Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: We Are Never Meeting in Real Life
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://bitchesgottaeat.blogspot.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.elle.com/culture/books/news/a45665/samantha-irby-we-are-never-meeting-in-real-life/ * http://www.chicagotribune.com/redeye/culture/ct-redeye-samantha-irby-interview-20170525-story.html * http://www.powells.com/post/qa/powells-qa-samantha-irby-author-of-we-are-never-meeting-in-real-life * http://lithub.com/samantha-irby-needs-to-talk-about-some-sht/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | no2014011531 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2014011531 |
| HEADING: | Irby, Samantha |
| 000 | 00751cz a2200193n 450 |
| 001 | 9461375 |
| 005 | 20180119145457.0 |
| 008 | 140128n| azannaabn |n aaa c |
| 010 | __ |a no2014011531 |z no2014012671 |
| 035 | __ |a (OCoLC)oca09667928 |
| 040 | __ |a IlMpPL |b eng |e rda |c IlMpPL |d DLC |d IEN |d DLC |
| 053 | _0 |a PS3609.R4723 |
| 100 | 1_ |a Irby, Samantha |
| 370 | __ |a Evanston (Ill.) |
| 374 | __ |a Blogger |
| 375 | __ |a female |
| 377 | __ |a eng |
| 670 | __ |a Meaty, 2013: |b title page (Samantha Irby) page 255 (Samantha Irby writes the notoriously hilarious blog, bitchesgottaeat.com) |
| 670 | __ |a We are never meeting in real life, 2017: |b ECIP t.p. (Samantha Irby) data view (African American comedian and blogger; born in Evanston, Ill; blogger of “Bitches gotta eat”) |
PERSONAL
Born in Evanston, IL; married Kirsten Jennings, 2016.
EDUCATION:Attended Northern Illinois University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Comedian, blogger, essayist. Has also worked as a receptionist at an animal hospital.
WRITINGS
Author of blog, bitchesgottaeat.com. Contributor to periodicals, including, Rumpus, Jezebel, and Marie Claire. Also the author of the e-book short, New Year, Same Trash: Resolutions I Absolutely Did Not Keep, Vintage (New York, NY), 2017.
Meaty was purchased for an FX Studios series, cowritten by Irby, 2016.
SIDELIGHTS
“Samantha Irby … may well be the most talented inappropriate woman in Chicago,” noted Chicago Tribune Online contributor Christopher Borrelli of this comedian, blogger, and essayist. Speaking with Audrey Gorden in another Chicago Tribune Online interview, Irby remarked on when she began writing: “I started writing fiction and short stories in high school, then I started my blog in 2009 (Bitches Gotta Eat).” That blog has proved to be very popular, as Irby told Lit Hub Website contributor Michele Filgate: “I just started writing about all the dumb stuff that was happening to me every day, and then it kind of exploded. And people were really reading it. When people I didn’t know started reading it, emailing me or commenting or whatever, I was like ‘Wow, this is a thing.’ And so then I just committed to doing it. It wasn’t anything that I ever really wanted to do, and then I kept doing it because people were reading it and responding well to it and I just haven’t stopped. Now it’s like well, you know, can I stop? If I take too long to post, people are like ‘What’s up? Where are you?'”
In her interview with Gorden, Irby further commented: “I’m pretty pragmatic, so I didn’t ever want to be a writer because it didn’t feel like a sustainable job. I didn’t start writing as a career until I quit my hourly job in July 2016. I was running the reception desk at an animal hospital first, and writing second as a hobby. I didn’t have the drive to put a book together, but it was easy because I knew the people at Curbside (Splendor Publishing) and they liked my work, so I didn’t have to go out and find an agent or do anything to make it happen.” Irby’s first publication was a book of memoir-like sketches. Meaty: Essays, which was purchased for an FX Studios series, cowritten by Irby. This was followed by the 2017 work, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life: Essays.
Meaty
Meaty follows Irby through failed relationships, taco feasts, her struggles with Crohn’s disease, poverty, blackness and body image. “No topic escapes the author’s blunt analysis, whether it pertains to herself or others,” noted a Kirkus Reviews critic of this “raunchy, funny and vivid collection of essays.” There are essays on how other people have sex, her relationship with her gynecologist, how she sometimes sucks her thumb, or how she relates to her life that is somehow lived between white and black cultures. The Kirkus Reviews critic concluded: “If you are ready for strong, sarcastic language paired with attitude-laced humor, strap in and get ready for a roller-coaster ride to remember.”
Other reviewers also had praise for Meaty. Writing in Booklist, Courtney Jones noted: “Irby’s voice is raw, gripping, and sings a clear tune many female readers will find themselves grooving to.” Xpress Reviews contributor Mark Manivong also had praise, commenting: “Readers with an interest in memoirs and short essays, especially those that find humor in everyday life, will enjoy Irby’s writing.” Similarly, Los Angeles Review Online writer Renée K. Nicholson felt that this collection is “as poignant as it is hilarious,” adding: “Irby gains our trust through her candid tone and the way she unabashedly reveals herself. … There is an everyday quality to the writing, as if each essay is a conversation already in progress, where insecurities and desires play out in tantalizing and brutal honesty.” New York Journal of Books Online critic Michael Adelberg likewise observed: “Meaty reads like a best-of collection from Ms. Irby’s blog BitchesGottaEat, but all the material here is new in these breathless, unconventional, bare-all essays.” Further praise came from Small Press Book Review website writer Richard Derus, who concluded: “The collection is far and away best taken in doses. It’s like any smorgasbord. The offerings are tempting, and the urge to overindulge is strong. Resist the urge that you not grow indifferent to the charms of the groaning board! Read one or two of these tempting treats. Put the book down, pick up something grim and joyless for a contrast…are you caught up on your Bolaño reading? isn’t there a new Murakami or something?…and then come back to laugh and learn.”
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life
In her 2017 collection of essays, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, Irby is “once again the inimitably candid, uber-confessional friend readers will happily spend a few hundred pages with,” according to Booklist reviewer Annie Bostrom. Here Irby writes about personal topics such as being black and fat or spending far too much time with her cat, eating junk food, and watching television. She also writes of her lesbian marriage, how to deal with money, and surviving relationships. “Irby’s brilliant blend of honesty and humor will have readers’ tears streaming for all kinds of reasons,” noted Bostrom.
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life garnered praise from many quarters. A Kirkus Reviews critic who commented: “Personal embarrassment provides plenty of material for in-print or online entertainment.” Writing in New York magazine, Kera Bolonik similarly observed that Irby’s “acerbic, raw honesty on the page–often punctuated with all-caps comic parenthetical asides– unflinchingly recounts experiences such as the humiliating intrusion of explosive diarrhea on romantic and borderline-romantic interludes.” Online Lit Hub contributor Filgate also had a high assessment of this collection and of the author, remarking: “In her latest collection of essays, We Are Never Meeting In Real Life, Irby establishes herself as one of our most entertaining but poignant contemporary essayists. … Irby is the unpretentious but brilliant voice that we need to hear.” Likewise, writing in Books and What Not Website, Betty Scott noted: “In her collection of essays We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, Samantha Irby has done the impossible. There are books full of poop jokes. There are books that make salient points about African-American women and mental health. There has never been a book that does both, let alone does both well–until now.” Online Lambda Literary reviewer Gena Hymowech was also impressed, observing: “Irby uses a killer sense of humor to do battle with a life that undermines her almost every step of the way.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2013, Courtney Jones, review of Meaty: Essays, p. 26; April 15, 2017, Annie Bostrom, review of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life: Essays, p. 10.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2013, review of Meaty; April 1, 2017, review of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.
Marie Claire, October, 2017, Samantha Irby, ” What We’re READING.”
New York, May 29, 2017, Kera Bolonik, review of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, p. 120.
Xpress Reviews, October 25, 2013, Mark Manivong, review of Meaty.
ONLINE
After Ellen, http://www.afterellen.com/ (August 21, 2013), Sarah Terez Rosenblum, review of Meaty.
Austin Chronicle Online, https://www.austinchronicle.com/ (November 3, 2017), Beth Sullivan, review of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.
Books and What Not, http://booksandwhatnot.com/ (April 12, 2017), Betty Scott, review of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.
Chicago Now, http://www.chicagonow.com/ (March 2, 2014), Mahjabeen Syed, review of Meaty.
Chicago Tribune Online, http://www.chicagotribune.com/ (September 14, 2013), Christopher Borrelli, author interview; (September 22, 2013), E. Jason Wambsgans, review of Meaty; (May 25, 2017), review of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life; (June 7, 2017), Audrey Gorden, “Chicago Author Samantha Irby Talks Sex, Adulthood and Being BFFs with Roxane Gay.”
Elle Online, https://www.elle.com/ (June 1, 2017), Estelle Tang, review of We are Never Meeting in Real Life.
Gapers Block, http://gapersblock.com/ (September 5, 2013), Mikaela Jorgensen, review of Meaty.
Lamda Literary, https://www.lambdaliterary.org/ (August 6, 2017), Gena Hymowech, review of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.
Lit Hub, https://lithub.com/ (May 31, 2017), Michele Filgate, review of We are Never Meeting in Real Life.
Lit Reactor, https://litreactor.com/ (March 25, 2018), “Samantha Irby.”
Los Angeles Review Online, http://losangelesreview.org/ (March 25, 2018), Renée K. Nicholson, review of Meaty.
NewCity Lit, https://lit.newcity.com/ (February 4, 2014), Brian Hieggelke, review of Meaty.
New York Journal of Books Online, https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (March 25, 2018), Michael Adelberg, review of Meaty.
Powells, http://www.powells.com/ (May 30, 2017), “Powell’s Q&A: Samantha Irby, Author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.”
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (July 25, 2014), Sari Botton, review of Meaty; (April 17, 2017), review of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.
