Internet-era self-consciousness under a microscope.

Tolentino writes about reality TV, Instagram, scam culture, feminism, self-optimisation, and the way the internet trains us to perform versions of ourselves we don’t entirely believe in. 

The title is accurate: everything reflects something distorted. What made this book hit when it did was timing, we were pre-pandemic but already diagnosing the exhaustion of living online. It captures that late-2010s awareness that we are both agents and products.

Readable, sharp, occasionally caustic. Sits comfortably beside Maggie Nelson, Leslie Jamison, Patricia Lockwood, but with a distinctly millennial digital lens.