I've read Tolentino's work for years whether it was at Jezebel or The New Yorker. She's a formidable writer who can crystallize a moment in contemporary culture with a few words. And while there are smart people out there writing non-fiction and essays, Tolentino is one of the only writers who acknowledges the context of her own life to make sense of the world*, and offers up observation and understanding without condemnation or ridicule. She understands the underlying capitalist-society-invented notion of eating a salad at your desk, but she wouldn't mock you for enjoying Sweetgreen—she admits to doing the same thing.

I recognized a lot of the behaviors and routines in her essay "Always Be Optimizing," as someone who has been working in the corporate world for twelve years, and her insight goes deep into other subjects of the zeitgeist. The essay that hit me the hardest was "We Come from Old Virginia," where Tolentino plumbs the depths of the effects of the infamous, retracted 2014 Rolling Stone article "A Rape on Campus" and her own experience at her alma mater. "The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams" delighted me (in ways Tolentino understood it would) and also managed to make me examine that feeling; it's a paradigm-shifting essay. "The Cult of the Difficult Woman" and "I Thee Dread" had similar resonance about modern-day living, and all the traps that fail us in disguise. For book lovers, "Pure Heroines" really digs into what happens to women in contemporary literature, and makes quite the case for the women of YA lit.

I'll stop there, because I could go on about Tolentino—gush, you might even say. I borrowed this one from the library, but I'm definitely going to be buying it (when released in paperback, of course).

*This, I think, is the quality in her writing that provoke many people to call her a modern-day Didion. They have decidedly different vibes, but on this I agree they are similar.