Most attempts to do what Irby does achieve little more than permanently tainting one’s Google results and embarrassing one’s loved ones. Writers in this tradition invite audiences right into their unruly lives, so they can rubberneck and relate. You can see the downstream influence of her mode of acidic, confessional writing all over the internet and even on real-life stages.
“I am the last person on Earth who still has a blog,” she proclaims in the book’s first essay, “Into the Gross.” Later, after mistakenly assuming that a waiter was star-struck, she will wonder: “How could a person who still has a blog on Al Gore’s internet in the year of our Lord 2020 possibly delude herself into thinking that she is notorious enough to be recognized in a mid-priced sushi chain in Kalamazoo, Mich.?” But Irby - unlike almost every other blogger - understates her relevance. These days she’s a little more bashful about her craft, now that most of this genre of writing has fled to even shorter formats like Twitter, or simply withered away with the rest of small-batch digital media. Live since the aughts, her site,, has spawned three previous books of essays. Irby is a longtime practitioner of a fine, dying art: the personal blog post. What Keats did for the ode, Irby has done for the complaint. Anything, it seems, can be worthy of Irby’s lavish scorn. No topic is spared her gaze: fermented foods, crown molding, dogs, Chicago parking, the gastrointestinal tract, the distribution of chairs in conference rooms, exfoliation. Listeners of her new audiobook, “Wow, No Thank You.,” will come to learn and resent any number of things they did not previously know or resent. She takes an idea in her hands, revolves it slowly in her fingertips and then calls your attention to its every minute flaw. The essayist Samantha Irby is an odd kind of jeweler. Essays By Samantha Irby Read by the author
Sarah Bakewell | Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope.In her new essay collection, Irby ponders inspirational Instagram infographics, being friendzoned by Hollywood, living in a red state, and the discomfort of life as a 40-year-old. She has contributed work to a variety of publications and written an episode of the television show Shrill. She is also the author of three essay collections: Meaty New Year, Same Trash: Resolutions I Absolutely Did Not Keep and the New York Times bestseller We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. In her popular long-running blog, bitches gotta eat, Samantha Irby offers raw, humorous takes on her sometimes difficult personal life, pop culture, and, of course, food. In conversation with New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
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