how jia tolentino wants to go✌️

Welcome to mixed feelings’ Hyperspecific, a profile series of increasingly intimate questions in which we ask our favorite artists, scientists, musicians, and the like to unveil their innermost selves — their weird existential musings.

Fangirling is the least “Jia Tolentino” thing you can do to Jia Tolentino, because she’s “not big on idols” and would probably detest being turned into one. But how difficult not to when she wrote one of the best books of the past 5 years.

In 2019, Jia Tolentino wrote the essay collection, Trick Mirror — 303 glorious pages of self-delusional wit on everything from optimization culture to an absolutely bonkers reality TV experience from her youth. Beyond Trick Mirror, you probably know Jia from the New Yorker, where the phrase “new Jia Tolentino” in my inbox spurs an instaneous “click.”

Oh to know what goes on through that brain of hers! Probably aliens? In this week’s newsletter, Jia Tolentino (!!!) does our Hyperspecific questionnaire.

SET I

1. Something you’re always hoping people bring up in conversation when you first meet. The Fermi paradox. 

2. A positive trait people always tell you you have. That I’m Zen about other people’s more irritating qualities. 

3. One destructive trait you know you possess and wish you didn’t. Carelessness, which mostly manifests in tiny or enormous ways. 

4. If a bodega were to name a dish after you, what would it be? (Be specific.) The Jia Beach Combo: an Italian sub (no mayo) and a pink lemonade with lots of ice.

5. One song that makes you feel understood. Ashlee Simpson, “Autobiography.” 

6. Something you think is wildly underrated. I don’t know if it’s underrated, but I have an overpowering love of traveling alone and a constant desire to do it.  

SET II 

1. A movie you watch when you want to self-soothe. Drop Dead Gorgeous

2. Your problematic fave artist/actor/musician (and why). I’m not big on idols and I am not so interested in the personal virtues of people I don’t know personally (there are too many of them). Let’s say everyone famous who takes private jets, which is all of them. 

3. A line from a TV show/film that plays on a loop in your head. Nothing is on a loop in my head right now except for that sound of that mummy making that noise, from the time that those scientists made that mummy make that noise. 

4. One time you laughed so hard you cried. Recently I cried laughing because my friends at work were showing a friend who’d never seen it that video of that mummy making that noise. 

5. One time you cried so hard you laughed. I’m such an infrequent and ugly crier that it never gets into funny territory. Last time I cried in general was during the last few minutes of “Past Lives.” 

6. Random thing you hate so much for no apparent reason. I hate when people complain about situations they voluntarily chose to enter.

SET III

1. What’s an anecdote you usually tell to describe how you were as a kid?When I was in first grade, I would go into the little classroom bathroom and sing to myself when I was on the toilet, because I thought that if no one could see me they couldn’t hear me either. In my defense I was four years old, but still. 

2. What is your low-key hell and actual heaven? Hell is a party where people are in any way trying to “network.” Heaven is a day by a body of water with your friends.   

3. Share a quote of one of the most meaningful things someone has ever said to you, context optional. “You’re really good at doing drugs” (stranger at Nowadays) or “I love you so much, thank you for taking care of me” (my toddler), both of which feel like the same thing. 

4. The age you most loved being and the age you’re most looking forward to. I had a near-perfect 28, I think. And no offense to my darling daughter and the baby I’m about to birth, but it recently occurred to me that when I’m 53 there will be no children in my house. 

5. How you exit a party. Swiftly and no more than ten minutes after I start wanting to. 

6. How you wanna go. Either imploding in space while looking at the solar system or painlessly, in the diving pool in Casa Bonita.