Small Press Book Review, http://thesmallpressbookreview.blogspot.com/ (August 1, 2013), Richard Derus, review of Meaty.*
Samantha Irby is a writer and performer who mostly jokes about hot dudes, kittens, and magical tacos at the highly visited Internet site bitchesgottaeat.com. Seriously. Go read it. In addition to co-hosting The Sunday Night Sex Show, a sex-positive live lit show, and Guts & Glory, a reading series featuring essayists, she has performed at Essay Fiesta, Write Club, This Much is True, Grown Folks Stories, The Paper Machete, and Story Club, among others. She opened for Baratunde Thurston during his "How to Be Black" tour. Her work has appeared on the Rumpus and Jezebel. Irby and creative partner Ian Belknap write a comedy advice blog at irbyandian.com.
QUOTE:
Samantha Irby ... may well be the most talented inappropriate woman in Chicago,
Arts & Entertainment
Blogger Samantha Irby is as bad as she wants to be
Christopher Borrelli Christopher BorrelliContact Reporter
Samantha Irby, who may well be the most talented inappropriate woman in Chicago, sat against the window, facing the bar, an arm draped across a wooden booth, supremely confident. She delivered great line after great line, quip after quip. She referred somewhat jokingly to the Chicago publishers of her new book as "dirtbag hipsters in the finest sense," described her sex life so vividly that I found myself curling inward, explained so bluntly why white women make up a big percentage of her devoted readers that I wanted to evaporate. Basically, as I picked at sweet potato fries and listened, she was killing, and I was her audience.
"Oh, white women love me," she went on, "but usually their first reaction when they see me, because they only know me by the words on my blog, is astonishment — that I am large, that I am black, that I am older than they are. They're like, 'You speak my truth! You can't believe how much I love you. And … look at you.'"
She laughed loudly.
She sounded not unlike the often thoughtful, often horrifyingly graphic essays found in "Meaty," her engrossing, occasionally touching new quasi-autobiography. Indeed, you could hear in her voice the same free-flowing candor and unexpected sweetness that she's brought to the weekly posts on her wildly popular four-year-old blog, the excellent title of which can't be fully printed in this newspaper: B------ Gotta Eat.
"People like it because I talk to people the way people won't talk to people," she said. "I had dinner with my friend's mom the other night. We talked about finding a dude for her to sleep with. For real. My friend won't do that with her mom, but I will! Parents love me, and I love parents, probably because I didn't really have any. I'm kindred spirits with parents — we both want to wear soft shoes and sit in our pajamas."
Which is what you're wearing, I said.
"This?" she said. "This is a pajama hoodie thing. This is like … the 'Trayvon Collection'" —
I noticed the room grow suddenly uneasy and quiet. I turned in my seat, cringing. Every person in the bar of the Heartland Cafe in Rogers Park was turned toward us, looking toward us — but not looking at us. Everyone was watching the TV perched a few feet above our heads. The president was delivering a speech on Syria.
I sank in my seat.
The only person in the room who had not gone quiet was Irby, who continued, cheerfully: "And these pants? Yoga pants! I swore off jeans for a long time! I hadn't worn pants with buttons in a while, but last week I wore jeans and I was like, who signed me up for buttons? Buttons are no fun. Give me waistbands!"
(DOT)
Samantha Irby often writes in all caps, speaks in all caps and seems to exist in all caps.
She is, after years as an online cult favorite and superstar of Chicago's live lit-reading scene, blowing up — relatively speaking. Her blog has developed thousands of rabid followers, some of whom feel so close to her that they send letters swearing to a palpable kinship and describe reading her blog long into the night ("I woke up my baby 4 times this morning from lol"). Each queasily honest post of Irby's — subjects of which range from her sex life to her weight to being rejected by her friend's babies — draws tens of thousands of readers, she said. And next month, Barnes & Noble plans to begin using "Meaty" as part of its Discover Great New Writers program, a sought-after distinction heavily lobbied for within the publishing world. "The thing is, we never pitched 'Meaty' to (the bookstore chain)," said Victor Giron, editor-in-chief of Chicago-based Curbside Splendor. Pre-orders on "Meaty," which doesn't come out until October, already have topped 2,000, a big number for a microscopic press. "That's a million times more interest than anything we've had," he said.
None of which seems at all surprising if you have ever seen Irby perform at Paper Machete or Funny Ha-Ha or any of the local reading series where she has become a regular. She is a natural. In fact, meet her and your immediate thought is: She's a star. Said Caitlin Pinsof, a fan who became a friend, "She's gold, just the easiest person to love." Said Ian Belknap, creator of the popular competitive reading series Write Club: "I was just with Samantha at a book party and it was insane. People were falling over themselves to attract her attention and impress her. And none of this is treated like a careerist thing. She takes it all with humor."
Actually, with so much dismissive, self-deprecating humor it's easy to overlook how smoothly her writing veers from profane to incisive to heartbreaking: A recent post about "Fifty Shades of Grey" began with the dirty parts, only to decide that the real heat derives from the sadomasochistic protagonist reading the Sunday newspaper and knowing that his lover likes pancakes — "Now this is some (expletive) romance," Irby writes.
"I have been a fan-bordering-on-groupie of Sam's since the sixth grade, when she started showing me manuscripts of what she was writing back then," said Anna Galland, executive director of the political advocacy group MoveOn.org. Galland and Irby, Evanston natives, attended Evanston Township High School together. "The crazy thing is, even back then she had the same charisma and voice she has now — this raw, personal recounting of the world around her, given by someone who has taken her share of hard knocks but channeled them into something accessible for everyone. I think she's become a wonderful cultural critic."
Irby — who describes herself as "an old 33" and, surprisingly, less Type A than Type D ("I could always go to sleep right now") — has a day job. For the past 11 years she's worked as a receptionist at an Evanston animal hospital. She likes the regularity and the health insurance, she says. She has Crohn's disease and arthritis in her joints. Her Roger Park apartment, she said, is $650 a month. And she likes it. She writes on a lousy, no-name laptop, the kind that big box stores offer as door-busters on Black Friday. And she likes it.
"When I was a kid, I had a really bad time," she explained. "I had a rough childhood. My parents both died six months apart when I was 18. It would have been tragic if it was an accident, but my father wasn't around really and my mother (who had MS) was in a nursing home for five years before she died. I bounced around from foster homes to living with sisters to being basically homeless. I lived with my dad for one year in high school and he could not handle a teenage daughter. We kind of toured the low-income parts of Evanston.
"So, I don't know what my life would have been like if I had a nice childhood or hadn't been sick all the time, but just having survived, once life has kicked the (expletive) out of you, everything else becomes gravy."
She settles back.
"The flip side, of course, is a lack of ambition."
And yet.
Tattooed across her heart is a kind of disclaimer of ambition, the words: "I want no one else to succeed."
"It's a line from 'There Will Be Blood,'" she explained, "and it's the truth! I truly hate to see other people doing better than I'm doing. And sometimes I think that's all I'm seeing. It's probably borne out of jealousy."
So why start a blog then? I asked.
"Because I wanted to bang a dude! Women are like, 'You know how many women you are reaching with this blog? How many people you speak truth to?' I'm like, 'And do you know I did this to have sex with a guy?'"
"Weird reason," I said.
"Really?" she asked.
"Kind of," I said.
"See, to me, that sounds so normal! I met this dude on MySpace and he was dating this woman who was a writer and a poet and he was, like, all, 'Nikki, Nikki, blah blah,' and I'm like, 'I can do stuff!' So started the blog and banged that dude, who is probably homeless now, and I am completely fine with that. Year later, we're over, and my friend said I should keep blogging. I did, then started reading and performing. And I'm good. I'm not afraid to be embarrassing. The first story I ever (performed) was about this guy I dated who would …"
She described in great detail a sexual fetish, then asked: "Do you know what that is? Ever heard of that?"
No, I said.
"Good, you're normal," she said. "Anyway people started bringing signs to shows, reading, like, 'GO SAM!' I'm all, WHAAAT? You guys are dumb! But I love it. I'd do this story about this African dude I dated who …"
When she was finished explaining another ambitious sexual fetish, I asked: "Samantha, Don't you have any nice stories that some nice family in Lake Forest can read over their breakfast dish on Sunday morning?"
"Yes!" she said. "There's a story in the book about moms. They love me. I never pretend they don't …"
And she got graphic again.
Said Keith Ecker, who co-hosts with Irby the Guts & Glory reading series at Powell's Bookstore in Lincoln Park: "Sam is not being disingenuous when she says she doesn't want more out of being known. She is by no means someone who is trying to climb the fame ladder and appeal to the widest possible audience. I think that's because it's a passion, and once that becomes a job, then it could start to feel like a job."
In fact, when I told Irby that I heard there was some tension between her and Curbside, she said: "How did you know that?" Then she went on to explain a combination of condescension she's felt from the publisher (Giron gave an interview recently in which he referred to Irby as "not really a writer") and a basic unwillingness to do what authors do with new books. Reasonably enough, Curbside wants her to tour with "Meaty." It presented her with an itinerary of East Coast book festivals and appearances, but she turned Giron down flat.
"I don't want every story about me to be how I am hobbling into every reading," she said. "The truth is, I have no aspirations for my writing! And I still don't. I like that people can read this book but I have a job and I can't leave for two weeks to tour. Plus, health issues. I would never have written a book if I knew I would have to take a box of books and sell them to people! I've gotten calls from TV producers asking if I'm open to my blog being a show, but I don't want to be a character! I don't want the world to know what I look like! I hate myself, and that's where the comedy in this comes from. If I could control things, fine. They're already talking to me about a second book and I don't want to do a second book. I need therapy."
She sat silent.
