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Jia Tolentino has the internet to thank for some of her biggest successes. In the 2000s, it offered her connections beyond her strict religious community and gave her a place to share her writing with her millennial peers. Her “online” insights carved out a niche at The New Yorker, and her 2019 essay collection, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, made a big splash with readers who felt similarly mired in digital disillusion. But these days she’s swearing off social media and seeking out the sublime elsewhere. Jia and I discuss the joys and perils of living life online (or even adjacent to it), the unexpected impacts of digital surveillance, and what all of this means for raising children.

Follow me on Instagram at @davidduchovny. Stay up to date with Lemonada on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @LemonadaMedia.

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Jia Tolentino, David Duchovny

David Duchovny  00:06

Hi, I’m David Duchovny, and this is Fail Better, a show where failure, not success, shapes who we are. Gia Tolentino is a culture critic and staff writer for The New Yorker. Gia was born in Canada and moved to Texas with her family at a young age, she spent much of her early years deeply involved in the evangelical church. In 2019 GIA published a collection of essays called Trick mirror reflections on self delusion. It captured a lot of jia’s interests and fears in one book. So it’s a good place to start to get to know her point of view. As a writer, I read it when it came out, but I thought it was one of the first brilliant books on the internet that was really getting into the dangers of what that world was becoming at the time, and has become since she was really at the forefront, almost a prophetic voice. GIA became a mother in the past few years, and that adds yet another layer to her perspective on the world, as you’ll hear us get into in the New Yorker. She covers everything from abortion access to body image. But today I’m the one in the interviewer seat, unfortunately. And here’s my subject.

 

David Duchovny  01:17

Hey, hi, Jia.

 

Jia Tolentino  01:19

Hi.

 

David Duchovny  01:20

Nice to meet you. I’m David.

 

Jia Tolentino  01:22

Really good to meet you too.

 

David Duchovny  01:24

Thanks. I got your book trick mirror when it came out because I read a really interesting review on it. And my kids, this is 2019 right? Yeah. Is it 2019 Yeah. And we were going on vacation, and I just conspicuously was reading it in front of them, you know, trying to get them interested in it and and it didn’t work, but I got interested in it, and.

 

Jia Tolentino  01:51

I can’t believe you read it. I am honored. How old are your kids?

 

David Duchovny  01:55

Well, now they’re 22 and 25 so then they were not what were they? They were 20 and 16.

 

Jia Tolentino  02:02

Well, can I ask you, I Are they readers like you are?

 

David Duchovny  02:09

I think if you compare them to their peers, they’re readers. They’re not readers like I am. Yeah, I don’t know if that. I think it becomes more and more of a niche kind of a consciousness, the reader’s consciousness, but, but that’s a really good question for me, because I want to kind of start in a weird place with you, because you were an English major, and that’s it’s rare that I get to talk to somebody who subjected themselves to that kind of rigorous training.

 

Jia Tolentino  02:44

I know you’re talking to a famous person that has done so many interesting things, and instead you’re just talking to another English major. Well, I’ve been thinking about the kid thing, because I have a four and a one year old, yeah. And I suddenly was beset by this fear that was like, what if neither of my children loves books the way that I do yeah, and then I remembered instantly that maybe likely enough, and I need to just.

 

David Duchovny  03:06

Yeah, it well, I don’t know what the answer is. I mean, I came from my dad was a writer, you know, he published his first novel, and he was 75 his only novel, and he died a year later. But he said his whole life he was a novelist and a reader, so he finally showed the truth at 75 and my mother was a school teacher in New York. You live in New York, you said.

 

Jia Tolentino  03:34

I live in New York. And actually one of my best friends had your mom as a teacher, said she was incredible, and said that her crush on you originated through having a crush on your mom. And she said, I’ll unpack that in therapy later.

 

David Duchovny  03:49

But when you went to college, you were thinking of a career as a writer. You were thinking of a career as a fiction writer, you were didn’t know what you wanted to do.

 

Jia Tolentino  04:04

I didn’t know what I well, I think that as a child, I was aware that, you know, I wrote all the time. As a child, I, you know, copious journal or I wrote horrible short stories. I was always writing. And I was aware that this was the main, one of the main things that I like to do, but I didn’t grow up like I didn’t know anyone in a creative field at all, like everyone in my family was like a nurse or a teacher or some sort of manager. And when I got to college, I was sort of like, presumably, I can parlay some sort of reading and writing into some sort of employment after school, I assumed it would be like teaching or grant writing. And then I graduated in 2009 and no one had a job, unless you were working in finance, and I did the Peace Corps. And from there, I actually, this is, I started working on a novel it was four May. Characters, four best friends from college, four girls, and it was set, you know, it was like this kind of cliche MFA type setting where it.

