Jia Tolentino was born in 1988 and raised in Houston, Texas by parents born in the Philippines. There, she entered first grade at the age of four at a parochial school attached to the Southern Baptist megachurch she and her parents attended, an experience she writes about in "Ecstasy." Although initially drawn to the church's teachings, Tolentino later became disillusioned with organized religion. She was salutatorian of her high school class and went on to study English at the University of Virginia, where she was a member of a sorority; she reflects on her time at the school in "We Come from Old Virginia."

Upon graduation from college, Tolentino served in Kyrgyzstan for a year as a member of the Peace Corps, an experience that appears in several essays in Trick Mirror. She later received her Master of Fine Arts in fiction from the University of Michigan. During her time there, she began to take barre classes, as she writes in "Always Be Optimizing."

In 2013, Tolentino began writing for the feminist website The Hairpin. The following year, she moved with her editor to the site Jezebel; in 2016, Tolentino joined the New Yorker as a staff writer. There, she has written extensively about issues affecting women and Millennials, among a range of other topics.