Alibi Bookshop Memoir Book Club October: Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

Name: Alibi Bookshop Memoir Book Club October: Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
Start: 2024-10-10T19:00:00-07:00
Location: Alibi Bookshop - Vallejo, CA

Schedule

Thu Oct 10 2024 at 07:00 pm

UTC-07:00

Location

Alibi Bookshop - Vallejo, CA | Vallejo, CA

Please join us for October's Memoir Book Club as we discuss Jia Tolentino's "Trick Mirror" on Thursday, October 10th at 7pm.
"New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino is a peerless voice of her generation, tackling the conflicts, contradictions, and sea changes that define us. In this dazzling collection of nine entirely original essays, written with a rare combination of give and sharpness, wit and fearlessness, she delves into the forces that warp our vision, demonstrating an unparalleled stylistic potency and critical dexterity.
Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly through a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Tolentino writes about a cultural prism: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the advent of scamming as the definitive millennial ethos; the literary heroine's journey from brave to blank to bitter; the punitive dream of optimization, which insists that everything, including our bodies, should become more efficient and beautiful until we die. Gleaming with Tolentino's sense of humor and capacity to elucidate the impossibly complex in an instant, and marked by her desire to treat the reader with profound honesty, Trick Mirror is an instant classic of the worst decade yet."
This isn't exactly a memoir, but rather essays like our old friend Joan Didion (though NYRB says, "In this collection of always trenchant and at times luminous essays, [Tolentino] establishes herself as the important critical voice she has been on her way to becoming for some time, although comparisons with Susan Sontag and Joan Didion seem to me unhelpful—as if, for a woman writer, theirs are the only hills to climb."), and it has so many rave reviews. It will be a pleasure to read this and celebrate Filipino American Heritage Month!
Books available in the shop and online: bookshop.org/shop/alibibookshop and audio: libro.fm/alibibookshop