 

David Duchovny  05:07

Also, don’t, you say cliche.

 

Jia Tolentino  05:11

Well, wait, so you haven’t heard what it’s about. It’s, it was gonna, you know, there’s gonna be a present day timeline that was just one day. And it’s like a long September day along the Hudson, and ends like a plane crashing in the Hudson, but then it flashes back to their friendships and their whatever. And I wrote, and my working title for this novel was girls, about four girls and I, and I worked on it. You know, I wrote like, 150 pages of it, and then I was Skyping my boyfriend in an internet cafe, because there was only, like, three cities where you could go and get internet, where I was doing the Peace Corps, and my entire backpack got stolen out from, like, under my legs, because I was so excited to see my boyfriend face to face, I wasn’t thinking. And so the whole novel went with it. And I was, you know, I was devastated. I was weeping like I was literally. My friends were sort of picking me up off the floor. And then one of my friend Akash did the nicest thing that anyone’s ever done for me, which he, like, he lent me his laptop, which, in the Peace Corps is like, that’s your whole life. You know that’s, that’s absolutely everything is your laptop. And we lived, like, 12 hours away from each other. And he said, I know you’re not going to feel better until you start writing again. And that was the moment that I think I realized, like, whether or not I ever get paid to do this, I will keep doing it. And so I might as well just accept that about myself and accept that I’m gonna be writing and maybe, you know, maybe there will be some way to do it professionally, but that’s what I knew. I was like, Well, I’m gonna be stuck doing this forever.

 

David Duchovny  06:41

Well, we should be on the lookout for some pseudonym out there publishing a novel about four girls in a plane crash on the Hudson one September day. So we got a scour. We got a scour for that. But I think that, does it feel like a compulsion to you to write, or is it something that you have to make yourself do?

 

Jia Tolentino  06:59

I was going to ask you that about fiction, because I have, because I don’t. I miss writing fiction all the time, and I used to try to write so much of it, but I’m not good at it.

 

David Duchovny  07:09

Well, you did win a short story prize your first time out. I have that right in front of me, so I don’t think, I’m not sure that’s true.

 

Jia Tolentino  07:17

Yeah. I mean, I was, I was just good enough to get into an MFA where it was like, because in my like, time of trying to figure out, how can I get someone to pay me to write this very mysterious question, and it was like going to a fully funded MFA program was the only, only way I could think of at age 22 but I do feel a compulsion to write, you know, less so in quite recent years, because I have, you Know, a one in a four year old. It’s more like my compulsion is to sleep and, you know, my but I feel like I have no access to my brain without writing. I don’t know if you ever feel like that, like there is. I am not thoughtful unless I’m writing. I’m not observant, I’m not careful, I’m not I’m not anything, I’m not very honest, like I’m I can only become certain things through the process of writing, and so for that reason, I feel kind of a larger compulsion to do it, even if, on an everyday basis, I’m a little bit more likely these days to take any excuse I can to not write.

 

David Duchovny  08:16

Yeah, I agree with that 100% I had a professor at Yale, a guy named Michael Cook, who used to say that he couldn’t think without a pen in his hand, you know, and and I feel that that’s true about myself at this point, not only that, but when I’m involved in Writing a kind of extended piece, but probably a novel or something. Once I once I look back on the thing and I’m reading it for editing purposes, or whatever it seems like it’s written by somebody else as well, that there’s kind of an aggregation of consciousness day by day, as you go in writing that makes me smarter than I am. And it goes back to something I wanted to talk to you about as well. Because, you know, if you look back on the technologies of knowledge, say, and the printing press being the first thing, you know, everybody’s like, up in arms, this is going to ruin the world, because now everybody’s gonna have the Bible, and they won’t need the priest to read it to them, and or they won’t need to go to church to hear the Bible. And then, when I was growing up, TV was the devil, movies were the devil, probably the generation before me. And then now we have the internet, you know, and it’s every step of the way we’re terrified that the technology is going to warp the human brain in a way that we that we don’t want.

