Reading List
Authors Like
At sixteen Tolentino flew to Puerto Rico to appear on a reality television programme, playing a version of herself for a camera crew. Fifteen years later she requested the tapes and watched them, and the essay that came out of it sits in the middle of Trick Mirror (Random House, August 2019, nine essays, 303 pages), a book about self-delusion in which she is always the first suspect. The other eight cover the internet as a machine that rewards performance, an evangelical megachurch in Houston and the ecstasy that followed, athleisure and the optimised female body, the wedding industry, heroines in the novels she grew up on, a decade of scams, and a fraternity house at the University of Virginia. Her formulation for what the internet has made of us is short: the self as the last natural resource of capitalism. She grew up in Texas, the daughter of Filipino parents who came by way of Canada, took an MFA in fiction at Michigan, was deputy editor at Jezebel and has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2016, winning a National Magazine Award in 2023 for her writing on abortion. The book was translated into eleven languages and there has been no second one. The ten below are the essayists to read meanwhile.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Essays · The internet and the self · Eleven languages · Updated September 2026
Quick answer
If you love Jia Tolentino, the comparison everyone reaches for is Joan Didion, and it is fair as far as it goes; Susan Sontag is the other name on the jacket. Zadie Smith and Leslie Jamison are the essayists working at her level now, Patricia Lockwood writes the internet as literature, and Anne Helen Petersen and Jenny Odell take the exhaustion somewhere structural. Samantha Irby is the funniest. And Lauren Oyler is the argument against the whole self-implicating mode.
Where to start if you loved Jia Tolentino
If you want the comparison everyone makes, read Joan Didion.
The White Album. The same instrument, thirty degrees colder.
If you want the internet as literature, read Patricia Lockwood.
No One Is Talking About This. Written in fragments, and then broken.
If you want the causes, read Anne Helen Petersen.
Can't Even. Burnout with the debt figures and the labour history attached.
If you want to laugh, read Samantha Irby.
Wow, No Thank You. The same generation, and the joke is the point.
If you want the argument against her, read Lauren Oyler.
No Judgement. On self-awareness as a way of avoiding judgement.
If you want more essays
My shelf of collections has the rest.
10 authors like Jia Tolentino
Frequently asked questions about authors like Jia Tolentino
Who should I read if I love Jia Tolentino?
Joan Didion is the comparison the reviews made and Susan Sontag is the other name on the jacket, and both hold up. Zadie Smith and Leslie Jamison are the essayists working at her level now, and Patricia Lockwood is the one who solved the internet formally rather than argumentatively. Anne Helen Petersen and Jenny Odell take the same exhaustion somewhere structural and political, and Naomi Klein's Doppelganger is the elder version of the online-self problem. Samantha Irby is the funniest. Lauren Oyler is the argument against the whole self-implicating mode.
Is Jia Tolentino writing a second book?
Nothing has been announced as of September 2026. Trick Mirror, published in August 2019, remains her only book. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker throughout, winning a National Magazine Award in 2023 for her columns and essays on abortion, and she also works as a screenwriter. For a writer whose first book was translated into eleven languages, seven years is a long gap, and the magazine work is where to follow her meanwhile.
What is Trick Mirror about?
Self-delusion, in nine essays, with Tolentino as the first suspect in each. The subjects are the internet as a machine that rewards performance, her own appearance on a reality television programme at sixteen, athleisure and the optimised female body, an evangelical megachurch in Houston, the heroines of the novels she grew up on, a decade of scams from Fyre Festival to Theranos, a sexual assault case at her university, difficult women, and the wedding industry. She chose a question to answer in each essay before selling the book, and ordered them so that each builds on the last.
Is she really the Joan Didion of our generation?
Vulture said so and the line stuck to the book, and it is half right. The method is shared — the writer's own perception used as an instrument for reading a culture, personal documents admitted as evidence — and the temperature is not. Didion is cold, withholding and often merciless about the people she describes; Tolentino implicates herself before anyone else and writes with obvious affection for the things she is criticising. Read The White Album and decide for yourself, which is more interesting than accepting the blurb.
What is the criticism of Trick Mirror?
Two objections recur. The first is that it diagnoses without offering an exit: the book is superb on how the machinery works and explicitly declines to prescribe, which readers either respect as honesty or find deflating. The second, made most sharply by Lauren Oyler, is about the form itself — that the self-implicating essay, in which the writer confesses her own complicity, turns self-awareness into a credential and a way of avoiding actual judgement. Both are worth taking seriously, and neither has stopped the book being read.
Where should I start in the book?
With “The I in the Internet”, the opening essay, which is the one that made the book's reputation and contains its central idea — the self as the last natural resource of capitalism. Then “Reality TV Me”, on the tapes she requested fifteen years later, and “Always Be Optimizing”, on athleisure, barre class and the well-performing avatar. If those three do not work on you, the rest will not either.
What did she do before The New Yorker?
She grew up in Houston, the daughter of Filipino parents who moved from the Philippines to Canada and then to Texas, went to the University of Virginia and took an MFA in fiction at Michigan. She was a contributing editor at The Hairpin and then deputy editor at Jezebel, which is where the voice was formed — a site built partly on making its writers visible as personalities, which is itself one of the subjects of Trick Mirror. She joined The New Yorker in 2016 and lives in Brooklyn.
Is it dated now?
The specifics are, and that turns out not to matter much. The scams are from the 2010s, the platforms have changed, and a book about the internet written in 2018 is necessarily a period document. What has aged well is the structural argument about performance, monetised selfhood and optimisation, which applies to whatever the current platforms are. If you want the same argument brought up to date, Anne Helen Petersen's newsletter and Naomi Klein's Doppelganger are the places to go.
Footnotes
- Jia Tolentino — official site, biography and prize record
- Trick Mirror — Penguin Random House, with reception and jacket praise
- Trick Mirror — Wikipedia, with composition and publication details
- Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror unspools the chaos of the internet — Electric Literature
- Identity shaping on social media: on Trick Mirror — Los Angeles Review of Books
List last reviewed 9 September 2026.
More from the shelf
From the bookshelf
“The self as the last natural resource of capitalism.”
— Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror, 2019.
If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations