12 Questions for Jia Tolentino
The bestselling author on ecoterrorism, Taylor Swift, generational trauma, drugs, parenthood and more.
02/11/2024 Neukölln, Berlin
Conducting these interviews brings to mind the feeling of playing tennis. I reach out to the artist, and, depending who they are, they tentatively or enthusiastically respond. The back and forth continues for a little while before I eventually send the questions. Sometimes I speak to the subject and am able to get a sense of them outside of their work, other times I only have the work itself to judge, as well as whatever snippets I can find on social media or from previous interviews. Based on this ‘research’ (which I think is a word that’s abused) I’m able to study how my subject, the artist, who in a way is now my opponent, might answer or react to certain questions. We’re both siloed, alone on opposite ends of this bizarre psychological court, and then at the end an interview is produced.
Unlike tennis, there’s not really any winner or loser. I think the subject and I lose together, because we’ve created something and then feel depleted afterward, the postpartum of artistic production. I’m losing the plot on this metaphor anyway, mainly because I’ve never really played tennis, I’ve had three major shoulder surgeries and it’s impossible. When I’m in Berlin I play badminton with my best friend, who’s also named Gordon, the German Gordon, but even that’s become difficult. Not difficult in the sense that I’m no longer able to face my German alter-ego in some bizarre trick mirror, difficult in the sense that my shoulder has been completely useless for over a decade now (I went bowling last night (against my will) and that really did a number on the entirety of my upper-right apparatus). My shoulder once dislocated while performing cunnilingus on my ex-fiancé. The world of intense physical play, losing myself in sports, has for years been closed off to me. There’s nothing that ruins playing soccer, tennis, badminton, or cunnilingus like wondering at every move if your shoulder and knees are about to erupt. This is one of the reasons I became a writer, probably, even more than the fact that both of my parents and one out of two sisters are also writers (the middle sister said, ‘fuck this, no,’ and went into business). Far too early in life my physical capabilities became frustratingly limited. But I have a strong playfulness, it’s what defines me. OK, so creating something, writing something, that’s my new realm of play, that’s my new form of physical and spiritual transcendence. But when writing something, unlike sports, where there are teammates and clear opponents, it’s easy to fall into the line of thinking that I can only play with myself (masturbation). This is untrue, though. I can play with my audience, I can play with constructs, and now, with these interviews, I have a clear opponent, or teammate, depending on how things go.
I think, in this affair, Jia Tolentino, who really needs no introduction, came to be neither an opponent nor teammate. She’s quite famous and a seasoned professional. Her first book, the title of which I’ve managed to sneak in above, was a national bestseller. She’s one of, if not the, most popular and talented staff writers at the New Yorker, one of, if not the, writers responsible for modernizing the New Yorker. She knows what she’s doing. She knows how to keep a distance from someone who wants to interview her. Uniquely, and often cruelly, in the feverish responses to her popular writing, Tolentino’s been subject to all sorts of intense opprobrium, people on the internet seeking to cerebrally molest her, podcasters and culture commentators picking apart her family background, personal background, sartorial choices, writing style, perspective, disposition, personality, etc. So she’s good at the initial cold response, at saying as little as possible off the record, at the refusal of giving anything away. I worried, when writing her questions, that this would make for a boring and cagey interview. And actually, as you’ll see below, it didn’t. Her answers were far more candid than I expected. Sure, it’s possible she could be playing a bit of sorts, trying to relate to people younger and perhaps cooler, more on trend or whatever, but this isn’t really the sense I got. I think, in her answers, she was unabashedly and honestly herself, which is the best I could ask from one of these, the best a reader could hope for and achieve when engaging with a gifted author. Because even if you don’t like Jia, if you find her irritating, if you’re not a fan of her style or content, it’s impossible to deny that she’s one of the few people on earth who’ve been blessed and cursed to be born to write, to do nothing professionally but write, to write prose that entertains and elicits strong emotions from her audience: angry, perturbed, interested, enlightened, humored, all that. Her talent lies in an adept form of self-expression, carving out the innards of her experience, her psyche, and then, even more, determining the subjectivity of how her psyche inhabits the perception of experience, the outside stimuli. She’s not the first to do this well, but she’s one of the very best around.
There’s some stuff in the interview on the war in Gaza, the nauseating bloodshed, the interminably lethal dilemma, the culpability of the US government. Friends and readers who are Jewish, like I am, descendants of Holocaust survivors, like I am, as well as some ‘political realists,’ not like I am, might be quick to call some of Tolentino’s comments on the conflict naive. This conclusion would be both apposite and a compliment to Tolentino. I think that a writer, a novelist, must be emotionally naive, emotionally in touch, embodying a firm yet melancholic desire for life and all the pleasure in curiosity that stems from life, which is also love, general and genuine love of the most sincere form; this is the cloying truth; people should live and continue living, that’s all the writer, novelist, artist should be fundamentally concerned with when it comes to war; the cronies, the authoritarians, the demagogues and the dogmatists won’t be listening anyway, literature is not for them, only pulp and propaganda, pornography and perverse pathology. War and everything around it always brings forth the desire to drink myself to death. Truly it does. Trick mirrors, self-perception, death, and war… it all reminds me of something Saul Bellow wrote: “Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything.”
I’ve actually seen Jia Tolentino in person, once, though we’ve never met. It was at a yoga studio in Clinton Hill in 2019. The instructor had red hair and a really high voice. It was a vinyasa flow class at around 6:00 pm, packed, very hot and sweaty, and Tolentino was a few rows behind me. I’d recently read Trick Mirror and I wasn’t certain if it was her or not. Then the instructor began chiming in — good Jia! Breathe, Jia! What a beautiful bhujangasana, Jia! And I knew, yeah, it must be Jia. I remember overhearing her catch up with a friend after class, and her voice was different than what I expected, as it always is with writers. I thought about introducing myself and asking a question or two about the book, but alas demurred, and went on my way. The interview below is the second time in life I’ve come across Jia Tolentino. This time more intentional, more personal. It was better than yoga and at times more exhilarating than a game of tennis, definitely badminton.
The sports metaphor with writing is stupid, overused. I’m publishing this piece from Berlin, what for the last decade has been a second home. I’ve just arrived, in scummy Neukolln, after five months in New York without a second of respite. Berlin’s anything but calm, but compared to New York it’s the Maldives. I immediately feel at peace among the perpetually jobless artists and ravers and addicts. Everything here seems relaxed, illogically serene, the chaos flows effortlessly. The problem with Berlin is that it’s in Germany, and there are so many fucking Germans everywhere, but even that isn’t bothering me at the moment. It just feels good to be here. There isn’t that dizzying feeling like there is in New York, of everything being at stake. Not as much seems to matter, not everything is a competition. And yet I know, after my few weeks here in Berlin, I’ll start craving the energy of my beloved hometown I’m now relieved to be away from, the elation of returning. And of course, right away, I’ll re-enter the arena.
GG: How has parenthood changed your perspective? Has it changed the way you write?
JT: You catch me at a time when parenthood has possibly (hopefully?) changed more about my daily way of operating than it ever will again. I have a three-year-old and a seven-month-old, so in terms of the things I spend my weekends doing and thinking about, I am almost unrecognizable as the person who also existed, child-free, in 2019. I’m in the tunnel in terms of logistics, and—though I do think that the transcendent parts of parenthood are impossible to access at the same depth without the slog of labor that surrounds them, and though I know I’ll be sad in a way to leave behind the animal simplicity of caring for a baby—I will be glad to eventually not be physically needed by a child every minute they’re awake.
I don’t know if parenthood has changed the way I see the world as much as it’s given me a more visceral understanding of things I might otherwise have thought about primarily in terms of material structures: healthcare, education, certain kinds of consumption, this inexcusable US-funded war. But it’s absolutely made the way I write—if not always, always my writing—so much worse. Comically bad sometimes. I started working both times postpartum about eight weeks out, which feels pathological (both in terms of my desire to as well as the lack of universal paid leave that hardened that desire). I used to feel that I could never have a real thought until I was alone for more than twenty-four hours, but now that literally never happens and so my brain rarely has a chance to function for its own sake. Even right now, I’m allowing myself time to do these questions because I’m on a six-hour flight and ate a weed gummy and this model of plane doesn’t support internet (??) and I can’t do any of the things that I came on the flight thinking I needed to do.
But I also anticipated this situation, thanks to being in a fifteen-year relationship with someone who has always been really obsessed with babies, and I thought it would be worse than it is. Writing is cathartic depletion, an open inquiry towards new forms of internal and external knowledge—a practice of being alert to the world—and I didn’t understand the extent to which raising kids would be that too.
Aside from addiction, what are some parallels between the smartphone and the cigarette, the way, historically, industries around both have operated? Do you think the smartphone is, holistically, worse than cigarettes?