 

Jia Tolentino  09:51

I have theories, as you might expect, about why, you know, I feel really conscious. I mean, whenever I write anything, like whenever I’m reporting something, because. I kind of get assigned the sort of like youth ish cultural phenomenon at the New Yorker and I always try to like one of the things that I am on guard the most about what the internet does to my brain. And I think everyone’s brain is, I think it it’s this uncanny, sort of eternal present that sort of erases depth, like depth perception and knowledge and historicity and kind of, do you know what I mean? Like, there’s, it’s like this flat plane where everything is infinitely and immediately available. And I do think when I first started learning about uncovering information, you know, looking stuff up in a book, there was a sense of distance. There was a sense that knowledge had to be sort of physically obtained, that there was, you know, that the acquisition and the refinement and the and the synthesis of knowledge like required kind of intense human labor to get, to write down, to file away, to retrieve, and all of that and that existed, but I was starting school and then kind of vanished by the time I was out of college, I would say, and I try to find myself resisting anything that I write about. It’s like, it’s not new, right? I wrote about, you know, the sort of, I like, five years ago. I wrote about the thing where everyone started to have the same face, like all the, all the 30 year olds, you know, and, and I was like, you know, this sort of repressive, like wild alterations of beauty, technology. I mean, that’s centuries, millennia old. You know, it’s not. Nothing is new. But I do think and and so when I get afraid about the internet or climate change, or, you know, these things that do feel kind of like we’ve reached the end, like, sort of scientifically, we reach the end, try to remind myself that we’ve always been afraid that it’s the end of the world. End of the World, the afraid the end of our minds. But the internet, I do. It’s different from all these other technologies, because none of them were surveilling us back right? Like television, you have someone who’s maybe keeping track of ratings if you’ve got a box or whatever, but none of them, none of them, were surveilling us every second of our interaction with them, and manipulating our actions on these technologies to retain our attention for as long as possible. They weren’t interactive and they weren’t based on surveillance in the same way they if we got bored of TV, we would walk away and read a book. And now, if we get bored of our phone, our phone says, wait, here’s 45 other things that I’ll just, you know, give me five seconds. Give me five seconds, and I’ll get you for another 35 minutes. And then you’ll feel, you know, I think that is that interplay, that dynamic quality, the literal sort of organizations of these things to be maximally addictive, like I do think that is new.

 

David Duchovny  12:48

It feels like it, I mean, I have so many responses to what you’re saying. I hope I can hold on to them. The first one is, what is our duty as as parents? Is it to raise them to live in the world that we thought best, or the one that we liked best, or to raise them in the world that exists. And does that mean letting them play on the internet and getting as savvy as they can, and, you know, having to deal with it the way they’re going to have to deal with it, or does it mean pulling them out and giving them the consciousness of a reader, or whatever it is that we validate more highly. I don’t know how to answer that.

 

Jia Tolentino  13:28

I think about it like I have, I have internet brain I’ve got, I’ve got brain disease, you know, I’ve got internet brain disease, for sure. But I think about, you know, because, like my children, like my younger one just turned old enough to watch a screen, like, and have her attention be held by it. And I was sort of like, Oh, thank God, you know, like, Oh, now I can make dinner, you know, like, it’s actually.

 

David Duchovny  13:48

It’s a bit of a babysitter, sure.

 

Jia Tolentino  13:50

Yeah, and, you know, and I, you know, I’m not, there’s no, I stand no chance of being a purist. I because I’m not one. And the way that I think about it, the thing that has rescued me from from full powerlessness at the hands of the sort of trap and surveillance machine is that there are things. There are there’s a certain set of things that I have always liked more, and will always like more that will feel more physically absorbing and more fun. And, you know, will make me like I think about it, and I think kids still feel like this way. Like you, you look at your phone for too long, and you feel less human instead of more. And there’s a certain subset of activities that make you feel more human and not less. Reading is the most profound of these like, I think it instilled presumably, in both of us and everyone that read so much as a kid, and, you know, pursues this. It teaches you from age like four or five, whatever it is, to that one of the best things you can do is fully subsume yourself in some. One else’s reality. Not even watch it the way you would on a screen. So it’s, it’s an empathy tool, yeah, the Martha Nussbaum thing, like, I think, you know, it clearly is not a foolproof one, but it just makes you want to get in other people’s heads and find total absorption in someone else’s, you know, like it, it teaches you kind of about an interdependence that I find sort of politically useful, spiritually useful, you know, and, and I can’t that’s like, my only hope for the for my children, who I know will be as addicted to their phones as I am, probably more, is like, hopefully there’s something. Maybe it’s reading, maybe it’s making something. Maybe it’s, you know, my partner is like an architect, and he builds things, right? It’s like, I just hope there’s something, if it’s going out dancing, if it’s like, whatever it is, that there’s something that reminds them that there is kind of no substitute for presence.

