That all this observation unspools from a forgettable early-aughts reality show feels almost like an act of transmutation, as if someone used a bag of Doritos and a bottle of Snapple to produce a multicourse feast. There has to be writing that is flexible enough to accommodate all these things existing, often at once.' And we’re in an age where everything is shifting. 'The ways in which our identities position us in the world are complicated. Boys, she writes that rewatching her show felt similar to scrolling through Twitter, “thinking on the one hand, Where are we underneath all of this arbitrary self-importance? And on the other: Aren’t we all exactly as we seem?” At one point, in the essay about Girls v. The book includes nine original pieces-about half are personal memoir, while the rest are social criticism-and in all of them, over and over, Tolentino lays out a satisfyingly perceptive insight only to push past it, asking how she might be using it to obscure something else. Using language that often conjures a Technicolor vividness, it is about how our identities have come to be shaped by algorithms and our sense of reality distorted about complicity, performance, self-surveillance, and how selfhood itself is a complex, ever-shifting concept. Instead, Tolentino, in an essay from her debut collection, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (out August 6), tells a story about her experience with so much depth it practically rips open a portal.
It would be easy to dismiss the show as just so much detritus from the new millennium, or simply an early harbinger of what was to come. Boys: Puerto Rico have since disappeared from not just television but the internet (though it is possible to find one picture of the cast standing arm in arm on the beach, with Tolentino sporting a crop top and a winning grin). Boys: Puerto Rico-which, it should surprise no one, involved two teams of teenagers competing against each other in various challenges while living together in a house brimming with hormones and low-stakes drama.Īt the time, reality TV was just beginning its sprawl into every corner of consciousness, and almost all traces of Girls v. Three months later, Tolentino was on a plane to the Caribbean to appear in Girls v. She and her parents were at a mall in Houston when they noticed a booth advertising a casting call, and her dad offered her $20 to audition, as a joke.
In September 2004, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, then 15, tried out for a reality show.
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