Photographed by Lawrence de Leon for the March 2025 Issue of Vogue Philippines
Nearly six years after the release of her debut essay collection, Jia Tolentino finds herself changed and in a whole new world.
In the Little Golden Books edition of the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty, illustrations of the evil witch Maleficent are, to a child, immediately horrifying: thick horns protruding from her head, brows frozen in a perpetual arch, cheeks angular and chin sharp, all against a vile green complexion. It certainly was enough to terrify a young Jia Tolentino, who, enthusiastically positioning jazz hands on either side of her neck, refers to the villain’s collared cloak as “a lizard-like thing.”
Yet she read the book anyway, and she read it all the time. Little came between her and what she categorizes as “American little girl classics featuring adventurous white girls,” a genre in her library that included Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables, The Baby-Sitters Club, and Harriet the Spy. “As long as I can remember being conscious, I can remember reading,” she says. “I’ve spent a lot of the last five years having and taking care of very small children, and the only thing I retained an absolute commitment to, through that, was reading.”
Vogue Philippines meets Tolentino in her Brooklyn home, and although we’re conversing from behind a screen, it feels as if we’re under the same roof. Barely seven minutes into our call, she picks her laptop up and off the table. “Sorry, I’m taking you into my kitchen because two of my Peace Corps friends are coming over tomorrow, so I’m making short ribs for them. Turning it off right now.” The shade of her cerise Le Creuset casserole matches the red sweater she has on. Her jeans jut into frame when she props her leg up on the chair. Her daughters are upstairs, and our chat is the last thing on her agenda.
At this moment, the New Yorker staff writer and New York Times bestselling author is nearly six years removed from the launch of Trick Mirror, her debut essay collection that garnered multiple award nominations, numerous best-book-of-the-year mentions, and 13 language translations. Its impetus can be traced to 2016, when Donald Trump was elected into office. Overcome by what she recounts as a tremendous amount of disorder and darkness, Jia felt useless, seeking something, anything, she could do to serve a purpose. “And I’m not saying I think a book is really useful, but I was like, ‘I think there could be value in trying to encapsulate this feeling of acceleration that’s happening everywhere.’”
Trick Mirror’s nine essays ended up probing into self-commodification from the prisms of female optimization, substances and religion, millennial scams, the internet, and other destructive realms she is cognizant and wary of participating in, despite her searing long-form criticisms. David Remnick, The New Yorker’s editor, tells Vogue, “Jia’s voice is honest, above all. There is no decoration or fakery. And what shines through always is a deep and questioning intelligence, a sense of freedom, both personally and politically.”
Somehow, the book’s resonance with readers was unexpected, if not overwhelming, for Jia. She calls its success “incredibly lucky,” but the irony at its core didn’t require much time to realize. In a March 2020 interview, she admits, “So much of the book is about monetized selfhood, and the self as a market asset. And on the book tour, I could feel myself being further monetizable.” These sentiments still hold, and when she looks back at that period now, she feels sheepish. “I don’t like reading my own work. I thought [the book] was pretty good, but it got so much praise, and then I just felt so embarrassed.”
“I love being bad at something and getting better at it.”
But there’s pride and gratitude there too, because apart from providing elucidation to herself and others, the project’s completion galvanized her to kill her ego. She had a baby, resolved not to write about herself nearly as much, and made a conscious effort to resist hyper-productive and hyper-visible systems. On the day she turned in her book, she picked up How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell (“Another Filipina!”), which effectively pushed her to think about being less useful to capitalism. It was the starting point that eventually led her to finally getting off the app formerly known as Twitter and stop posting so much on Instagram. Sure, she sometimes spends a quarter of her day on her phone, but it’s time spent texting her friends. “But I’m depressed that, like, you know, I haven’t gotten any smarter, and I’m still using my phone for four to six hours a day,” she says, laughing.
