Jia Tolentino Books in Order

If you want her signature essays first: Trick Mirror
If you want a short piece of fiction: I Would Be Doing This Anyway
If you want to read in publication order: Trick Mirror → I Would Be Doing This Anyway

Jia Tolentino was born in Toronto to Filipino parents and moved to the Houston area when she was still a child. She grew up in Texas inside a Southern Baptist world that would later become central to her writing. Religion, belonging, ambition, and the strange rules people learn early all show up in her work, usually with a mix of candor and sharp observation.

She was a serious reader from the start, and also the kind of person who kept writing things down. As a teenager she was both studious and curious about pop culture's weirder corners, which helps explain why she later wrote so well about everything from megachurches to reality TV. One of her stranger early detours, appearing on the teen competition show Girls v. Boys, later became material for an essay in Trick Mirror.

At the University of Virginia, Tolentino studied English, wrote for the student paper, and attended on a Jefferson Scholarship. She graduated in 2009, the same year she became a U.S. citizen. Not long after that, she headed to Kyrgyzstan with the Peace Corps.

Then she had to figure out how to make a writing life work.

Tolentino spent a year in Kyrgyzstan teaching English, and the experience widened her sense of the world while also making the practical side of adulthood feel more urgent. Back in the United States, she took a grab bag of jobs, including copywriting, grant writing, ghostwriting, and editing college-application essays. She has been open about how uncertain that stretch felt, which makes her career easier to read as a real path and not a tidy success story.

Graduate school gave her time to deepen the work. She earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan, and around the same period she started building a readership online. She worked at The Hairpin, then became deputy editor at Jezebel, learning how to write quickly, clearly, and without wasting a reader's time. In 2016, she joined The New Yorker as a staff writer.

That mix turned out to suit her.

In Trick Mirror, her 2019 essay collection, Tolentino looks straight at the forces that shape modern life: the internet, scam culture, self-branding, reality TV, weddings, religion, and the endless pressure to improve yourself until you disappear into the project. The book is personal without getting self-protective, and critical without pretending the writer stands outside the culture she is describing. Readers tend to come to Tolentino for the clarity, but also for the feeling that she is thinking in real time, asking what our habits are doing to us and why so much public life now feels staged.

Her fiction carries many of the same concerns into a different form. I Would Be Doing This Anyway, a 2021 short story, follows a drifting social media editor who goes to work for a former college friend who has become a closely watched influencer. It is a compact story about money, class, friendship, resentment, and the way online performance can swallow ordinary human feeling. Even in fiction, Tolentino is interested in how people live when they know they are being watched.

Across her work, the recurring subjects are easy to spot: feminism, power, race, class, desire, the internet, and the uneasy line between sincerity and performance. She often starts with a vivid scene or a slightly absurd detail, then works outward until the larger system comes into view. In 2023, she won a National Magazine Award for columns and essays on abortion. She lives in Brooklyn and continues to write for The New Yorker, still trying to describe the mess of contemporary life without pretending it is simpler than it is.