Then rallied: "See, I bring laugher to hearts of billions! Maybe! But I like comfort! Some dude said he would make me pancakes twice a week, I'd be like '(Expletive) this stupid blog forever. B------- Gotta WHAT?'"
cborrelli@tribune.com
Twitter @borrelli
QUOTE:
No topic escapes the author's blunt analysis, whether it pertains to herself or others
raunchy, funny and vivid collection of essays."
If you are ready for strong, sarcastic language paired with attitude-laced humor, strap in and get ready for a roller-coaster ride to remember."
Irby, Samantha: MEATY
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 15, 2013): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Irby, Samantha MEATY Curbside Splendor (Adult Nonfiction) $15.95 9, 24 ISBN: 978-0-9884804-2-1
A raunchy, funny and vivid collection of essays chronicling intimate acts and everyday life as perceived by Chicago blogger and performer Irby. No topic escapes the author's blunt analysis, whether it pertains to herself or others. The author opines on how other people have sex, her relationship with her gynecologist, her ongoing and graphically depicted battle with Crohn's disease, the embarrassment of sucking her thumb or the overall icky behavior of men. As a black child growing up on Chicago's North Shore, Irby experienced a life sandwiched between white and black cultures. "I am pretty much an expert in white people," she writes. "I don't really understand lacrosse, but I do pay for a subscription to the New Yorker." Irby sniffs out and confronts the racial ticks both races engage in--e.g., "black people who are uncomfortable in their own skin-try to control and demean other black people by challenging their "blackness.' " Or whites burdened by guilt, engaging in racial profiling and taking her at face value: "I love that you have no idea that I don't know what the fuck I am talking about. I'm not Cornel West, bitch." Irby refuses to adhere to any boundaries in her selection of topics or language. The subject of sex runs throughout the collection. The titles of two of the essays give some indication of the author's take on the topic: "How to get Your Disgusting Meat Carcass Ready for some New, Hot Sex" and "Massive Wet Asses." Irby's vocabulary is akin to that used in late-night comedy clubs. Those faint of heart beware. If you are ready for strong, sarcastic language paired with attitude-laced humor, strap in and get ready for a roller-coaster ride to remember.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Irby, Samantha: MEATY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2013. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A342657979/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=9045b6a1. Accessed 25 Mar. 2018.
1 of 13 3/25/18, 3:18 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Gale Document Number: GALE|A342657979
2 of 13 3/25/18, 3:18 PM
QUOTE:
"once again the inimitably candid, uber-confessional friend readers will happily spend a few hundred pages with,"
Irby's brilliant blend of honesty and humor will have readers' tears streaming for all kinds of reasons
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
113.16 (Apr. 15, 2017): p10. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. By Samantha Irby. May 2017. 288p. Vintage, paper, $15.95 (97811019121951.814.
In her new book of essays, Irby, author of the blog bitches gotta eat and a previous essay collection, Meaty (2013), is once again the inimitably candid, uber-confessional friend readers will happily spend a few hundred pages with. Master of both in-your-face jokes and clever, sneaking humor, Irby fills out her application to star on The Bachelorette, the "show where a woman is surrounded by 25 slabs of brisket clamoring to drink her dirty bathwater." She relays a bathroom emergency on the side of a gridlocked highway. She and a friend escape relatively unscathed from a Civil War reenactment in the Chicago suburbs. Writing about topics like growing up "poor, anxious, and unhappy," turning 18 at the same time her wayward father died, dealing with depression ("Do black girls even get to be depressed?"), figuring out how exactly one is supposed to deal with money, or the special challenge of understanding a loving relationship after so many bad ones, Irby's brilliant blend of honesty and humor will have readers' tears streaming for all kinds of reasons.--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "We Are Never Meeting in Real Life." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2017, p. 10. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492536076/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=592bfd5f. Accessed 25 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492536076
3 of 13 3/25/18, 3:18 PM
QUOTE:
Personal embarrassment provides plenty of material for in-print or online entertainment.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Irby, Samantha: WE ARE NEVER MEETING IN REAL LIFE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Irby, Samantha WE ARE NEVER MEETING IN REAL LIFE. Vintage (Adult Nonfiction) $15.95 5, 30 ISBN: 978-1-101-91219-5
A blogger (Bitches Gotta Eat) has to laugh to keep from crying--or maybe killing somebody--in this collection of essays from the black, full-figured female perspective.The second collection of essays by Irby (Meaty, 2013) explores what it means to be "fat and black." Though she has an active and diverse sex life, the author seems to prefer staying home with her cat, with whom she's "trapped in this mutually abusive codependent relationship." She watches a lot of TV and eats a lot of junk food while watching junk TV. She prefers writing jokes for online consumption rather than interacting with so-called real people in the so-called real world. "People are boring and terrible," she writes. "I am boring and terrible. My funny runs out, my cute runs out, my smart sometimes hiccups, my sexy wakes up with uncontrollable diarrhea. I have an attitude. And a sharp edge!" Irby shows her sharp edge throughout a collection that touches on topics ranging from the potential pros and cons of living in a small town, her employment adventures at an animal hospital, her upbringing with an alcoholic, abusive father and the mother he exploited, her preoccupation with death, and her unpredicted path to lesbian marriage. She responds to a pre- marriage questionnaire that asks, "how important is sex to you?" with "Is there such a thing as 'the opposite of important?'....Hopefully lesbian bed death is real and not another unattainable fantasy the Internet has lied to me about, like poreless skin." Though the collection is uneven, and many of the pieces strain for effect, some are very funny, some of them ring painfully true, and the best do both. Consider the essay about what happens when all of Irby's friends have reached the birthing and raising children stages, and she has no experience around kids: "I forget when they're within earshot and say mean things about dead people or recount in excruciating detail the highlights of my most recent gynecological exam." Personal embarrassment provides plenty of material for in-print or online entertainment.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Irby, Samantha: WE ARE NEVER MEETING IN REAL LIFE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2017.
Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A487668472 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=4da0518c. Accessed 25 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487668472
4 of 13 3/25/18, 3:18 PM
5 of 13 3/25/18, 3:18 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
QUOTE:
acerbic, raw honesty on the page--often punctuated with all-caps comic parenthetical asides-- unflinchingly recounts experiences such as the humiliating intrusion of explosive diarrhea on romantic and borderline-romantic interludes
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Voted most inappropriate
Kera Bolonik
New York.
50.11 (May 29, 2017): p120+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 New York Media
http://nymag.com/
Full Text:
Samantha Irby took up her confessional writing to "impress a dude"--and wound up marrying a woman. She also picked up a lot of famous fans.
WE ARE NEVER MEETING IN REAL LIFE will be published on May 30 by Vintage.
It is not uncommon for people in Chicago to approach essayist and Bitches Gotta Eat blogger Samantha Irby. The Chicago Tribune once said she "may well be the most talented, inappropriate woman" in the city for her searing, ribald story-telling at live-lit reading salons like Paper Machete at the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge. But recently, at the Write Club--an event that pits writers head-to-head in a series of battles--a woman approached the 37-year-old to tell her how much she loved her work. "I said, 'Thank you, I'm glad you liked my book about butts,' " Irby says, self-deprecatingly referring to her 2013 memoir-essay collection Meaty, which Vintage Books is reissuing in 2018. "She looked at me like, 'What? Aren't you Roxane Gay?' I was like, 'No, girl. Roxane is not going be at this little literary fisticuffs competition telling shit jokes.' "
Irby and the prolific Gay, the bestselling author of Bad Feminist, are friends and mutual fans but resemble each other only in that they're black women with tattoos who both have written movingly about body image and race. "But she's tall! And has hair!" says Irby, who shaves hers close, stands five-eight (Gay is over six feet tall), and wears thick tortoiseshell glasses. "Now Roxane is being associated with someone who was talking about the inside of her vagina," she says, laughing.
Incidentally, Meaty is not about shit jokes or butts, and neither is Irby's new essay collection, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life--which is not to say those topics don't regularly appear. The essays in We Are Never Meeting, as with Meaty, compose a memoir of the life of a sardonic, at times awkward, at times depressed black woman with Crohn's (an inflammatorybowel disease) and degenerative arthritis. Irby has always felt a sense of dislocation, whether in the diverse but predominantly upper-middle-class Evanston, where she grew up in Section 8 housing with her much older sisters and mother, or hanging at coffee shops with her "stoner" friends ("Mellow hippie white kids with dreadlocks and black kids into alternative rock," she says).
Her acerbic, raw honesty on the page--often punctuated with all-caps comic parenthetical asides-- unflinchingly recounts experiences such as the humiliating intrusion of explosive diarrhea on romantic and borderline-romantic interludes. One tale involves her desperately constructing a
6 of 13 3/25/18, 3:18 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
makeshift toilet out of snow. Another story evokes the shock and grief of being informed, the day before her 18th birthday, that her alcoholic father was missing (he was later found dead of hypothermia). At the time, Irby was living in rural DeKalb, Illinois, as a freshman at Northern Illinois University. She dropped out months later, following her mother's death from complications of multiple sclerosis. "It just felt like overcoming an insurmountable hurdle to return," she says. "I would have graduated and had no home to go to."
Lest there be any concern that We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (which she dedicates to Klonopin) is a sequel to a book and a popular blog that many readers outside the Chicago area haven't yet read, she cleverly introduces herself in the first essay, "My Bachelorette Application," which is literally just that. She describes her weight as "Lane Bryant model? But maybe on her period week"; her age: "35-ish but I could pass for 47 to 52, easily"; and reveals that she was arrested for shoplifting as a teenager. "I have that disease that a lot of poor people who claw their way out of the miserable depths of poverty suffer from, the one that makes you want to blow your paycheck on all the special things because never before in your life could you ever have anything even remotely fancy or expensive." Then there's her torturous love life: narcissistic men who are "boring and lazy ... I do not have the energy to be in a relationship with someone exceptionally good looking."