 

David Duchovny  16:16

I think your journey is very interesting, because you said, you know, in the beginning, your experience of the internet. There you are a Southern Baptist in Houston. Your experience of the internet was, oh, there’s a great wide world out there that I can be a part of, not, not necessarily, this little area that I’m in. So that was the original impulse and the original beauty of it.

 

Jia Tolentino  16:36

Yeah, it was like, Oh, here’s a place where you are free to be yourself, and then that sort of curdled broadly for every for most people on the internet, you know, 1015, years later into Oh, like, here’s a place where you are going to be algorithmically micro, targeted and, like, forced into a particular type of self. But I think something that I wrote about with this Instagram face that I was referencing earlier, where it was like.

 

David Duchovny  17:01

I love that article. Can you name the article so people can find it?

 

Jia Tolentino  17:05

If it’s called the age of Instagram face, it was sort of like, you know, it was like, 2018 it was like, Why does everyone on the internet look like the same five professionally beautiful women? Like, it was just when everyone started getting the same exact injections, because, and I went to the Kardashians, one of the Kardashians plastic surgeon just posed as a journalist. And I was just like, I want to look better. What should I do? And, you know, within 30 seconds, he was like, here, I recommend $75,000 of work. And he, you know, he’d face tune, my face live and projected the face onto his face tune.

 

David Duchovny  17:35

And I wait, you said Face Tune?

 

Jia Tolentino  17:37

Yeah.

 

David Duchovny  17:38

What is face tune? It’s like, auto tune for a face?

 

Jia Tolentino  17:41

Yes, it literally is. It’s an app you can download and you can.

 

David Duchovny  17:46

Your face, kind of perfect pitch at some point.

 

Jia Tolentino  17:49

Basically, um, and it was interesting, because it’s like, it felt to me, you know, i i At the same time I was, like, if I was trying to be someone that had my face on screen, I would probably do this, you know, like I would I understand. It’s not that I don’t understand why everyone started to have the same face. It was more like it felt like the algorithm itself, the Instagram algorithm, was physically rewriting people’s faces in order to make them perform better on the platform. And that seemed to me to be just a quite specific and interesting use case of the way that we have adapted ourselves, you know. And I think in many ways, like truly spiritually, to this system of, you know, surveillance technology that is sort of using the raw material of our selfhood as it’s as the gold that’s mining out of the ground. But, and I think it is true, like, the extent to which I have already utterly been shaped by the incentives of the social internet, maybe irreparably, even as I try to, like, stay off of it as much as possible, I feel that, like I feel that I’ve already been shaped by it. I’ve started to think about that is my, my older daughter, who’s four is so much like me, like she shows no signs of not being like a real clone in every way and and she, how does that feel? And I think about, I’m sort of like, well, it’s sort of like I sewed and now I have to read like, I was like, oh god, she’s gonna party, you know, party and, you know, and I hope she has a great time. But I was like, Oh no, you’re growing up in New York. That’s a whole different, yeah, but I do think I feel that I emerged pretty unscathed, like as as unscathed as one can like as a girl that grew up in the 90s, early 2000s can from you know, this a sense of being alienated from my looks and my body, like I was, I was, I have not felt disconnected from. It in my life, like I feel lucky that I’ve had that experience. But, yeah, I do remember that all of high school, like I thought it was fat, you know, like I was tiny, thought I was fat, you know, didn’t like XYZ about that period of adolescence where you just cannot stand yourself and you wish you were just better in every way. And and I realized how, I realized thinking, when I think about my daughter, how painful it must be for your parents to see their children going through that these, these creatures, that they think, you know, I think she’s the most beautiful, like, I think she’s so the idea that she would ever look at, you know, this heavenly figure that she is and be unhappy and and basically to be able to forecast that she will because she’s socialized as a girl, and that all of my motherly reassurances that she’s perfect or whatever, it doesn’t mean anything, because she’ll grow up as a teenager.

 

David Duchovny  20:59

It means something, I assure you something, but it doesn’t mean enough. I don’t think.

 

Jia Tolentino  21:03

Yeah, it’s kind of unbearable to think about that, to think about her, her being subject to the hierarchy and that, and the sort of, you know, if I had been in middle school and had been able to get numerical likes on a picture of myself and have that every single day of my life and have that be with everyone around me like i I’m deeply glad that I never experienced that.