I think the smartphone is a million times worse than cigarettes. I had my first cigarette in eighteen months on New Years Eve this past year, in a dive bar in Key Largo, blissfully off child duty with my partner—sorry, I have been unwillingly married to a man for health insurance since 2022 and I know I shouldn’t use “partner” and steal gay valor but I also really retch when I type out the other word—for the first time since summer 2022, off my rocker on ketamine and mushrooms, watching three men with long white beards play a four-hour cover set with this sort of gobsmacking proficience that made me start silently constructing an elaborate narrative about how this band had lost a bet around 1979 to the Turtle God and become consigned to greatness in total obscurity. I had that first cigarette and every annoyance from my entire life that my brain is capable of retaining evaporated instantly. I felt sure that no drug I’d ever done had ever hit harder. I love cigarettes, I miss them, I hate them, they’re gross and awful and deadly, I think they’re amazing and incredibly cool.
My ambivalent relationship to the smartphone is so different. The smartphone is soul-eradicating, personality-destroying, an inescapable reframing of every moment of waking life as a transaction within a market, it encourages us all to be huge fucking losers, it’s an individual poisonous mushroom cloud of surveillance and monetization pluming above us at all times, etc. There is nothing I actively like about my smartphone. Unfortunately, the pluses involved are essentially contractual requirements of being alive in the current moment: this thing that I abhor is also the object most essential to my functioning, deeply intertwined with everyone and everything I love and care about in the world.
What’s serenity to you? Can an artist accomplish anything without a sense of inner peace? On the contrary, can the joy in hate lead an artist any place productive or useful?
Serenity is not something I think about often or consciously aspire to, though I place an almost moral value on maintaining my chill and am always trying to completely deplete my mind in one way or another. I think there are serene writers (Marilynne Robinson) and the opposite (Kafka?), and I think anger and fury and violent impulses—and the joy in all those things—can lead a person to art. But hatred specifically, that’s not a feeling I can countenance. I don’t feel it often (though I have certainly felt it lately, directed at all these brainless fuckhead celebrities and rich people who would raise hell if they experienced a 24-hour flight delay on a commercial airline but seem to find the genocide in Gaza too complicated or “sad” to speak about at all.) Anyway, I don’t know if I can get anywhere from hatred; it’s rigid, not good for us, not funny, not fun.
What makes you laugh? What makes you cry? Where and how do the two coalesce?
Before kids it was doing acid that made me laugh and cry simultaneously, or just hanging out with my friends while not being on acid. Now it’s still all of those things but it’s most often my kids. In fact one of the things I “liked” (I think?) most about the postpartum experience, especially the first time around, was that I cried a lot, where normally I find it really difficult to cry. For awhile I cried every time I held my baby and a ray of sunlight hit me in a certain way, or if I was holding her while listening to music. I’m easy to laughter, and all my friends are, too, but I’m too internally defended to cry often; I feel sadness as a slow awful numb heaviness in my body and other than moving that body I don’t know many ways to let it out.
What’s an ego death? Has it happened to you? If so, how?
Not to talk about acid too much, though I always seem to be talking about acid, ego death has always been one of my primary draws to psychedelics. Like I said, I’m well-defended. I have a constant craving for whatever knowledge you get through annihilation, devastation, extremity, some crazy recalibration of scale. But I’m bullshitting myself in some way about this—I think that I would love to lose my marbles in Antarctica or to literally die in space but I also can’t sleep without a silk eye mask on and the Peace Corps started trying to kick me out mere weeks after I got there so I’m sure my desire to confront the void outpaces my actual ability.
What do you think of the Taylor Swift phenomenon, her music, the fandom surrounding her?
Aesthetically, I find Taylor Swift remarkably, bafflingly, sometimes fascinatingly swagless. In terms of the fandom, I’m happy anytime teen girls find a community that makes them feel happy. Musically, I think she’s often really good, and specifically in terms of pop songwriting, I think she’s one of the very best to ever do it.
I don’t listen to Taylor Swift on my own, really, but I remember being on a plane on the way to one of the most insane things that ever happened in 2010s corporate advertising—the Bacardi Triangle, where Bacardi flew all these coke-addicted culture journalists to an island in Puerto Rico for three days and nights of open bar and a kind of unbelievable show under fireworks and lasers on a beach (Kendrick Lamar!); it was like an all-expenses-paid Fyre Fest if Fyre Fest had actually worked—and someone had a leak of 1989, and I was listening to it for the first time, thinking, Is this actually the best thing I’ve ever heard?
Do you believe in generational trauma? If so, how has it played out in your own life? If you don’t really believe in the idea of generational trauma, what way has your heritage had an effect on you? Do our pasts really matter?
Well, I definitely believe that the descendants of people who experience famine or violence or other kinds of trauma often experience measurable differences in their health and their life that aren’t always clearly explainable by circumstance—though I don’t know much about whether actual epigenetic transmission happens the way it’s often said to these days, and it’s also certainly not something I apply to my understanding of myself. I do think everything inevitably flows down through generations: history, politics, advantage, the lack of it, specific senses of humor, whatever—when I had my second baby, my older daughter instantly materialized a very specific Filipino mode of baby-cuddling called gigil that I don’t think she had ever witnessed in person.