Recent events would indicate she has found that energy: While most of the sexual encounters in her stories center on men, last year, Irby married her female partner, Kirsten Jennings, and left her longtime job running an animal hospital's reception desk in Chicago to join her wife in Kalamazoo, Michigan. "I now live in a house that's run like a house-in the old days, like a year ago, if I ran out of peanut butter, that's it. Here, there's four jars in the pantry."
In December 2015, Irby published an online essay for Cosmopolitan titled "Black Girls Don't Get to Be Depressed" that went viral. ("Depression was something that happened to white people on television, not a thing that could take down a strong black woman," she wrote.) It drew a tremendous response from young black women-as well as from a few white male readers who claimed it was "reverse-racist" to characterize depression as an affliction associated with white people. "I don't get trolls enough to have built up a callus and tell them to fuck off," she says. "Some shit just sort of sticks with me-and that did." Then, out of nowhere, she discovered an open letter addressed to her on Tumblr from New York City's First Lady, Chirlane McCray, who wrote, "There's much I recognize in your essay ... the trauma of racism is real, and can create severe emotional pain and distress that has a destructive effect on our minds and ability to cope." Irby felt validated, to say the least. "My head exploded," she says.
McCray is hardly Irby's only famous fan. She met Janeane Garofalo after they both performed at Paper Machete and Irby asked if she could give her a copy of Meaty. "Janeane was like, 'I don't do social media or tweet or email, so you're never going to hear from me again.' And I was like, 'Just knowing you would read it is supercool.' " Months later, she started getting tweets from people she'd never met who said Garofalo had given them copies as a gift. Other recipients of Garofalo's generosity included Broad City's Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson--and now Jacobson, Irby, and Inside Amy Schumer writer Jessi Klein are adapting Meaty into a TV series for FX.
"My writing has been my saving grace," says Irby, who is now doing it full time. She started
7 of 13 3/25/18, 3:18 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
writing to "impress a dude--and here I am now, married to a woman. However you get there." She laughs. "Most bad things I don't write about right away. I gotta get a little perspective and reframe it. Even if I'm wallowing-like my mom's funeral," she says, recalling a story of how the pastor kept confusing the names of her mother, Grace, and Irby's sister, Carmen. "But," she adds, "if you can't laugh at it, it eats you up-especially during all the years I didn't have access to therapy. I can find the humor in anything if you just give me a few days."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bolonik, Kera. "Voted most inappropriate." New York, 29 May 2017, p. 120+. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498998025/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=50d75a90. Accessed 25 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498998025
8 of 13 3/25/18, 3:18 PM
QUOTE:
Irby's voice is raw, gripping, and sings a clear tune many female readers will find themselves grooving to."
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Meaty
Courtney Jones
Booklist.
110.1 (Sept. 1, 2013): p26. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Meaty. By Samantha Irby. Sept. 2013.250p. illus. Curbside Splendor, paper, $15.95 (9780988480421). 800.
"How to Get Your Disgusting Meat Carcass Ready for Some New, Hot Sex," is just one of the amazingly crass, defiant, witty, terrifying, and wondrous offerings found in Irby's debut book of essays. Fans of her uproarious blog, bitches gotta eat, might already be well acquainted with some pieces found in this book. However, here they are expanded, edited, and feature proper capitalization, and they're tucked in amid newer gems. Irby, a Chicago-based writer-performer who mostly jokes about "hot dudes, diarrhea, kittens, and magical tacos," cuts the bawdy, wickedly funny pieces with some truly poignant palate cleansers, including the heartrending "My Mother, My Daughter," the story of her mother's declining health and eventual death. She also confronts her struggles with Crohn's disease, poverty, blackness, and body image, and, in some truly vulnerable, moving passages, she nakedly displays her earnest desires for romantic love. Irby's voice is raw, gripping, and sings a clear tune many female readers will find themselves grooving to. And, for good measure, she includes some recipes. Delicious.--Courtney Jones
Jones, Courtney
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Jones, Courtney. "Meaty." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2013, p. 26. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A345457055/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=8df06f34. Accessed 25 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A345457055
9 of 13 3/25/18, 3:18 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
What Were READING
Samantha Irby
Marie Claire.
24.10 (Oct. 2017): p127. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Hearst Communications. Reprinted with permission of Hearst. http://www.hearst.com
Full Text:
1. FRESH COMPLAINT
by Jeffrey Eugenides (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The Pulitzer Prize--winning author behind The Virgin Suicides is back with a collection of short stories. There are tales of aging girlfriends, a poet turned embezzler, world travelers crossing paths in Ireland, and a high school student desperate to escape her strict immigrant family--all told with heart and humor, and written in Eugenides' inimitable style.
2. DOGS AT THE PERIMETER
by Madeleine Thien (W.W. Norton & Company)
As a child living under Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime, Janie lost her family. Today, as a neuroscientist in Montreal, she finds herself abandoning her son and husband to sort out why a mentor's brother was also lost during that time. We follow Janie as she confronts the demons she'd hoped to leave in Cambodia. Thien's visceral, beautiful writing will haunt you.
3. THE FLOATING WORLD
by C. Morgan Babst (Algonquin Books)
With Hurricane Katrina set to wreak havoc on New Orleans, Cora refuses to leave the city. Her parents, a black artist and his white wife, decide to evacuate without her, opening a Pandora's box of trouble that upends the couple's relationship and results in Cora being the victim of a baffling crime. This is a spot-on examination of race and the tumult natural disasters leave in their wake.
4. THE TWELVE-MILE STRAIGHT
10 of 13 3/25/18, 3:18 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
by Eleanor Henderson (Ecco)
Both a light-skinned and a dark-skinned child are born to Elma, a sharecropper's daughter, in 1930s Georgia. A field hand is lynched after being accused of her rape, and Elma is left to raise her children under the prying eyes of her gossipy neighbors. Henderson weaves an emotional, unsparing, and unexpectedly timely tale of race, class, motherhood, and prejudice.
5. I HEAR SHE'S A REAL BITCH by Jen Agg (Penguin Books)
Agg is the kind of bitch you want in your corner. And behind your bar. In this blunt, incisive memoir from the Toronto restaurateur, she lavishly details restaurant life, with lots of juicy insider information that will satisfy those with an appetite for sex and salty language. It's a razorsharp feminist manifesto for the culinary trade.
6. MANHATTAN BEACH by Jennifer Egan (Scribner)
I got sucked right into this story about Anna, a Brooklyn woman living through the 1930s and '40s, whose father's disappearance might have come at the hands of a shadowy gangster. While it's obvious that Egan meticulously researched the era's history, the novel's crooked politicians, organized-crime bosses, and shady cops make it read like a fast-paced, hard-boiled drama, not a boring textbook.
7. THE RULES OF MAGIC
11 of 13 3/25/18, 3:18 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
by Alice Hoffman (Simon & Schuster)
The Owens children are dangerous. The 1960s find difficult Franny, clairvoyant Jet, and troublemaking Vincent doomed to their mother's careful rules. In this prequel to Practical Magic, Hoffman, a master of magical realism, draws us back into the spellbinding universe of the Owens family with gorgeous prose set against a backdrop of vivid imagery.
8. AFTER THE ECLIPSE
by Sarah Perry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
This book is a gut punch. When Perry was a child, she witnessed a partial eclipse of the sun that she took to be a harbinger of good things to come--but two days later, her mother was murdered. Breathtaking in her courage and candidness, Perry delves into her mother's past in an effort to decipher who she really was, resulting in a heartbreaking yet hopeful testament to human resilience.
9. MIRROR, MIRROR
by Cara Delevingne (Harper)
Yes, this novel is about teens, but hear us out. Misfits Red, Leo, Rose, and Naomi are having a hard time fitting in. Life outside of school is no cakewalk, either. Then one day, Naomi mysteriously disappears. This super-suspenseful coming-of-age story asks us: How well do you ever know your friends?!
By SAMANTHA IRBY
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Irby, Samantha. "What Were READING." Marie Claire, Oct. 2017, p. 127. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509365460/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=ffc93075. Accessed 25 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509365460
12 of 13 3/25/18, 3:18 PM
QUOTE:
Readers with an interest in memoirs and short essays, especially those that find humor in everyday life, will enjoy Irby's writing
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Irby, Samantha. Meaty: Essays
Mark Manivong
Xpress Reviews.
(Oct. 25, 2013): From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2013 Library Journals, LLC http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews- first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
Irby, Samantha. Meaty: Essays. Curbside Splendor. 2013. 250p. ISBN 9780988480421. pap. $15.95; ebk. ISBN 9780988825864. LIT
Irby (cohost, The Sunday Night Sex Show; www.bitchesgottaeat.com) offers up this debut collection of essays--selected as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick-continuing upon her successes in cohosting live literature and essay shows and her blog writing, which includes a comedy advice blog she pens with her partner, Ian Belknap, called irbyandian.com. Readers familiar with Irby's work will recognize some of the pieces that have appeared, albeit in shorter form, in her online posts. However, most of what is here is new and continues with subjects that the author is famous for obsessing over: food, weight gain and loss, relationships, coping with Crohn's disease, diarrhea, hygiene, and sex. The author is not afraid to confront any topic, and she does so baldly and with a self-deprecating humor that is at once blunt and coarse, but readers will quickly begin to appreciate her openness. It is Irby's ability to find humor in awkward circumstances, such as in discussing her boyfriend's poor choice of toilet paper, that makes her so accessible. This collection is not without gravitas, though, and her essays that confront somber and tender issues reveal her as a writer with universal appeal.
