal connection that took me by surprise, and more of-the-moment topics still relevant today in nine exquisitely open and biting essays. Explore her thoughts on the connection between barre and the “Always Be Optimizing” ethos, her take on hustle culture, pop-feminism, and marriage. You will want more, even when it feels as if she’s reading you, personally, to filth. It helps that her own self-awareness is present on the page.
If you love Joan Didion and Dorothy Parker, if you want to read absorbing nonfiction, if you need to lolsob about our generation, pick up this essay collection and find a writer you’ll want to follow beyond the book.
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English (US) · 