The Brilliance of Jia Tolentino
Written by Juliana Weber | Edited by Aarna Paliwal
Essayist Jia Tolentino has dedicated her career to writing with precision and care about the politics of beauty, abortion, celebrity, motherhood, marriage, and the like. Her singular prose “suggests clarity and conclusion amid chaos and conflict,” and she is “credited with revitalizing the essay [form] over the last decade.” But who is she, and what does she have to say?
Born Jia Angeli Carla Tolentino to Philippine immigrants in Toronto, Ontario, her family moved to Houston, Texas when she was four. Tolentino went on to earn a B.A. from the University of Virginia and an M.F.A in fiction from the University of Michigan. Her essay collection Trick Mirror (2019) is a NYT bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Best First Book prize, and has been translated into twelve languages. In 2017, she was named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Media. She has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 2016 and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter. Most recently, she received a 2023 National Magazine Award for three essays published in the New Yorker: “A Post-Roe Threat,” “The Post-Roe Era” and “Is Abortion Sacred?”
In the realm of beauty, her viral essay “The Age of Instagram Face” traces the emergence of the “single, cyborgian face” such as those of Kim Kardashian, Emily Ratajowski, Kendall Jenner, and the thousands of influencers that mimic them. She writes, “It’s a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips.” Tolentino dubbed this “Instagram Face,” and the term has circulated in social criticism ever since. The essay itself grapples with the construction of beauty and questions who decides what is beautiful, and whom beauty serves in the first place.
Also among her best-known works is her 2021 report, co-authored with Ronan Farrow, on Britney Spears’ conservatorship, which argues strongly for Spears’ legal emancipation. Her personal essay “Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston” is long and lyrical, delving into the history of religious mystics and drug development, the poems of Sappho and the music of DJ Screw. In addition, she has written extensively on abortion legislation, the MeToo movement, the Kavanaugh and Weinstien hearings, and the Trump presidency. She is a prolific cultural critic, too, evident in essays like “Love, Death, and Begging for Celebrities to Kill You” or “How a Woman Becomes a Lake.”
All in all, Tolentino is not only a brilliant writer but a complex woman and citizen. Her piercing analysis is turned on high and low culture alike; she is able to make sense of the tragic and the uncanny with equal ease. Her clarity of thought and openness of mind grant you a deeper understanding of both others and yourself — and that is the best thing a writer can offer the world.
“American Society of Magazine Editors Announces Winners of 2023 National Magazine
Awards.” American Society of Magazine Editors, Mar. 2023, https://asme.memberclicks.
net/american-society-of-magazine-editors-announces-winners-of-2023-national-magazine-awards.
Dagenais, Travis. “2021 Class Day Speaker Jia Tolentino: An Interview.” Harvard University
Graduate School of Design, 2 June 2021, https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/2021/05/2021
-class-day-speaker-jia-tolentino-an-interview/.
“Jia Tolentino.” Contributor Page, The New Yorker, Condé Nast, https://www.newyorker.com/
contributors/jia-tolentino.
“Jia Tolentino.” Forbes 30 Under 30 — Media (2017), Forbes Magazine, https://www.forbes.com/
profile/jia-tolentino/?list=30under30-media&sh=6cca19645c3a.
“Jia Tolentino.” JIA TOLENTINO, https://jia.blog/.
Langmuir, Molly. “Jia Tolentino Makes Sense Out of This Nonsense Moment.” ELLE, 29 Nov.
2021, https://www.elle.com/culture/a28381933/jia-tolentino-trick-mirror-interview/.
