Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

in the twenty-first century it would sometimes be impossible to differentiate between the pretext for an experience, the record of that experience, and the experience itself.

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.

felt the specter of stagnation hovering over my existence.

as if some deep patriarchal logic has made it that women need to achieve ever-higher levels of beauty to make up for the fact that we are no longer economically and legally dependent on men.

Why have I sunk thousands of dollars over the past half decade into ensuring that I can abuse my body on the weekends without changing the way it looks?)

Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”

Then either the world sours or you do.

and that even if she couldn’t, she would still write. “I’ve just got to,”

“what makes you so sure you want to get married at all? Lots of women never do and are perfectly happy.”

models of female happiness have always tended to benefit men and economically handicap women

“there is a hoax in marriage, since, while being supposed to socialize eroticism, it succeeds only in killing it.”

to go out into the world and transcend himself, the woman reduced to the kind of work that will be erased and forgotten at day’s end, living invisible among the vestigial people of the afternoon.”

Has anyone ever written a great novel about a woman who is happy in her marriage?

Years of auditing my own conduct in prayer gave me an obsession with everyday morality.

Part of my aversion to getting married is my sense of incompatibility with the word “wife,” which—outside the Borat context, which is perfect, and will be perfect forever—feels inseparable from this dismal history to me.