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Jeff Rigsby's avatar

I had been thinking of buying "Trick Mirror" and then read Oyler's review in the LRB... oy. I had to go on Facebook to get a friend to reassure me that Tolentino was actually worth reading, because the review made the book sound like more than I could handle. But that was Oyler's pretentiousness more than Tolentino's.

When I did read "Trick Mirror" my reaction was more or less the same as to Freddie's "Women Do Not Need Lunatic Overconfidence". It seemed to me that Tolentino was trying to put her finger on a serious problem, of which her essays themselves were nevertheless an example. Partly because of the internet and partly because of our growing ability to think abstractly about society and our place in it, people nowadays--women especially, and young people especially--are so consumed by pathological self-consciousness that they can't think or do anything "straight". And it's poisoning our lives.

Tolentino's essay on her barre classes (I don't even know exactly what those are) illustrates this very well. She asks herself whether the social expectation for women to stay in shape reinforces a constricting norm of femininity. Then she reminds herself that being able to afford the classes is a form of privilege many women don't share. Then she observes, very shrewdly, that the burden of self-consciousness has a gender bias: men nowadays can guilt-trip themselves in all sorts of ways, but women do it too and then have to ask "Does doing X make me a bad feminist?" on top.

The entire collection of essays feels as if it's groping towards a solution to the problem of excess self-awareness, but the paradox is that *reading and writing essays like Tolentino's* is itself a manifestation of the problem. People didn't use to think about these issues as much as we do now, and in some ways they were better off.

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Anthony's avatar

I'm glad you ended with Didion. When I finished Fake Accounts, I was trying to put my finger on why I found the novel's solipsism so unbearable while I so enjoy Didion, who is often accused of solipsism. Where I landed is that Didion uses her experiences and observations as an entry point to a world that feels very large, full of possibility, every detail and supporting character with its own story and meaning. The world of Fake Accounts is unbearably small, no thing or person having any meaning beyond what the narrator tells you in two paragraphs of musing. I've never had a book make me feel claustrophobic before.

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