A New Year with Writer Jia Tolentino (‘Trick Mirror’)

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Lemonada Media

Society & Culture, Film Interviews, Tv & Film

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 5 January 2025

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Writer Jia Tolentino (The New Yorker) became a literary sensation in 2019 upon the release of her best-selling essay collection, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. She joins us this week to ring in 2025.

We start by discussing the erosion of privacy online (11:26), the potentially forthcoming TikTok ban (13:32), and how she circumvented self-surveillance technology in her Hidden Pregnancy Experiment for The New Yorker (15:28). Then, we unpack how data is monetized online (18:00), as depicted in an unsettling scene from Succession (21:50), the harmful effects of screen time on children (26:10), and her writerly upbringing in Houston (31:48).

On the back-half, Jia recounts a formative summer in Venice (41:55), her subsequent decade working at The Hairpin and Jezebel (50:43), the trad wife phenomenon (55:00), how she swings between pessimism and optimism (1:12:19), and why writing still retains the power to liberate (1:17:00).

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Transcript

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0:46.4	Now you know.
0:49.4	Lemonada. This is Talk Easy. I'm Stan Fragoso. Welcome to the show.
1:25.6	Today, I'm joined by writer Gia Tolentino. She's a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the New York Times best-selling essay collection, Trickmere, Reflections on Delusion. The book turned Tolentino into a literary sensation, with publications often referring to her as the Joan Didion of modern American life.
1:47.3	A comparison she's admittedly uncomfortable with, but is not entirely untrue, as both frequently circled the systemic dread bubbling beneath the surface.
1:57.9	And although Trickmere was published back in 2019, its insights on social media,
2:03.4	bodily autonomy, late-stage capitalism remain as relevant and damning now as they did then.
2:10.2	In the five intervening years, Tolentino, the daughter of Filipino immigrants who ended up in
2:15.8	Houston, has had two children of her own,
2:19.2	which she's written about extensively in the pages of the New Yorker. She's also recently written
2:24.8	pieces about the erosion of privacy, the wave of young alt-right men that helped put Trump
2:30.5	back in the White House and the assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United
2:36.1	Healthcare, all of which we discuss in today's episode. But before we get into it, I explained
	...

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