 

David Duchovny  21:26

You know, the tough thing too, and it’s probably exacerbated by the phone, is that kids don’t like to fail. Usually kids don’t like to fail, you know, getting back, yeah, and so it’s hard to get them to put themselves in those positions where they’re not expert, you know, and they’re not expert in anything. I don’t know where that comes from. It’s some kind of human DNA that’s like.

 

Jia Tolentino  21:52

And I found a special perfectionist about yourself growing up.

 

David Duchovny  21:56

Yeah, I was, I’m not. I’m not anymore. In fact, I value the other side. I value the imperfection so much more. But, yeah, no, I was bad. I mean, there was my father would remind me of this thing where we would have a catch, you know, you say that back in the east, I think they say play catch. Here on the West Coast, I can’t stand it. They also say tennis tennis shoes rather than sneakers. But I can still live here. You know, it’s okay. I can, I can put up with it, but having a catch I dropped one. I’d had a fit of crying, crying my my dad says, Pick it up, throw it back to me. You’ll catch the next one. And he says, might be apocryphal, but he says, I said, no, I want to catch that one, the one I already muffed. So that’s kind of where my brain was living as a child. And I think a lot of kids brains are in that place. And I wanted to get my kids to be at home with failure. And one of the reasons I started playing guitar at the age of 50, or even skiing with them, which I’d never done, was I wanted to see them, see me suck at something, right, and not be upset about it.

 

Jia Tolentino  23:08

Okay, can I? Can I tell you a child story, please? So my, this is when my so my daughter, she just turned four. She’s pretty young, but she I had gotten her, like, a little workbook that had a bunch of shapes and a little pair of scissors. Because I was like, Okay, maybe, you know, she can have some fun cutting out some shapes. And she immediately tried to cut out a star, and she botched it. And the more she tried to correct herself, the more she sort of made this sort of nubbin, sort of like, like many headed nubbin, you know, of like an unrecognizable amoeba where a star used to be, and she started crying and, and she was like, Mom, I didn’t do it perfect. I really wanted to do it perfect, but I didn’t do it perfect. And I was like, oh, you know, Zoopla, like it. I got you this to just practice, you know, like, the whole point is we do things really, really badly, and we do, you know, we get slowly better. But I was like, the whole point of this is practice. The whole point is to mess it up. It’s, you know, it’s okay, it’s okay. And I was like, let’s start with, you know, let’s do an easier shape. I’ll give you this triangle. Triangle star is so hard. Let’s do something easier. And she’s like, through her tears, she’s going, but I don’t want to do something easier, mom. I want to do something harder, and I want to do it perfect. And I was like, oh no.

 

David Duchovny  24:27

It’s me.

 

Jia Tolentino  24:27

You know, because it’s like she and it really did feel, you know, the arena in my life in which those impulses come out. It’s not really within the domestic scene, you know. It’s like, maybe she’s seen me, like, burn something on the stove and get mad at myself. But really, most of that impulse is contained within a zone of my life and my day that she doesn’t see, right? And it really in my in my partner, is exactly like this, too. As our you know almost anybody in well.

 

David Duchovny  24:54

You’re successful people, that’s what they’re seeing. They think that you’re great.

 

Jia Tolentino  25:00

Everything you have that you have, the brain disease that every single person in New York that I know has, you know, like you, I want to do something harder and I want to do it perfectly. And I both felt a great sadness that this quality was already manifesting itself within like, a very tiny little person’s brain. And I felt a weird pride that, that will drive her to do something.

 

David Duchovny  25:28

Well, I think we’re in a dangerous place for kids to make mistakes, period. You know, kids are supposed to make mistakes. And unfortunately, what we’ve done, you know, with the Internet that curates everything and then everything exists forever. We somehow, you know, I was thinking about it this morning that just that phrase that usually bad people use when they get caught, which is like, you shouldn’t judge me for my worst day now. Yeah, it’s usually bullshit because it’s usually those kind of people had a lot of worst days. But kids, you know, teenagers, they’re going to have worse days. And we’re now in this place as a culture where we’re judging people for their worst days and it lasts. And I think, yeah, forget about adults, you know, they’re going to have to handle it. They’re going to have to take their medicine or whatever. But kids should not have to take that medicine. And I don’t know that we figure that out.

 

Jia Tolentino  26:18

Yeah. Do you know about the right to be forgotten?

 

David Duchovny  26:21

No, but I love it.

 

Jia Tolentino  26:23

This is like a legal principle in the EU. It’s a GDPR thing. The General Data Protection Regulation Act in the EU. And it’s just the right it’s the right to erasure. It’s the right to have personal information removed from online searches and directories, it says.

