Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

customer orders a kale Caesar with chicken without even looking at the other, darker-skinned, hairnet-wearing line of people who are busy adding chicken to kale Caesars as if it were their purpose in life to do so and their customers’ purpose in life to send emails for sixteen hours a day with a brief break to snort down a bowl of nutrients that ward off the unhealthfulness of urban professional living.

Such a fire sentence

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.

My relationship to female protagonists changed sharply in adolescence: childhood heroines had shown me who I wanted to be, but teenage heroines showed me who I was afraid of becoming—a girl whose life revolved around her desirability, who was interesting to the degree that her life spun out of control.

On Screwtape’s terms, the fact that everything feels like God to me ensured that I would not remain a Christian. Church never felt much more like virtue than drugs did, and drugs never felt much more sinful than church.

We can analyze difficult women from the traditional point of view and find them controversial, and we can analyze bland women from the feminist point of view and find them controversial, too.