Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

I wrote this book because I am always confused, because I can never be sure of anything, and because I am drawn to any mechanism that directs me away from that truth.

me on a regular basis

Even as we became increasingly sad and ugly on the internet, the mirage of the better online self continued to glimmer.

People often make faces, in private, in front of bathroom mirrors, to convince themselves of their own attractiveness.

#MeToo critics to claim that women must themselves think that going on a bad date is the same as being violently raped.

Capitalism has no land left to cultivate but the self.

It’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible. Women have known this intimately for a long time.

When you are a woman, the things you like get used against you.

Wanting to look good—taking pleasure in trying to look good—does, too.

I like trying to look good, but it’s hard to say how much you can genuinely, independently like what amounts to a mandate.

They felt like the person their clothes said they were.

In real life, women are so much more obedient.

If you were a girl, and you were imagining your life through literature, you would go from innocence in childhood to sadness in adolescence to bitterness in adulthood—at which point, if you hadn’t killed yourself already, you would simply disappear.

Love and money, or the lack of them, calcify a life.

Where the teenagers have been drained of all desire, the adults are so full of desire that it kills them.

the heroines we read about, the heroines we might have been, the heroines we are.

Difference was not the problem; it was the beginning of the solution.