This is Editorial Letter’s first guest post. It’s written by Tajja Isen, who will contribute from time to time. Her first book, Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service, will be published in 2022 (One Signal/Simon & Schuster; Doubleday Canada).
Title: “Always Be Optimizing” (from Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion)
Author: Jia Tolentino
Publisher: Random House
Date: August 2019
Form: Cultural criticism
Keywords: Self-optimization, gender, capitalism, social media
When starting a piece of writing I often find myself tempted, as many writers have been before me, to reach for the anecdote. The anecdote is like small talk: a gentle on-ramp that gets something solid under your feet before leaping into the terror of argumentation. An anecdote can be personal or reported; the former is the provenance of the first-person essay, the latter the opening gambit of most magazine features. Because of how common they are, anecdotal openings can also feel a bit tedious. I imagine their popularity to be an overcorrection from an earlier stage of the writer’s development (present company very much included), a high-school-essay grandiosity that seeks to encompass all of history or society in its first line (“Since the dawn of time…”)
I’m currently working on a book of essays, and I’ve been trying to think of ways to vary up the structure of my openings. To that end, I recently reread Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, paying particular attention to the opening and closing moves of each piece and the way each essay moves from A to B (a bit of advice gleaned from an online class I took with Alexander Chee). It was during my reread that I came to identify what I’ll call the first-principles opening.
The first-principles opening works at a scale somewhere between the hyper-specific detail and the overbroad cliché. It’s a way of outlining the essay’s subject and argument—and, if you’re really fancy, its structure—right out of the gate, absent the ballast of personal experience or reported example. It takes, I think, a lot of nerve. Tolentino does the move a few times across Trick Mirror’s nine essays. Here are a few lines from the first paragraph of the book’s third piece, “Always Be Optimizing”:
The ideal woman has always been generic. I bet you can picture the version of her that runs the show today. She’s of indeterminate age but resolutely youthful presentation. She’s got glossy hair and the clean, shameless expression of a person who believes she was made to be looked at … [she is] an interesting subject, a worthy object, a self-generating spectacle with a viewership attached. (63)
The idea behind first principles is to break down a complex idea into its elements and remake it from the ground up, and that’s what Tolentino is doing here. Though we haven’t met any ideal women apart from this hypothetical one, Tolentino is previewing the basic concepts she’ll later build on in her argument about gendered self-improvement: an obsession with image, capitalist productivity, performing (and monetizing) identity, aestheticizing the body, a social media–conditioned state of hypervigilance. The opening is neither hyper-specific (“Norma Jean gazes into the mirror, blow-drying her hair, and demands that her husband take a picture”) nor, as might be particularly tempting with a subject like this, overbroad (though the start of Tolentino’s paragraph seems to be doing something similar to the since-the-dawn-of-time approach, she narrows the ambit with a more specific second sentence).
As an opening move, writing from first principles is especially daring because your reader hasn’t encountered the complex idea yet (or, if you’re like me and stubbornly insist on writing a piece chronologically, you haven’t even put it on the page), so you’re reverse-engineering the argument out of nothing. Clarity, therefore, is at a higher premium. The first-principles opening requires tremendous command of your subject matter—to pull it off, you have to be comfortable zooming across the surface of broader trends and timelines (“…has always been,” “…the version of her that runs the show today”) but also pausing to dig in for the specific detail (“glossy hair”; “a clean, shameless expression”).
What I appreciate most about the first-principles opening is how confidently and efficiently it conveys authority. I instinctively trust a writer who starts by getting straight to the point. The opposite, unfortunately, can sometimes feel true of the anecdote (and, obviously, the cliché): you don’t have a clear enough idea of your argument yet, so to compensate, you had to fetch the words from someone else’s mouth. The strongest arguments use the anecdote as a stepping-stone to somewhere else—and, at times, sidestep it altogether.