Verdict Readers with an interest in memoirs and short essays, especially those that find humor in everyday life, will enjoy Irby's writing.--Mark Manivong, Lib. of Congress, Washington, DC
Manivong, Mark
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Manivong, Mark. "Irby, Samantha. Meaty: Essays." Xpress Reviews, 25 Oct. 2013. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A351263537/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=b5527d1b. Accessed 25 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A351263537
13 of 13 3/25/18, 3:18 PM
Seriously, Everything Is Funny to Samantha Irby
The hilarious writer, with a TV series on the way, has a new book of curmudgeonly musings.
By Estelle Tang
Jun 1, 2017
Samantha Irby
Eva Blue
The first thing I need to talk to Samantha Irby about is The Bachelorette. Irby loves the show so much that the first essay in her new super-funny book, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, is a faux application to be on America's favorite public courtship ritual. She's a shoo-in, obviously ("Age: 35ish (but I could pass for forty-seven to fifty-two easily; sixtysomething if I stay up all night)"), although she's not a fan of the "Whaaaa-booom"-ier aspects of the current season.
But over the phone Irby tells me that, if she had to choose a reality show to be on, she'd pick Real Housewives of New York. ("I would be the friend, like the poor person without botox or whatever.") Why? "They have beautiful apartments and go to the beautiful places that you want to go and drink in," she explains. "But they also are petty and mean and terrible."
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby
If Irby's hilariously contrary prose is to be believed, she is also mean and terrible. "I know where they keep the euthanasia solution," she whispers to an orphaned kitten being cared for at the veterinary clinic where she works. In fact, the cover of her book is the exact representation of her if she were a cat, she says: "Wet and gross and kind of sweaty looking, and also hissing." In the 20 essays that make up the book, she comes across as an irascible, curmudgeonly hermit who would love nothing more than the world to become a sinkhole and swallow everybody up, leaving her and her television set in peace.
However, the jig is up. I can tell that Irby is actually warm as pie. She's a great conversationalist, with a laugh that can go non-stop for about 20 seconds. (And, by the way, that kitten? She ended up adopting it.) So I can't help but ask how much of her written persona's withering attitude is real and how much of it is plied for laughs. "A lot of it is humor," she says, "but my first thought is always the worst. And then, because I'm not a terrible person, I process those bad thoughts." An example: That morning at the gym, she mentally scowled at a guy who gesticulated to her to take her headphones out, before she finally acquiesced ("You know, what if he can't breathe?"). But all he said was "Good for you." Truly an annoying way to find out that you're right about humanity. "I don't need a 147-year-old man to be telling me 'Good job,'" she laughs. "In my writing, I turn that up to a 10."
We might be making merry over it now, but her suckerpunch wit and handy processing habit were honed thanks to life experiences that it would otherwise be shitty to laugh at. Her father, an alcoholic, died just a few days before she turned 18. Before that, he persuaded Irby's chronically ill mother to move out of a nursing home and into his house, so he would have access to the state funding allocated for her care; her health deteriorated as a result. Money was scarce, and her family relied on "WIC vouchers, money orders, and rolls of quarters for the laundromat." Mental health is also a recurring topic in Irby's writings, with depression and anxiety being a constant in her life.
Related Stories
A Kidnap Thriller That Will Keep You Up at Night
Karen O Doesn\'t Play by the Rules
The Bachelorette
\'The Bachelorette\' Season Premiere Was...Weird
"People are always like, 'You're so open, is that hard?'" she says, "and it isn't. Once I started writing about myself honestly and getting grateful feedback, that made it easy for me." In one essay, she jokes that because her parents are both dead, she can pretty much talk about anything she wants—and that bears out in her ultra-personal, fancy-free writing. From calling herself a "champion masturbator" to describing a horrifically humiliating incident in which she had to void her bowels by the side of a road during a snowstorm—Irby has Crohn's disease, which she also manages to make a source of humor—it seems like there's very little that's off-limits. Yet the result is far from indulgent or unthinking; her writing is a chronicle of resilience, albeit one that might leave you with a bad case of the giggles.
Irby's 10-laughs-a-minute style has earned many fans, beginning with readers of her blog, Bitches Gotta Eat. Her first book of essays, Meaty, followed, as did the news last year that FX had bought a TV series based on her debut—to be executive produced by Broad City's Abbi Jacobson and Inside Amy Schumer's Jessi Klein. When I ask if we'll be seeing it on screen anytime soon, Irby tells me they're still working on the script for the pilot. "But at what point do we interview Jon Hamm for a role?" she asks. "I mean, Jon Hamm's probably not going to be on a diarrhea show, but maybe."
How does this TV fanatic feel about taking her culty writing to a wider stage? Irby admits she's a little nervous. "Everyone is always talking about shows, and I feel like especially with what we're trying to do, like put diarrhea on television," she laughs, "my people will be into it. But a lot more people pay attention to TV than books." But, you know, Irby will get over it. "With enough time and distance, I can find most things funny," she says. And she's going to help everyone else find life as side-splitting as she does. Plus, she has a mission: "I wanna represent for everyone who doesn't poop right."
QUOTE:
"I started writing fiction and short stories in high school, then I started my blog in 2009 (Bitches Gotta Eat)."
I’m pretty pragmatic, so I didn’t ever want to be a writer because it didn’t feel like a sustainable job. I didn’t start writing as a career until I quit my hourly job in July 2016. I was running the reception desk at an animal hospital first, and writing second as a hobby. I didn’t have the drive to put a book together, but it was easy because I knew the people at Curbside (Splendor Publishing) and they liked my work, so I didn’t have to go out and find an agent or do anything to make it happen."
Chicago author Samantha Irby talks sex, adulthood and being BFFs with Roxane Gay
Samantha Irby
RedEye talked to Chicago-born author Samantha Irby ahead of her appearance at the Printers Row Lit Fest on June 10.
Audrey GordenContact ReporterRedEye
Privacy Policy
Chicago-born author, comedian and blogger Samantha Irby combines comedy, personal stories and feminist narrative in her recently released book, "We are Never Meeting in Real Life." Since getting her start writing a blog for her friends, "Bitches Gotta Eat," Irby has published three books, including "Meaty," which is now being made into an FX show. RedEye had a chance to talk with the wildly funny author ahead of her appearance at the Printers Row Lit Fest on June 10.
When did you first start writing or know you wanted to be a writer?
I started writing fiction and short stories in high school, then I started my blog in 2009 (“Bitches Gotta Eat”). I’m pretty pragmatic, so I didn’t ever want to be a writer because it didn’t feel like a sustainable job. I didn’t start writing as a career until I quit my hourly job in July 2016. I was running the reception desk at an animal hospital first, and writing second as a hobby. I didn’t have the drive to put a book together, but it was easy because I knew the people at Curbside (Splendor Publishing) and they liked my work, so I didn’t have to go out and find an agent or do anything to make it happen.
Was that because of the popularity of your blog?
Yeah, I had some of the editors at Curbside I had gotten to know through the literary scene in Chicago, like readings, and my blog was picking up steam. I think that they knew (my book) would be successful, I just don’t think anyone anticipated how well it was going to do.
So publishing your first book, “Meaty,” wasn’t a long struggle because they basically wanted it and that was it?
I mean, it took a while because I’m lazy and my primary focus has always been “work.” It was an independent publisher, there was going to be no advance, no riding off into the sunset with my huge amount of earnings. So when they first asked me to do it, I said no because it seemed like a lot of work for not a lot of reward.
But now you are adapting “Meaty” into an FX show. How has that been?
It’s been good. It’s a super slow process which keeps me grounded. We just turned in a draft of the pilot, and now we are working on a second draft. It’s been super cool, but I’m in Michigan working on it and Abbi (Jacobson of “Broad City”) is in New York and Jessi (Klein of “Inside Amy Schumer”) is in L.A. so it doesn’t feel real, you know? It’s hard to get a big head about anything you’re doing while you’re working on it on your living room couch.
There are problematic issues in most TV shows, but do you think there are any solid, female driven comedies right now?
I watch “Black-ish,” which is more of a family show, but it’s amazing. I love “Broad City,” but that’s like, my friend, so it’s weird when I say that. I watched “Dear White People” which I really liked and was feeling good about watching, but then one of my Facebook friends said, “Well, why was there no representation of fat people?” There’s always something.
Do you think it’s OK to enjoy something in the media or in pop culture while also understanding it’s not perfect in those ways?
Yeah, what would you watch? I am not really vocal about politics or “woke shit,” you know? There’s always going to be some blind spot that I miss, so instead of trying to set the bar, I’m just trying to check myself. Like, “I like this, but the way they treated this disabled character was kind of wild.” I don’t know that there is anything on TV or that is popular right now that meets all of the “woke” criteria.
How does it feel to have Roxane Gay (author of “Bad Feminist”) as one of your fans?
Roxane doesn’t even think of herself as famous, even though she is, so it’s easy to be around her and not be all dazzled because she doesn’t act famous; she’s mellow and relaxed. It’s like, “Oh, this is just Roxane, my friend.” She really is so soft spoken and funny and nice that you forget she is wildly popular until people start approaching her on the street. She manages to be sweet and unassuming while also being crazy successful.
I digitally met her a long time ago, before “Meaty” even came out because I wrote a piece for her at The Rumpus. She had been reading my blog and she was editing at The Rumpus and asked me to send her something. I was so impressed by her that I wanted to write, like, a serious thing. I didn’t want to write my usual, trite drivel. I wrote an essay that she published that got a good response so I ended up putting it in “Meaty.”
You reference pop-culture a lot in your writing. Why is it important for you to write about and how does it add to your work?
I’m a huge consumer of pop culture. I really like to enjoy myself and TV and movies bring me a lot of joy. At the moment, I have a smaller life. I live in a little town in Michigan and there’s not a lot of wildly hilarious things happening to me. Pop culture is a touchstone that everyone can relate to, even if someone doesn’t identify with being black or queer or overweight, if we watch the same show, that’s a connection. A lot of times when I’m writing, I’m thinking about making all these small connections with people.
