Jia Tolentino, author
The one and only Jia Tolentino was our guest on the show. We had Shipley’s donuts & it’s Britney’s Spears birthday all in honor of Jia. She’s a staff writer for the New Yorker and if you haven’t been living in a cave, you know she’s been on an international press tour for her first book, Trick Mirror, which she documented with her signature mix of wheee and disbelief, echoing the rollercoaster of gratitude and surreality we all ricochet between several trillion times a day (when we’re not reeling from helplessness and despair).
In every piece of her writing, Jia comes across just as baffled, heartbroken, and furious as the rest of us about the unjust forces we’ve unthinkingly given power to. But because she leads with a genuine desire to understand rather than a hastily applied authority, reading her feels like eavesdropping on a mind at work.
Whether she’s documenting her ‘fucking Tatcha’ skincare addiction or peeling back the Lycra’d layers of ‘ideal’ womanhood, Tolentino creates a philosophy of curiosity that implicates herself, not to be coy or pseudo-anything, but because she knows/admits that even hard work, luck, and success don’t guarantee a reprieve from even a reluctant examination of contemporary culture. Reading Jia is self care in the grandest and the most basic sense: she polishes the grimy windows of modern life so we can see into and out from it, and, with our sharpened perceptions, come away with more compassion for ourselves and even, occasionally, for others.
Work by Jia Tolentino:
Essays and Critique at The New Yorker (from Waxahatchee to Weinstein)
Suggested Reading from Jia:
The Yellow House by Sarah Broom
When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
The Supernova Era by Cixin Liu
Honorable Mentions:
“Does Who You Are at 7 Determine Who You Are at 63?” by Gideon Lewis-Krause for The New York Times Magazine
Raymie Nightengale by Kate DiCamillo
Check out the New Yorker radio hour conversation between Rivka Galchen and Jia for more children’s literature love
Photo credit Elena Mudd