 

David Duchovny  26:38

I guess it’s more of a technical thing and less of a spiritual exercise. You know, it’s very.

 

Jia Tolentino  26:45

You know, there’s no there’s no hard line between the two of the things. Right. Like it it is kind of a spiritual thing. It is it is an assertion that there should be selfhood that is removed from, you know, instrumental ization. And I think that’s a like fundamentally, that is a spiritual thing, right?

 

David Duchovny  27:04

Yeah, I’m a I’m a I’m a machine of of use as opposed to a machine of being. Yeah. And I think that’s why you’re so uniquely kind of poised to be thinking deeply about these things because you were raised in a in an older spiritual tradition.

 

Jia Tolentino  27:23

Yeah, and like, you know, everything about the way I think about politics and morality and the purpose of being alive, it’s it’s inevitably so rooted in this spiritual framework that I in many ways find abhorrent and don’t believe in at all. But I am grateful for that, for the imprint that it left on me. The damage and the burn, you know, and that. Yeah, like that’s something that I was so growing. I grew up in this giant evangelical church with this kind of incredibly overwhelming constant. This, like, terrifying sacred was always hovering over me. And this, this idea that there was some sort of. Like a mystery and consequence and like revelation, like these things and and punishment and like, these ideas just hovered so intensely. But as did, like, the idea of transcendence, this, feeling that I first, I think experienced in these giant evangelical worship services in the dark with so many people listening to a hymn and someone, you know, some kind of person with abhorrent political views talking about salvation. But I felt some sort of disappearance and transcendence in that that long after I lost that religious framework, I still feel that I’m actively chasing. I think it’s almost impossible to to experience the full body sublime on the Internet. It’s impossible to forget yourself because you are all I.

 

David Duchovny  28:37

I just want to copyright the full body sublime as a term. As an aspiration.

 

Jia Tolentino  29:11

Yeah. I mean, because you are not allowed. I mean, it’s sort of like what we were talking about that that space that you’re in when you are writing something, you are in one way, you are deeply in your own ego, an ability been in another, perhaps more significant way. You are racing it, you’re disappearing into service.

 

David Duchovny  29:32

Imagined service of an idea of a of a mission.

 

Jia Tolentino  29:36

Yeah.

 

David Duchovny  29:36

You’re part of a mission.

 

Jia Tolentino  29:37

And you feel and the most pleasurable part of like you know I mean it’s anything like dancing, music, drugs, sex, like, whatever. Like the feeling of being in a crowd in a march, like it’s being part of a movement or I just walked by. Mike It’s like it’s this dissolution of self to me. That’s when I feel the most human. When I experience that, and I do think that the nature of the phone, in every way, it’s so antithetical to that experience, because the phone requires you to be like this very precisely, micro, targeted, like combination of monetizable demographics every second that you’re looking at it. That’s the exact opposite of what we experience in any one of those moments of profound beauty on the edge of fear and disappearance. And I think about actually with my kids like how, and I was talking about this last weekend with a friend who was also raised in this extremely strict religious environment like I was, and I want my children to hunger for like that, hunger for transcendence has been, in many ways, like the guiding force of my personal and possibly my professional life. And I don’t know if I could have had that without, you know, spending 18 years within a church where I never met a person, you know, that didn’t believe that abortion was murder, you know.

 

David Duchovny  31:02

Yeah, we saw it was possible. I mean, you saw transcendent, the feeling was possible, whether or not the the framework was, you know, mentally acceptable to you or.

 

Jia Tolentino  31:15

And that yeah, and that it’s, it’s universal, right? That it’s like it, it’s a reminder that actually, probably all of us are engaged in this quest in some way, you know, and we just find it in different things.

 

David Duchovny  31:55

Your experience with trick mirror. I mean, it’s, it’s outrageous that you know, as you said, you put together a collection of essays out of the blue, and you had this huge success, and in a way, you’re still it took a couple years to sit in the catastrophe of that success, right? You know, because this is, yeah, this is a podcast about failure, right? And how wonderful failure is. And the flip side to that is like, how inhibiting and and crazy making success can be.

 

Jia Tolentino  32:25

You’re the only person that has ever put that quite so succinctly, and it’s a little devastating, and it because it also it feels so churlish for me to say that sounds like what I experienced was the best case scenario for any like youngish writer and to be read when you thought, you know, because it’s like, I came out of, like MFAs, like places where I understood UVA, even I took some when I would take creative writing classes there, I found out so early that, like most books sell 5000 copies. You know, you that’s what you expect. That’s all a person can expect. And I think that I had a lot of complicated feelings, like, I’m uncomfortable with praise, because I think, you know, I mean, you know how it is you write something, you’re like, I don’t think I’ve ever known like a good writer that is very pleased with the stuff that they do, right? I mean, that the ambient state is like.