Do you think there are such things as “guilty pleasures” in entertainment?
I have super smart friends who would never watch some of the things I do, and I think that because of the good examples they are setting by reading the newspaper and being well versed in socio-political happenings, I feel guilty about not living up to that. People are reading about world events and I’m like, “I’m just gonna watch ‘The Hills’ again for the hundredth time.”
You say in your book that you are not good at exposing your innermost feelings, but your book is incredibly open and revealing of your life. Is it hard to write about things that may seem embarrassing or cause shame?
If I have enough time and perspective, I usually get to the point where I can write about it. There are things that I don’t write about, and won’t write about, so if you’re reading it, I’ve already processed it and can talk about it and find it funny. If it’s the kind of thing that can make someone else laugh, or realize that what happened to them also happened to me, it makes it easier to share.
Your writing is very unapologetic in the way it addresses sex. Why do you think that type of openness is important?
As I’ve become more acquainted with the “fat liberation” scene, it has become even more apparent that it is almost a revolutionary act for a fat woman to be talking about sex openly and enjoying it, and it’s not like a weird, secret perversion. It wasn’t like, “Boo-hoo, I can’t find anyone to touch me.” I wanted to show what we don’t often get to see: black women being fun and playful about sex. Not to compare my experiences to “Sex and the City,” but why shouldn’t I talk about this crazy time I had with this person?
Sometimes essays about body-positivity are too “happy, happy” when really no one is always happy with their body. You are good about addressing both sides of that struggle—can you speak some more about your views on body image in your writing?
There are a lot of things I hate about myself, and they change daily. I’m my own harshest critic. I feel like there needs to be room to say that. Some days I think, “All right, I look good.” Then there are days where I think, “All right, I should probably count a calorie or two.” I think there’s a certain type of body positivity that doesn’t allow room to have those bad days, and I want to shed light on that.
You have an essay in your book discussing how you deal with your mental illness and the expectations that surround you specifically as a black woman and a comedian. How are you coping with that and how do you want to help other women cope?
I think the first thing is talking about it. It’s my nature to laugh things off or make a joke out of something I’m feeling. One of the things about writing jokes is that people assume I’m a walking, talking comedy robot. It’s a huge shock for people to find out I’m not just all jokes all the time. If you can be honest with the people in your life, that’s a start; people will at least know what’s up with you and understand your limits and how things affect you.
A lot of your topics touch on adulthood and what it means to be an adult. What do you think defines “adulthood” and have you made it?
I haven’t mastered any of the things that I feel come with adulthood. Like taxes. Every year I am flummoxed by them. I’m 37 years old! I’ve had a job since I was 18, every year it shouldn’t be a huge mystery to me. I don’t have a savings account, I don’t auto pay my bills and I have a really hard time saying “no” when I don’t want to do something. Mastering finances and being able to say no really make up my idea of adulthood, and it’s these micro-failures that define my immaturity.
But you also have three books, and an essay in the “New York Times,” and Roxane Gay is your BFF.
I know! In some ways, I am doing some adult stuff. But every time a freelance check cashes I’m like, “OK, how many $20 body washes can I buy with this?”
How would you classify this new collection of essays and who do you most want to reach with them?
These essays chronicle a big period of change in my life where I am trying to transition from just hanging out with friends and working an hourly job to trying to be a responsible adult and partner to my wife while also having a career shift from punching a clock to being my own boss.
I write for women of all ages, stripes and colors. My primary focus is women. If men read it and like it, that is fantastic, but I’m just trying to make a woman’s day better. If you sit down and read an entry in my blog, I want you to go away from that chuckling at the very least, and maybe seeing yourself or feeling better or less alone. That sounds trite, but it’s true. If you read any of my stuff and it gives anything to you, that’s what matters to me.
@AudreyGorden | agorden@redeyechicago.com
QUOTE:
I just started writing about all the dumb stuff that was happening to me every day, and then it kind of exploded. And people were really reading it. When people I didn’t know started reading it, emailing me or commenting or whatever, I was like 'Wow, this is a thing.' And so then I just committed to doing it. It wasn’t anything that I ever really wanted to do, and then I kept doing it because people were reading it and responding well to it and I just haven’t stopped. Now it’s like well, you know, can I stop? If I take too long to post, people are like 'What’s up? Where are you?'"
In her latest collection of essays, We Are Never Meeting In Real Life, Irby establishes herself as one of our most entertaining but poignant contemporary essayists. ... Irby is the unpretentious but brilliant voice that we need to hear."
Samantha Irby Needs to Talk About Some Sh*t
Michele Filgate Talks to the Very Funny Author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life
May 31, 2017 By Michele Filgate
To say that Samantha Irby has a great sense of humor is an understatement. She made a name for herself eight years ago when she launched her Bitches Gotta Eat blog, where she writes about everything from blocking annoying people on Facebook (“so yeah, even if people are relatively harmless it doesn’t mean you have to, like, be assaulted by their terrible memes. you don’t owe them shit!”) to dealing with Crohn’s Disease.
In her latest collection of essays, We Are Never Meeting In Real Life, Irby establishes herself as one of our most entertaining but poignant contemporary essayists. Whether she’s talking about trying out a strap-on with her wife, pooping on the side of a road, or growing up poor, Irby is the unpretentious but brilliant voice that we need to hear. I recently spoke with her by phone for an hour. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.
*
Michele Filgate: When did you create your Bitches Gotta Eat blog, and why did you start writing it in the first place?
Samantha Irby: I started Bitches Gotta Eat in 2009. I had this little Myspace blog that I started to impress this dude. So I was like, I’ll just write these little blogs and they’ll be funny and I’ll win him over. And so I dated him and it ended and I was like “Well, I’m done with this blog.” Then I stopped. Then everybody switched over to Facebook anyway, so you know, a Myspace blog, no one was going to read it anymore. So my friend Laura was like “You know, I really liked that blog and so did a lot of other people. You should start a real one.” And I had no idea that that would be a thing, and I was like how do I do it? And so she explained Blogger and she said “You can just make it whatever you want.” And so I did. I mean, at first I didn’t know what I was going to write about. I wrote about whatever TV shows I was watching and stuff like that. But then I kind of picked a theme and got a readership and just was like “Well, I’ll just write about myself.” I think my lens or my perspective on most things is pretty funny. I wouldn’t describe myself as a good-natured person, but I can experience things good-naturedly, if that makes any sense. I scowl about everything, but even in situations I hate I can find the humorous silver lining.
So I just started writing about all the dumb stuff that was happening to me every day, and then it kind of exploded. And people were really reading it. When people I didn’t know started reading it, emailing me or commenting or whatever, I was like “Wow, this is a thing.” And so then I just committed to doing it. It wasn’t anything that I ever really wanted to do, and then I kept doing it because people were reading it and responding well to it and I just haven’t stopped. Now it’s like well, you know, can I stop? [Laughs] If I take too long to post, people are like “What’s up? Where are you?”
MF: One of the things I absolutely love about We Are Never Meeting in Real Life is how candid you are. You talk about having Crohn’s Disease, for instance. Why is the subject of our digestive systems and poop so taboo? I mean, as we know from Taro Gomi’s children’s book: Everyone Poops.
SI: Yeah! Once I got really sick in 2008 or so, I reached a point where it really was impossible to conceal. Especially when I was dating a lot or whatever, there was a lot of thought that had to go into your life when you’re shitting yourself all the time, like what can I eat? How many Imodium do I have to take? Like how many days before this date should I stop eating solid food so that I don’t have a problem when I’m on the date? It had become such a big thing that I was like you know what? It’s impossible for me to hide it, and if someone is uncomfortable hearing it or dealing with it or knowing about it, that can’t be on me.
If someone said “Oh my god, I have terrible diarrhea,” I wouldn’t immediately be like “Get out of my sight.” How can I get you to the nearest toilet and move to the furthest room so you feel like you can be free and not embarrassed? And so I just decided it’s something I can’t hide. At one point I was taking, you know, 20 pills a day or something. That is a really hard thing to hide from people when you’re around them a lot. And so if I have shame about this, then that’s going to impact my life more than being like “No, I don’t want the nachos because they’re going to destroy my insides.” I just felt like being really frank about it. We’re conditioned to be ashamed and it felt like a big enough burden that I had to deal with it in the first place that I didn’t want to add the burden of also trying to hide it. And so then I was like well, I’m just going to write about it. And the response I get—I have gotten so many emails from people who say “Thank you for talking about this.” I think it’s really brave for people to be like “Hey, my life is often disrupted by my butt.” And not to compare it to the challenges disabled people face, where there are no ramps or no elevators or things like that, but there are not a lot of good toilets all over the place that are readily accessible to people.
I went to LA in December, and I did the thing where I don’t eat so I don’t have to poop. But then I was like if you had to poop two or three times on this airplane, what a nightmare it is, right? This little tiny box with other people impatiently waiting for the box and then you’re supposed to feel bad that you smelled up the little box that you had to poop in. And I feel like that’s a thing we all can relate to, healthy guts or not. Everyone has had that feeling of “Oh, you have to sit in my stink.”
I want everybody to get to that place where they’re like “Sorry I ate a wheel of brie before getting on this flight.” So inch-by-inch, I’m dragging us. I feel like men can take a dump or whatever and be proud of it. They’re really proud of it. And I want us to be as proud of our poops, too.
MF: Me too. Amen to that. I can already see the headline for this interview, by the way. [Ed. note: yup.]
SI: That’s the hill I’m going to die on. Everybody talking about their poop with zero shame.
MF: Speaking of shame, in the essay “Fuck It, Bitch, Stay Fat,” you write that at one point “I learned how to operate under both the physical and emotional weight of unrelenting shame very early.” Did shame motivate you to become a writer? And has writing helped remove the shame?
