In Naomi Wolf’s 1990 book The Beauty Myth, a woman walks into a department store. “To reach the cosmetics counter,” Wolf writes, this woman “must pass a deliberately disorienting prism of mirrors, lights, and scents that combine to submit her to the “sensory overload” used by hypnotists and cults to encourage suggestibility.” Confusion makes her the perfect customer.
Today we permanently live in that deliberately disorienting prism of mirrors and lights. Thanks to the internet, “commerce has filtered into our identities and relationships,” writes Jia Tolentino in the first essay of her book Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, as the web constantly overwhelms “our frayed neurons in huge waves of information.” It is out of this moment that Trick Mirror has been written, and it is this moment that it tries to capture, through nine essays that range across the glossy fitness culture, the modern wedding-industrial complex, her teenage experience on a reality TV show, and much more. “These are the prisms through which I have come to know myself,” she writes. “I tried to undo their acts of refraction.”
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