A Conversation with Jia Tolentino

We need writers who will show up, pay witness, and not back down.

Jia Tolentino is a contributing writer for newyorker.com. Previously, she was the deputy editor at Jezebel and a contributing editor at the Hairpin. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Times Magazine, Grantland, the Awl, Pitchfork, The Fader, Time, and Slate. Here, Jia talks about making the switch from editor to staff writer, her favorite authors, how writers should think about pitching, and the kind of work we will need to read in the years ahead.

You are now killing it at The New Yorker website, where you’ve been writing since June. (I also really appreciated your contribution to the magazine feature “Aftermath: Sixteen Writers on Trump’s America.”) Before that, you were deputy editor at Jezebel. How has that transition been for you, and what’s the best thing so far about your new(ish) position?

I’m grateful for the compliment. The transition has been terrific, freeing, and lightly unnerving in ways I wasn’t expecting, which is great. At Jezebel, I spent most of my time editing features and functionally helping to run the blog. I was really aware of other people’s opinions all the time; I got a lot of personal satisfaction out of other people’s work and didn’t have too much time to think about my own.

Now I only think about my own writing, and I’m the only voice in my head, which feels a little embarrassing, but I think that’s good. This job in every way is very lucky for me. It’s easier logistically and harder critically, which seems rare these days; I’m on my own schedule, in phenomenal hands, with a lot of leeway in terms of subject and style. There are also no comments (blissful) and there’s much less bad-faith reading, though of course there’s still some. I wrote a piece on the Chapo Trap House podcast recently, and it was funny to see responses calling me a “centrist, elitist, typical New Yorker media liberal,” where a few months ago I’d have been getting “stupid, scummy, clickbait-peddling Gawker Media feminist” or something like that, off the same argument.

You wrote so many great pieces for Jezebel. What are some of your favorite pieces you published as an editor?

Off the top of my head, there was Brit Bennett’s essay about good white people, her debut; Catherine Nichols’s piece on her “homme de plume”; Mairead Small Staid’s stuff on pro wrestling; Sarah Miller’s maxi dress essay; Andrew Heisel’s historical curiosities, Melissa Chadburn’s pieces about labor and organization. And in terms of staff writing, everyone was brilliant. I loved Jane’s vagina piece and Ellie’s Ted Cruz rabbit hole; I loved all of Kara’s rants, Anna’s investigative stories, and Joanna’s psychotically committed satire.

When you were editing, what did you primarily look for a story? Anything you wish you’d seen or published more of?

I think Emma Carmichael and I always wanted to publish more writing from older women than we did. We both tried to widen the purview and style of the online women’s publication, both at the Hairpin and Jezebel—the sort of cardigans and curiosities, catalogs and outrage reputation—but there were some things that tended, for reasons we could identify, to elude us. I wish I had seen more writing that had a different sense of weakness and resistance; those two concepts are central to online women’s writing, but they would appear in the average cold pitch in extremely unimaginative ways.

I always felt very happy whenever I was editing anyone who had a sense of humor, an attention to style, and an intelligence that felt personal to them. But women’s media will change drastically during a Trump administration, or, at least, the good outlets will. We were imagining (and, we thought, helping to create) a future where equality could go without saying; now, Trump’s election has made me doubt every instinct I’ve had about consensus and persuasion and what’s compelling to whom.

Was writing a career you always planned on? What do you think you’d be doing if you weren’t doing this?

I am temperamentally averse to long-term planning, but my subconscious is much more goal-oriented than my conscious self and I’m sure I always knew I would try to write for a living if I could. The other lanes I’ve gone into are adjacent—teaching, literacy-based nonprofits, etc.—but my real dream jobs are like, hand-picking bookshelves for rich people, picking items for the Skymall catalogue, running a farm for Pomeranians, naming paint colors or strains of weed.

Who are some of your favorite writers?

Thinking just about books in order to not repeat myself, I’d say the best I’ve read over the last year have been from Magda Szabo, Alejandro Zambra, Rebecca Makkai, Ted Chiang, Jill Leovy, and Claire-Louise Bennett. I loved Margo Jefferson’s and William Finnegan’s memoirs. I reread my Stephen Millhauser, Yiyun Li, Jhumpa Lahiri story collections pretty frequently; in the nonfiction section I reread Michael Paterniti, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Ellen Willis and Rebecca Solnit; I also reread lot of children’s writers, like Louis Sachar, or E.L. Konigsberg, who had incredible deep cuts, and Rebecca Stead, who wrote this 2010 Newbery winner that’s one of my favorite books ever.

Got any advice for people just starting to pitch their work?

The outlet is just as important as the piece, or it should be. I think a lot of writers throw one piece at a dozen places and get impatient when that strategy doesn’t work; I think it’s much better to read your favorite few places very closely for awhile, and then pitch something thoughtful, particular, and strong to the one you could most easily imagine running your work. Basically, with any writing—this is probably stupidly obvious—your work should always feel much more important than whatever personal attachment you have to getting it up.

I also think—you know, writing is fun! It should be fun. It’s fun to find a subject that generates some chemistry when you think about it, and it’s fun to take that chemistry wherever it goes. That being said, writing will probably be less fun now that we’re walking into an awful future in which “the discourse” will certainly be worse than ever, there will be a real Orwellian dissolution of words and their meanings, and there will be no shortage of misery to contextualize and pay witness to. We need writers who will show up for this, and not back down.