Of course our pasts, our heritage, our family histories, matter enormously. I don’t think you can look at what’s happening in Gaza and not believe that, not believe in some form of generational trauma, which is about a million times too weak of a term to describe what the infants being born in Gaza will carry with them as they grow up—if they get to—without limbs, without any living relatives, without psychic or actual homes. Generational trauma is the reason the genocide is justified by Zionists, and also the profound moral foundation of the Jewish-led movements for permanent ceasefire and justice for Palestinians.
How would you define romantic love? Can someone exist without it?
You’re asking good questions. (Or I’m stoned?) I don’t think I’ve ever thought about this before. I feel like when my friend Emma and I were going through notes on a screenplay we had written together, and we were like, “What do you mean, what does this twenty-six-year-old woman ‘want’?” Like—she’s twenty-six. I don’t even know what I want, today, in a way that I could explain to a producer in a single line. But maybe the answer is just that you know what you’re drawn to. I guess romantic love has something to do with the near-impossibility of meeting someone who you truly don’t get sick of, and the fact that someone can know you well enough to make you cry in any way from the intensity of that knowledge. A lot of that I think you can and should get through friendship. But though I’m incredibly unromantic in many ways, I have found myself in love, with hardly a break, for more than all of my adult life, since I was sixteen. I’d think I could exist without it, but I haven’t been living like that, for sure.
What aspects of life, today, would you say are dystopian? On a more positive note, what, if anything, feels utopian?
I have had a pretty simple feeling about this for years: what’s dystopian always involves surveillance and monetization, what’s utopian is unmonetized and unsurveilled.
What do you enjoy writing more, journalism or criticism? Where and how, in your process, do the two converge?
I think of criticism as part of journalism, but I know what you mean, and both are so fucked that I can hardly answer the question. Somehow it always keeps getting worse: Pitchfork, Sports Illustrated, the LA Times layoffs, Wall Street Journal, whatever else. The blog that got me into media, The Hairpin, is currently an insane A.I. SEO-farm chumbox. Everything I wrote in my twenties is gone or degraded into unreadability. Criticism I’d say I like to write most, but also I’ve basically stopped writing it, because the “conversation” feels like a dusty echoing room filled with trapdoors. I’m sure this has felt true for many generations of critics but it doesn’t feel like it can get much more true than now—though I know it will.
But reporting, researching an essay, writing criticism, it feels the same to me inside: it’s just trying to get clearer and closer to the center of something.
Where/how, in the USA, can someone find dignity?
Through having enough money to go to the doctor, to live somewhere safe and comfortable, to not be afraid that your kids will go hungry, and to go on vacation from time to time. Universal basic income or a wealth tax that hurts. I also think we could have a lot more dignity as a society if we embraced what’s typically called “ecoterrorism.” Surely we are long past the necessary time to start blowing up (empty…) hangars of private jets.
What’s the most irritating term in contemporary usage? What’s annoyingly prevalent in today’s discourse? What topic isn’t really discussed that we should be thinking about more?
I don’t like when people say “the ___ of it all” or “I resonated with that.” I’d say I have zero need in my life to know anything about TikTok lifestyle typologies but somehow continue to learn about them against my will. What isn’t discussed enough? Well, to repeat myself: the unbearable shame of this country spending billions of dollars every year to ensure that Israel can blow up as many children as it chooses, the unbearably conspicuous silence of people who will soon or eventually call the genocide “awful” and “horrible” and genuinely believe their emotional discomfort with it amounted to opposition. Also, again, as much as everyone loved the yacht-sinking orcas, we really don’t talk enough about how the horizons of possibility in the climate crisis would change if people started blowing up (empty!) yachts and private jets.
How important is legacy to you? Is this something a writer should care about?
It’s not important to me at all as a writer. I think maybe that’s a sign of what some people might call unseriousness—maybe a writer can’t achieve anything great without a certain grandiosity of ambition. I would in fact like to achieve something great, at some point, which I would define as going far beyond my sense of my own positive capability, but I think my bar is usually set at just being worth my own and also other people’s time.
But I do care about legacy as a person. We’re not guaranteed as writers to influence anyone or to be remembered by anyone, but as people—as friends, family, community members—we almost certainly are. I feel much more certain that it’s possible and necessary to leave a mark in this way.
Why do you write? Is this something a writer should know about themselves?
Because I like to and get to and am not good at other things, and, as with most writers, would keep doing so even if and when nobody asks.
Photo Credit — Elena Mudd
Jia is thoughtful and insightful as always. Excellent read.
god she’s cool as shit