SI: I started writing in earnest in high school. And at that point, I was writing fiction which was really thinly veiled stories about myself and my dream life. So I definitely was trying to escape. My childhood was rough, plus I was a fat kid. There was a lot happening that I wanted to kind of get away from, at least in my head. I used to read a ton and so I started writing. I think now my view of shame is it’s healthy. [Laughs] I feel like it’s not poop shame, but it’s good to keep yourself from acting like a total asshole the whole time and being embarrassed is a coping mechanism or something. Basically I feel like they keep things in check, and everybody could use a little bit more shame. [Laughs] And so I definitely think it has helped to keep me from humiliating myself all the time. [Laughs] I wish I lived in a world where I could feel free to do whatever, but I don’t, so I make the shame work for me, if that makes sense.
MF: You have a wonderful, twisted sense of humor but there are essays in this book that deal with really serious topics, like abuse and growing up poor. And I’m wondering if it’s harder to write jokes about some of these really painful experiences. Are there any topics you consider off-limits?
SI: I think time is my friend, and the further I get from something the more perspective I get. I feel like one of the things that I’m really good at is living through the horror of something and then, you know, a few days, a few weeks, a few months, a few years later being able to look at it and laugh at the ridiculousness of it. My parents died almost 20 years ago. I don’t have any active hurt about it. At this this point, my friends are all in their thirties and forties and they’re dealing with their parents. I have not seen a situation yet that makes me jealous.
Like, thank God mine are dead.
If they were alive and who they had been before they’d died, they would just be a huge albatross. I don’t have anybody telling me what to do. I don’t have anyone to disappoint. I feel very free. I feel very free when they’re not around. In my first book, I wrote this essay about my mom and when I wrote it I cried. This time around when I wrote about my dad, I didn’t. And I think just as time passes it makes those things easier. And I’d sworn to myself though that this was it. This is it, almost 20 years. I do not need to reexamine their lives and deaths anymore.
This is the last time I’m going to write about them. Not because it’s painful, but just because it’s old, you know? I’m going to be really crass and say how long can I beat this dead horse? But for real, how long?
I’ve just started, but I really do get super shy about writing about my weight and how I feel about myself physically. Like writing that essay where the chair broke at brunch—I wanted to kill everyone in the room and myself so we could never talk about it again.
I think because I haven’t fully decided how I feel about it. I mean, am I going to be a fat liberation person who is like “I don’t care. I do whatever I want. Whatever size I am is what I am.” Or am I going to change and try to see a dietician or whatever my doctor wants me to do? I think because I am so uncomfortable in my body and uncomfortable with what I should be doing, writing about my weight and my body is still tough. But not so tough that I wouldn’t do it.
MF: Do you ever get anxious about writing about your anxieties and then having people read about your anxieties?
SI: Ultimately I feel like every embarrassing or terrible thing I write about is helping someone somewhere. I have gotten the most random [responses to] things I didn’t think would help anybody. People will email me and be like “Thank you for writing about how terrible that plane trip was,” or whatever random thing.
So if there’s the potential it could make someone laugh, that’s always my first goal; or if might do some good, then it’s worth it for me to squirm and feel weird about it.
MF: FX is developing a comedy based on Meaty and your blog, with Abbi Jacobson of Broad City and Jessi Klein of Inside Amy Schumer attached to the project. Can you tell me about your work on the show and what it’s like to see your own words transformed into a script for TV?
SI: Well, I am an executive producer, and Jessi and I are writing it, and then Abbi reads it and makes suggestions. We just turned in the first draft of the pilot, which is very cool. I feel so removed from it, because I’m sitting in a little room in Michigan. It doesn’t feel very Hollywood in here right now. It’s really important for me to get fat people on TV and to be talking about inflammatory bowel diseases on television. I can’t, off the top of my head, think of any shows right now that prominently feature someone who has to poop all the time.
That, to me, was the most important thing, is to be representing for all my IBD people out there. So there’s a lot of diarrhea in the pilot. But also talking about, you know, being young but having to take a lot of pills. What if you can’t always afford those pills?
And what hospitals are like when you’re in and out. I really want to be real. Right now, it feels so abstract right? It’s just a bunch of pages with words on them. I feel like I will really bug out when there’s casting and real people attached. Like that’s going to feel crazy… I feel like people will really be into it. And I don’t want it to be a big deal anymore when you see a black character on television just doing normal stuff. Just trying to live and love and all that, you know? I just want there to be more of that on TV. Plus I really want to see a girl with a big ass on TV.
And another thing that is really sort of important to me is hustling. I worked a lot of random jobs and our focus is going to be, at least in the beginning, on the time when I was working for my friend’s dad as his assistant and sort of straddling the line between my own personal poverty but sort of this access to wealth, you know? Because I drove his car, I had his credit cards, and was living this kind of lavish life on one hand, and then went home to my barren studio apartment on the other…
At least at first we’re not going to talk about writing. Like, you know, there’s that idea of the struggling writer, the struggling artist. I wasn’t ever really that. I just had these jobs and kind of wrote on the side. We don’t often see someone who’s young and just fine doing their job and not aspiring for more. I had no aspirations. I still don’t, you know? Probably that should embarrass me to say.
MF: I like your outlook on life. It’s inspiring.
SI: Yeah. I want to make a TV show about a person who is just like “All right, if something good happens to me today, great. If something bad happens I’m going to joke my way through it and come out okay on the other side.” So cross your fingers that they love this show.
__________________________________
Feature photo by Kirsten Jennings.
Powell's Q&A: Samantha Irby, Author of 'We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.'
by Samantha Irby, May 30, 2017 2:34 PM
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. by Samantha Irby
Photo credit: Kristen Jennings
Describe your latest book.
My new book of essays is called We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. It’s basically a collection of strung-together swear words that turned out pretty funny. It chronicles the last several years of my life, with bits from the past and a little nod to the future.
What was your favorite book as a child?
Pet Sematary. Or maybe Misery. I was a pretty intense kid and Stephen King is a really good storyteller, so I spent a lot of my young life absorbed in his books. I really like a lot of details and descriptions, like, tell me exactly how frayed her shirt was and list every single thing on the kitchen table, and he writes like that. Also he is a prolific writer and churns out 500+ page books; every time you finish one he’s got another bullet in the chamber, ready to blow your minds again.
When did you know you were a writer?
Probably not until I saw my first book in an actual bookstore. Although even now I kind of feel like a fraud because I’ve never taken a single writing class or workshop and I read Bird by Bird so long ago I can’t even remember what it said.
What does your writing workspace look like?
I have a big black metal desk that I got from CB2 that looks totally punk rock and modern shoved into the corner of our cozy farmhouse living room, right across from the wood-burning stove. I like to be surrounded by a lot of stuff when I work, so my desk is piled high with stacks of books I want to read and unopened mail that I don’t. I really love the collage artist Eugenia Loli, so I have several large prints of hers on the wall above my desk, a chalk drawing of Forest Whitaker hanging next to the largest collage piece, and on the opposite wall a beautiful watercolor of my cat Helen rolling her eyes in what I can only assume is disgust at whatever I’m working on. There’s a cardboard banker’s box full of magazines and scented candles under the desk, and a couple of bright green succulents in pots lining the window next to the desk. I also keep a set of resistance bands under my desk as a reminder that an alternative to turning in my work on time is 50 biceps curls, which probably explains why my book is so long. I also used to keep a vase of flowers on my desk but all they did was wilt and die, which felt like too real of a metaphor for my dumb jokes.
What do you care about more than most people around you?
Manners. Which I know might come as a surprise considering how much I swear and how little I tend to keep to myself. But I have impeccable manners. I am painfully self-aware and always treading carefully with the feel of publicly embarrassing myself looming over me, so I try to be as polite as possible to narrow the odds of that happening. And when I say “manners” I don’t mean using the proper fork or anything like that. I mean walking on the right side of the sidewalk to reduce the chances of running headfirst into someone looking down at his phone, or arriving at the salon 20 minutes early for a haircut even though my barber is always late because I don’t want anyone scowling at me when I cut into her time in the chair with my gross tardiness. I use my turn signal and I pull all the way up at a red light and I tip the mail carrier and I would never carry on a bag that was clearly too big for the airplane’s overhead bin, because I don’t want to get hit or honked at or be hated by the postman or every other passenger impatiently waiting for the flight attendant to gate-check my bag while I make us all late. I’m acutely aware of the space I take up in the world, and how the noise I make may be affecting someone. I wear headphones, I don’t make public calls, I would never eat a tuna sandwich with onions near people who could smell it. So yeah, I might not have a form thank you letter memorized to send to someone who gives me a gift, but rest assured that I would never try to engage you in mindless conversation we have to shout across a crowded rush-hour train.
Share an interesting experience you’ve had with one of your readers.
I married one? The short version: she tweeted at me, I responded, she responded, we got married. The long version is in my book, so you’ll just have to read it to find out the rest.
Tell us something you’re embarrassed to admit.
I hate editing my work. Getting a piece back with notes on it is super embarrassing to me. And it’s not ego; I have absolutely zero ego when it comes to professional corrections of my stuff. I just feel eight years old again, humiliated because I didn’t see the mistake as I was working on it. I wasn’t really a high achiever in school, so it’s not like I have this record of perfection to adhere to. It’s just that shame is such a ready emotion for me; I’m quick to mortify, and every highlighted spelling error or run-on sentence feels like an accusation, that my impostor syndrome is about to be made real.
Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start.
I cannot stop talking about The Mothers by Brit Bennett. I got it the day it came out and read it the same day. It was incredibly compelling, and I was genuinely invested in every single character. I want Brit to write a dozen more books. Like, today. But I understand that that’s a lot of pressure to put on a stranger, so I’ll just be over here patiently waiting to buy every single thing she ever publishes.