 

David Duchovny  33:22

I did the best I could.

 

Jia Tolentino  33:24

I did the best I could, you know, and and you have to be displeased with your own work in order to think that you can do something better than it next time, right? Like I feel in general that like extreme praise is as meaningless as extreme sort of criticism slash hatred. You know, it’s like both feel a little bit not my business. I felt this great heartbreak that it feels so fucking stupid. Thank you for letting me talk about it. But it was like I realized when my book came out that the thing that I wanted was not to have written a book that people were reading, although that was a great blessing, and like, made it possible for me now to be doing a thing that I didn’t think I’d be able to do as a college student, which is right for a living, right? Like it doesn’t, it’s all where anything is worth it for that. But I realized, like, I felt this heartbreak, that this book was this thing that I thought I was doing for myself, and then suddenly it was this incredibly public thing. And I realized, like that sacred space of of just the thing that I liked, the thing that I loved the most about writing, it was over, and I felt and then I felt the thing like tugging, which is where, and it felt like so and I was, what have I done? What have I done? And then, and I was like, Okay, I need some ego death. And then I had a baby, and then I had another baby, and then my ego has fully died, and congratulations, yeah. And it feels great.

 

David Duchovny  34:56

It gets back to kind of the heart of why I wanted to begin. This podcast in the first place, which was, for me, you talk about intention. So intention is the beginning, but as you know, as a writer and as any Creator knows that between intention and execution, there’s all these little failures, there’s all these approximations, there’s the inco eight kind of thought in your mind, and then there’s the translation into words as you sit at the typewriter or the keyboard or whatever, and it’s never quite, quite, quite what you wanted. And I’m drawn to especially, you know, when I’m working as an actor, it’s like, Ah, I really like the discomfort of, like, No, it’s not quite, it’s not quite, it’s not quite. And that’s what it’s all about.

 

Jia Tolentino  35:46

I think a lot about, I think a lot about, you know, I think that the economy in the last 10 years, and certainly the entire economy of the internet, has been geared towards frictionlessness, right? Like seamless transactions, seamless personless stuff delivered at your door in a click of a button without any sense of all of the human sort of agony that goes into it right, just like an erasure via the impression of seamlessness and that as sort of a goal, like almost an ideological goal. That’s it’s something that’s been implanted almost as an ideological goal, without giving us any time to think about what that means, right? And I it’s one of those things. It’s one of those sort of fundamental tenets, fundamental sort of principles of the current Internet, which I it’s, you know, it’s surveillance, and it’s seamlessness. And I do think that, you know, think about the best times you ever had as a kid, as a teenager, as a young adult, like they were probably completely unsurveiled, right there, you were completely free to just be doing whatever you were doing and fucking up and, you know, and starting over the next day, right? And I think it’s the same thing with seamlessness. I think about this was something that having children reminds, you know, it’s kind of a continual reminder of that the things that are actually meaningful is, it’s what you’re talking about. It’s friction, it’s imperfection, it’s the struggle to reach the thing that you are trying to get to. And it’s sort of the perpetual struggle to be able to express something unreachable. Is the is the whole purpose of trying to make any kind of art right. And without that struggle, the whole process loses meaning, right? It’s not the whole point is that the closure of the gap between the empty page and the imperfect approximation right, and, and, I mean, that’s what I realized actually in writing my book too. It was like, I actually, you know, it’s nice to have written in that, like you don’t have to be in a manuscript agonized anymore. But actually, the thing that I like is that intermediary agony, yeah, there’s nothing like it.

 

David Duchovny  37:51

Well, this, you’re involved, you know, you’re in a relationship with that thing, yeah, you know. And it’s an intense relationship.

 

Jia Tolentino  38:01

I wrote a novel after my MFA that I worked on for five years and then shelved it, and it was bad, you sure wasn’t stolen. I it’s in a drawer that I can picture, the drawer that it’s in, never to return him, but that.

 

David Duchovny  38:15

Well, wait, why did you deem this a failure out of because it was bad. That’s your interpretation. I mean, no, I think you’re a good judge of your own, the best judge of your writing.

