I can't say that Trick Mirror is entirely focused, unless you're responding to my description of her prose which very surely is. The opening essay is on the internet, another on drugs and losing faith and finding faith and megachurches and Houston hip-hop, another on our obsession with optimization, another on the complexity of campus sexual assault, etc. The collection is broad and each essay is deep. (I feel quite strongly that I would read Jia's writing on anything—sawdust, pecans, lice, dry cleaners—and that compounds itself when she writes about topics both so weighty, so broadly applicable, and yet so personal.)
What I love about the collection is it feels the way Joan Didion's or DFW's best narrative non-fiction feels. That kind of awe at the writing, that unfurling of confident and thought-through storytelling, that kind of blossoming of connections that form the richness of life and intellectual inquiry. The difference–and for me this is somewhat personal and so perhaps not universally relatable but feels like it could be–is that, at 30, she is writing about our time. She's writing about coming of age in and with the world we live in now.
Didion writing about the sixties and seventies and Wallace about the eighties and nineties and two thousands are both beautiful and timeless and a masterclass on what greatness feels like in your hands, but there's something special about reading someone cogently weave personal experiences about AngelFire and Twitter and political extremism and Anonymous and the crushing weight of forever being "seen" and performing on the internet. Something special because we are living it now.
I feel about Jia—as well as a few other living writers; Caity Weaver's profiles come to mind—the way I didn't know to feel about other living legends. That feeling of not appreciating what you have because you think it will last forever. I think about when Mac Miller was still alive (less than a year ago) or when Lil Wayne was on top of the world with Tha Carter III or when Chance the Rapper still made good music or when Obama was president or when Jon Stewart was on TV or when Jobs was leading Apple. I didn't consciously stop and appreciate not only the work but to be alive to live it, and now that those times are gone there's only nostalgia. I'm trying to be more mindful of witnessing generational talent in the moment and Jia's writing feels that way to me.