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Get ready to get meta. And yes, I’m hoping you’re picking up on the irony of me making that statement on a social media platform owned by Meta. 🤣 ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ I’ve been trying to finish Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino since June and I finally did, just in time for #NonfictionNovember! ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ I LOVE A MEMOIR IN ESSAYS, y’all. It is one of my favorite things, and this one is special. I knew as soon as I started because I had to reread the Introduction — it grabbed me immediately. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ The first essay, on our relationship to the Internet, laid me flat on my ass because it articulated perfectly what I’ve been feeling: “the internet — those unlimited channels, all constantly reloading with new information: births, deaths, boasts, bombings, jokes, job announcements, ads, warnings, complaints, confessions, and political disasters blitzing our frayed neurons in huge waves of information that pummel us and then are instantly replaced […] There was no limit to the amount of misfortune a person could take in via the internet, I wrote, and there was no way to calibrate that information correctly — no guidebook for how to expand our hearts to accommodate these simultaneous scales of human experience, no way to teach ourselves to separate the banal from the profound.” ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Essays on everything from social media to athleisure to megachurches to con artists to the institution of marriage capture the shift in our society so stunningly that I haven’t stopped talking about this book since I started it. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ If, like me, you waited for the hype surrounding this one to die down before reading — this is me reminding you to do that! ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ CW: The essay “We Come From Old Virginia” is about campus rape. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ID: A hardback copy of Trick Mirror stands on a concrete stair with a green bush and a brick building in the background. via Instagram https://instagr.am/p/CkvYgbMrMgq/