Writing-wise, she made a pivot, instigated by the birth of her first child in 2020. When she reflects on her relationship with her partner, architect Andrew Daley, there’s a tender earnestness to her tone. Having met at a Halloween party as University of Virginia undergraduates, they’ve been together for 16 years, and are now parents to Paloma Daley Tolentino and Marisol Tolentino Daley, who each carry a parent’s last name.
They’re often labeled as opposites. Jia herself once said, “My boyfriend and I historically do not speak about work with each other; he doesn’t read books and I don’t know what cement is.” If left to her own devices, she would’ve considered motherhood now, at 35, and not five years ago when she actually did. “And one of the things that tipped me into wanting to do it was, I was like, ‘I think this will be really fun with you specifically,’” she says, referring to Andrew. “It’s a gift to let yourself be changed by a person, and for a person to allow you to change them.”
On the other hand, Andrew describes himself as having always been “baby crazy.” When their daughters were born, he chose to take unpaid time off (about five months for Paloma and a full year for Marisol) and dedicated his days to caring for them. “[Jia’s] focus and drive is actually what made that possible. So in many ways, we’re both allowing the other to do exactly what they want. It’s not a forever situation for us, but one that works for now,” he expresses. “It’s possible because of how we refuse to define our relationship in terms of gender stereotypes but especially in how we communicate with each other about our needs at any given time.”
Throughout her first year of motherhood and without full-time childcare, Jia couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t think the same. She lost interest in pulling from a well of personal experiences in writing, so she basked in the novel comforts of the unreal. In 2021, she released “I Would Be Doing This Anyway,” a short story that follows a social media editor who begins working for her college friend Seraphina, a popular Instagram influencer. She got into screenwriting; she’s produced three scripts, and is in a contract to write a couple more. None have been made, but she’s unfazed because most if not all the gratification she derives from the endeavor comes from relinquishing control and launching into the unknown. “I’m not good at it, so I have to figure out how to get better in real time. And that’s really fun. I love being bad at something and getting better at it.” These deviations from the personal-critical essay felt necessary immediately after Trick Mirror. She confesses, “There’s a kind of pleasure that I’m not proud of taking in, which is that I am spared the obligation of having to analyze the present. It’s fun to make stuff up.”
She continues to pen commentaries and profiles for The New Yorker, dividing her time between the publication and screenwriting for the past five years. Outside authorship, Jia has taught poetry to third graders in Houston where she grew up, a master class at Columbia University, and a course in literary journalism at Bennington College. A piece of advice she often gives students is to write the story you’re hungry for, and when asked which ones she yearns for right now, she quickly replies, “I’m not writing any of them. Currently, I’m extremely hungry.” If she had “more time and brain space,” her literary preoccupations would be the devastation of displacement against the backdrop of the Los Angeles wildfires and the Israel-Hamas war. Or, fake images and artificial intelligence (“I just think AI is disgusting.”), and the gender divide in America.
Settling into parenthood, the writer defines it as an existentially important act of surrender, one that has opened her eyes to “a non-egocentric vision of time” that will one day supersede her. “You have kids and you’re forced to remember that time actually extends. The world extends, policy extends, stakes extend past your own life. And I don’t know how much I’m doing with that knowledge, but I feel it intensely.”
This profundity strikes her in bursts, and it’s changed the way she lives, and therefore, writes. She writes less about the world because “objectively, I’m less in the world. I’m at playgrounds all the time.” The rhythms of her everyday consist of writing, in great amounts, at home or her budget co-working space, but they also look like reading Filipino children’s books to Paloma and Marisol, or her eldest daughter telling her, “Mom, you don’t have to be so perfect all the time.”
When Jia teaches her girls the rules of the universe from scratch, it somewhat feels like a becoming for her, too. She’s writing a world that’s no longer just hers but also theirs, and it’s transcendent, glistening, endless.
By TICIA ALMAZAN. Photographs by LAWRENCE DE LEON. Photographer’s Assistant: Noel Gerard Bunal.
