Now That’s What I Call a Breakdown

So here’s a fun game: read Trick Mirror, highlight every sentence that makes you wince in recognition, and see how fast you run out of ink. (Spoiler: I got through a full pink highlighter and had to switch to purple.)

This one’s been on my shelf for a while, and it felt like the right kind of brain-zap to pick up during a moment of online burnout. What I got was a book that’s funny, intelligent, bleakly hopeful, and occasionally too clever for its own good - but in a way that still hits. Here's the full review:

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⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ – “Brainy Spiral of Late-Capitalist Selfhood”

I finished Trick Mirror and immediately wanted to lie down in a dark room and scream into a Lisa Frank pillow. Not because it wasn’t good - it was - but because it was so sharply observed, so intellectually chewy, and so precisely aimed at the slippery, performative mess of being a person online that it made me feel like I’d been caught posting cringe on the astral plane.

This is a collection of nine essays about the self, or more accurately: the selves we try to be, the systems that shape them, and the illusions we build to survive. Jia Tolentino writes like someone who’s seen all the mirrors and still finds herself blinking. She’s critical but never cynical, thoughtful but not preachy, and has a gift for laying bare the contradictions of modern life without pretending to be above them.

Some standouts: the opener on the internet as an identity trap, the essay about heroines and "difficult women" in literature, and the one on scam culture that had me whispering “oh no” every other paragraph. A few pieces run long or get a bit circular, but honestly, it feels like part of the point, like the book itself is caught in the spiral.

If you’re a millennial with media brain, grew up under the tyranny of Girlboss feminism, or just want to read someone smart trying to make sense of late capitalism with a scalpel and a side of Tumblr trauma, this one’s for you.

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📖 One-liner summary: Clever, cutting, and a little too real—like having your brain picked apart by your favourite mutual in essay form.

If you've read it: did you also feel like she invented a new kind of existential nausea? I mean that as a compliment.