 

Jia Tolentino  38:29

I do. I think I have a good internal bar. I I mean, I think that’s, you know, probably the one most, one of the most important faculties to cultivate when you’re a writer anyway, right? Like, you know, when something shitty.

 

David Duchovny  38:41

Well, I don’t know, because, if I’m out on a ledge, I don’t know if it’s a stupid ledge and nobody cares about it, or I’m really onto an interesting ledge here. So I don’t know. I push back a little bit on that, like I know what’s good, but I don’t know what’s great and what’s horrible.

 

Jia Tolentino  38:59

Yeah, that’s true. I, however, felt quite certain that this one was not good, but I but writing it, I still think about it as one of the most valuable writing experiences of my life, because it was exclusively that part. It was exclusively the struggle.

 

David Duchovny  39:13

Yeah, I want to show you my copy of the book, because you’ll see that the it’s yellowed, right? The original. It’s the original. You can tell I’m truly honored. Yeah, this is not, this is not. I didn’t buy this shit just to do this is yellow.

 

Jia Tolentino  39:29

I truly am so honored. I, you know, I have been, I’ve been watching you on TV for since I was a tiny child, getting fucking terrified out of my mind on expelled so.

 

David Duchovny  39:37

That’s a horrible thing to say to a person, but thank you.

 

Jia Tolentino  39:42

Can I ask you, what have you? Have you read anything great lately that you would recommend to me?

 

David Duchovny  39:46

Read anything great lately? Oh, yeah, where is it? It’s by Markson. It’s called the last novel.

 

Jia Tolentino  39:56

Okay, I’m gonna write that down and go by it.

 

David Duchovny  39:58

David Marx, and it’s not. Really a novel at all. It’s just a thinking, it’s just a mind. It’s just a brilliant mind. So I love that any anywho, thank you, Jia, how about you give me, give me your recommendation for some fiction.

 

Jia Tolentino  40:14

Okay, Loved and Missed by Susie Boyd. Don’t know that it, it’s been like, kind of a word of mouth circulator in my in among my friends here, and I sobbed my eyes out, and I never cry. And it felt amazing. It’s interesting. I mean, it’s like a book about a mother child relationship, and it’s one of the most kind of, like devastating evocations of love I’ve ever read, but it was parent child, which, you know, that’s, that’s quite rare, that that’s, yeah, intensity and yeah, I really loved it.

 

David Duchovny  40:49

I will get that, because, blowing my own horn, I mean, the book I wrote, Bucky fucking dent is really about parent child love and the intensity of that. And I’m a sucker. I’m a sucker for that setup. Oh, I hope, I hope you like it. Tell me the name again.

 

Jia Tolentino  41:06

It’s called Loved and Missed.

 

David Duchovny  41:08

Loved and missed. Thank you, Jia, what a pleasure.

 

Jia Tolentino  41:14

Really wonderful to meet you.

 

David Duchovny  41:15

Yeah, likewise.

 

David Duchovny  41:30

Hey, everyone post Jia Tolentino, thoughts, again, I’m always just so pleased at the kind of conversations that I get to have, by virtue of doing the podcast, I’m grateful for that. As much as I’ve been struggling with the preparation workload, I feel grateful to have these conversations. And the other thing I struggle with is just, you know, my self, my sense as a creative person, like is this what I want to be creating? Is this? Is this creative? Are we making something? Are we making something together? I sure hope so. Um, it was a great conversation, I thought. And I’m grateful. I’m grateful to have this, this opportunity to talk to interesting people about what I feel is a very human and interesting subject. Even though we rarely talk about like a failure per se, we always kind of circle back to some situations that brought great pain through expectations, not filled, fulfilled? Yeah, man, we keep going.

 

CREDITS  42:59

There’s more Fail Better with Lemonada Premium. Subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content like more of my behind the scenes thoughts on this episode. Subscribe now on Apple podcasts. Fail Better is a production of Lemonada media in coordination with King Baby. It is produced by Kegan Zema, Aria Bracci, and Dani Matias, Paula Kaplan   . Our engineer is Brian Castillo. Our SVP of weekly is Steve Nelson. Our VP of new content is Rachel Neil. Special thanks to Carl Ackerman, Tom Karpinski and Brad Davidson, the show’s executive produced by Stephanie Wittels Wachs, Jessica Cordova, Kramer and me, David Duchovny. The music is also by me and my band. Lovely Colin Lee. Pat McCusker, Mitch Stewart, Davis Rowan and Sebastian […]. You can find us online at @LemonadaMedia and you can find me @DavidDuchovny. Follow Fail Better wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership.