Talking essays, Brooklyn and community with Jia Tolentino

A writer who says that she learns more about herself through every book she reads, essayist Jia Tolentino is this year’s guest editor for the annually published anthology showcasing the best essays of the previous year, “The Best American Essays 2025.”

Tolentino is best known for being the perspicacious millennial voice as a staff writer at the New Yorker. In 2019, without taking a sabbatical from work, she authored a book of ten essays entitled Trick Mirror, in which she reflects on her beginnings writing on the internet, challenges society’s constant need to optimize and questions the true intentions around the business of marriage, to name a few topics. Tolentino joined the Brooklyn Eagle to discuss essays, share why she loves living in Brooklyn and expand on the need for community.

The Eagle asked Tolentino how essays relate to her own life. Referencing her introduction to “The Best American Essays 2025” anthology, Tolentino told the Eagle that essays “seem to be about a process of trying to understand a question as much as answer it, and also maybe try to answer a question in a way that is not definitive, in a way that leads to more questions.”

“[It] taught me how certainty can be sustained alongside uncertainty. I think a lot of the project of living is learning how to hold a kind of incommensurability.”

Essays, both in Tolentino’s work and in the upcoming anthology, have the power to highlight the dialectics in reality. Holding space for contradictory feelings, she explains, is the skill needed to both excavate a deeper truth and navigate life. “A lot of the essays in this collection speak to how we hold together fortune and misfortune, life and death, suffering and happiness. This is how I try to understand my own life and the world.” This is to say that the essay isn’t simply work for Tolentino, but about a framework for how she views and lives her life.

“Essays engage with opposites, things that our brains don’t want to, that our brains can’t easily fit together,” Tolentino explains. “Certain structures, like the essay, can help us understand how we personally can fit them together.”

Tolentino describes Brooklyn as a space where civic life is a similar structure that holds all types of people and perspectives together, “despite all of New York’s wealth and segregation.”

Jia Tolentino speaking with the Eagle via Zoom. Screenshot via Brooklyn Eagle

Tolentino has lived in Brooklyn since 2014. Her first home was in Fort Greene for ten years, and after some moves in neighboring areas, she now lives in Bed-Stuy. “It’s an expensive city,” she said, recalling her first few years in New York. “So, I waited until I could actually get a job. I was surprised to get it. I had been in grad school in Michigan before that and had started writing on the internet in grad school.”

The Eagle asked Tolentino how, as a Brooklynite, she felt after Rebecca Solnit’s visual “City of Women” renamed the Franklin Avenue A/C stop, Tolentino’s local subway, after her. Tolentino describes Solnit, prolific author and essayist, as “a kind of fairy godmother” who strongly encouraged her to write her book. The visual is an NYC subway map that renames each stop with that of a well-known woman connected to that area. Tolentino explained that the idea of writing a book was daunting, but Solnit reframed the whole project by simply saying, “You write long essays all the time. Just write 10 of those, and that’s a book.” Describing Solnit’s support, it seems the map does something bigger than just spotlight names: it shows a community of women thinkers, artists, creators and leaders in supporting and making up a great city.

Tolentino grew up in Houston, TX, but she has stayed in Brooklyn because “you can have a real community here as an adult in a way that I think you can’t in a lot of places that lean towards more of the isolated domestic. Here, we don’t have room in our apartment, so we just have to hang out with each other all the time.”

She touched on how commonplace it is for people to leave the city after having children, but her feeling was, “No, I want to stay here. I want this community specifically.”

Tolentino frequently brings her children to the bookstore Books Are Magic and museum spaces like P.S. 1. Keeping with the theme of living in a place that values community, she says her family frequents parks and that “We have to bring our children to each other’s houses.”

In choosing essays for “The Best American Essays 2025,” Tolentino says she read every submission multiple times to come up with a general selection. “Then,” she continues, “I looked at it and asked, ‘Is this geographically diverse? Does this seem sort of age diverse? Does this seem racially diverse?’”

If Jia Tolentino views the essay as a framework for her life, then the anthology is a communal expression of many thoughts — the type of life she’s created for herself in Brooklyn.

“The Best American Essays 2025” was released on October 21, 2025.

Some book recommendations from Jia Tolentino’s 2025 reading list:

“Down Time” by Andrew Martin
“On the Calculation of Volume” series by Solvej Balle
“Bread of Angels” by Patti Smith
“Small Boat” by Vincent Delecroix