Besides your personal library, do you have any beloved collections?
I have every single one of Carl Hiaasen’s books. And I’m not sure I’m his target demographic, or am I? Is he writing these madcap Florida capers for "chubby black nerds"? But I love him so very much. His books are just so wild. I got on the Hiaasen train late; I started with Skinny Dip when it came out and worked my way backward, and I’ve read everything he’s ever written since. Even his books for children are brilliant and hilarious.
What’s the strangest or most interesting job you’ve ever had?
In 2001 I worked as a researcher on a political campaign once for this guy who was running for Illinois attorney general, even though I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. The job was in this sweet high rise in downtown Chicago, and I didn't know what “business casual” meant, so I spent a lot of time there feeling dumb about my clothes and reading press releases while eating cheap takeout Thai from the restaurant below the office. I definitely had this idealistic naïveté about government and the election process, and even though I was pretty far down the bench, I learned very quickly that winning is about money and influence and having the political machine behind you. I’m not even sure how I charmed my way into that job, but after we lost (sad!) I never worked in matters of state again.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
I’m not even sure what this means, so I’m pretty sure I haven’t. Is it, like, taking a road trip to a place you’ve read about? Making a pilgrimage worth writing about!? Either way, I’m fairly certain I have never done so because I am not a good traveler and “pilgrimage” is one of those words that has a negative connotation to me, a word that feels like “tired” or “suffering” on my tongue.
What scares you the most as a writer?
Being forced to either read or listen to negative reviews of my work. I don’t ever read reviews, because even if I encountered 99 good ones, my mind would never stop zeroing in on the one that said “THIS IS TRASH.” I don’t have enough confidence to laugh that off, and I haven’t yet acquired that extra layer of skin that protects you from people tweeting 140 characters of hate vomit at you, so I don’t even bother. Especially because my inclination isn’t even to get angry — it’s to wish I could talk to that person and carefully explain what I was trying to do, or how they misinterpreted what was meant to be a harmless joke. I do understand that everything isn’t for everyone. I’ve read lots of books that I would never pick up again. We all have. But I’m also not the kind of person to publish a review online or seek out the author of something that didn’t grab me and give them a piece of my mind. What the fuck do I know? And why ruin some innocent author’s day by hating on a piece of writing I likely did not understand!? People can hate whatever they want and if it’s me, that’s cool, but I don’t think I have to go find it and read about it. The problem then becomes my well-meaning friends who misguidedly screenshot and send to me the one-star Amazon review left by someone’s angry uncle who doesn’t think girls should write about butts, but my iPhone has that block feature, so actually I think I’m all good.
If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
Dumber Than She Sounds: The World’s Most Boring Comedian
Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
“My daughter is happy and brave. When she falls down or gets hurt, the first words out of her mouth are always: I’m all right, Mom. I’m okay. And she is. I want her to be okay always. So while my refusal to keep laughing or making you comfortable may seem like a real fucking downer, the truth is that this is what optimism looks like. Naming what is happening to us, telling the truth about it — as ugly and uncomfortable as it can be — means that we want it to change. That we know it is not inevitable.”
– Jessica Valenti, Sex Object
Share a sentence of your own that you’re particularly proud of.
“I braced myself and watched the slow-motion horror movie that is the empty conversation bubble that pops up on an iPhone when someone is typing a message to you, terrified that I might have been an overzealous abuser of exclamation points who dotted her I’s with hearts in my youth.”
Describe a recurring or particularly memorable dream or nightmare.
I dream about Tom Cruise with embarrassing frequency. A couple weeks ago I dreamed that he was in town to promote a movie and, for reasons that are unclear to me because I’m a terrible organizer and super unmotivated, I was tasked with “showing him around.” So basically I get in our car, which is full of empty coffee cups and baggies full of nuts and Cheerios and start driving him around on my daily errands. And Tom is totally humoring me, but I’m not sure if it’s because he’s kind of scared because he’s in a strange place and I’m his only link or if he actually thinks watching me pick through nectarines at the farmer’s market is charming. In the dream I could feel this tension rolling off him in waves, yet I just could not stop ignoring his movie star needs in favor of my own shit. I was totally stressed about getting him to his event on time, but I kept saying, “I just need to run to the bank,” and, “Sit in the car while I go grab this cat food.” I have no idea how it ended but I woke up in a panic, totally embarrassed that I had gone through the McDonald’s drive-thru with Jerry McGuire in the passenger seat of my filthy mom car.
What’s your biggest grammatical pet peeve?
Old me would’ve said “misused apostrophes,” but current me knows that correcting someone’s grammar might make me look like a classist asshole, so now I try to avoid doing that. Although it does kinda make me die inside when I see it.
Do you have any phobias?
I’m not sure that this qualifies as an actual phobia, but it is a waking nightmare for me to be trapped in a car/room/other small enclosure with a person who won’t stop asking me shit. I will launch into this exhausting charm offensive because I’m terrified of coming across as rude, even to a rude person asking invasive questions that have no bearing on either his life or our shared experience. I don’t know how to say “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t want to talk to you” without feeling like bursting into flames for the duration of the cab ride, so I instead do the opposite and go into great detail about my childhood pets or whatever. Never talk to me.
Name a guilty pleasure you partake in regularly.
My favorite time wasters are makeup tutorials on YouTube. There is something so soothing about spending hours listening to pleasant voices guide you through expert winged eyeliner application and under-eye-circle concealment. The wildest part, though, is that I rarely wear makeup, and if I do, I’m too allergic to put any on my eyes and too much of a pig to keep anything on my face looking nice for more than an hour and a half, tops. I have shaky hands and hate paying attention to things, so if I wear mascara, it’s definitely speckled around my eye and my attempts at nail painting always look like a child did it. But I love watching total transformations, acne-spotted and kind of greasy, when I should be doing something useful. Like exfoliating my T-zone.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
SHUT UP.
Top five essay collections/memoirs, not written by me, but by people I actually know in real life.
1. How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America by Kiese Laymon
2. Hunger by Roxane Gay
3. Shrill by Lindy West
4. The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae
5. One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter by Scaachi Koul
÷ ÷ ÷
Samantha Irby writes a blog called “bitches gotta eat.” Her new book is We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.
QUOTE:
as poignant as it is hilarious," adding: "Irby gains our trust through her candid tone and the way she unabashedly reveals herself. ... There is an everyday quality to the writing, as if each essay is a conversation already in progress, where insecurities and desires play out in tantalizing and brutal honesty."
Book Review: Meaty by Samantha Irby
Meaty
Essays by Samantha Irby
Curbside Splendor Publishing, October 2013
ISBN: 978-0988480421
$15.95; 250 pp.
Reviewed by Renée K. Nicholson
In a collection as poignant as it is hilarious, Samantha Irby talks to her reader like a trusted girlfriend, a confidant. From childhood embarrassments, dating woes, her battles with Crohn’s Disease and difficult family relationships, Irby always peppers her heartache with humor. She discusses homelessness and losing family members with the deceptively flippant tone she uses to chastise women who submit to baby food diets. In these essays, nothing is off limits, presented in a style that features all caps, much swearing, and that can turn from literary essay to gossip rag on a dime.
Irby gains our trust through her candid tone and the way she unabashedly reveals herself. In talking about Crohn’s Disease, a chronic, inflammatory condition that affects the bowels, her off-the-cuff style undercuts the seriousness of her condition:
There’s no known cure for Crohn’s. I just keep dutifully taking my pills and trying not to drink so much and trying even harder to stay away from fancy French cheeses. Right now I’m not on steroids or rheumatoid arthritis drips, and I’m no longer on immunosuppressive drugs either. I haven’t had to Depend on special undergarments (see what I did there?!) in months. No rubber sheets. No scopes, no xrays, no scans, no colonoscopies, NOTHING.
She gives us an unflinching glimpse of what it is like to manage a chronic condition without pity, but underscores it with a pun on Depends, the adult diaper. And Irby takes a similar tack when discussing other topics. In “My Mother, My Daughter”, an essay that originally appeared in The Rumpus, she fuses humor with the horror of an accident her mother had been in:
I found her standing in the kitchen sipping a cup of coffee, the instant kind you mix with hot water that came in a gallon-sized drum for $2 at the dollar store and smelled like cat pee. One side of her head was bandaged, and there were some cuts on her face. She explained that she’d fallen asleep while driving and had been blindsided by another car. My mom hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt and was thrown across the front seat, smacking her head pretty hard against the rearview mirror in the process. There had been an ambulance, and a trip to the emergency room. The Dodge was totaled. All while I was working on my stupid spelling worksheet.
All aspects of the essays in the collection reveal something of the writer’s mindset. Even Irby’s titles make use of her over-the top-humor, such as “How to Get Your Disgusting Meat Carcass Ready for Some New, Hot Sex.” One could say that Irby takes frankness in the essay to new levels. From her bowel movements to her sex life to caring for her dying mother as a teen, no terrain is sacred for Irby, and so subject too personal. Yet, she manages to make subjects that shouldn’t be funny fill with an irreverent humor that never allows her the role of victim.
Many of these essays stemmed from Irby’s popular blog, Bitches Gotta Eat, and the collection retains that informal blogger style. It’s confessional, witty, and performative on the page. While her sense of humor may not be for every reader, and for others the sections in all caps and the many and varied expletives might be too much, her essays retain the spontaneity of the Internet and blogging culture where her writing roots began. There is an everyday quality to the writing, as if each essay is a conversation already in progress, where insecurities and desires play out in tantalizing and brutal honesty.
Renée K. Nicholson lives in Morgantown, WV, splitting her artistic pursuits between writing and dance. A former professional dancer, Renée earned teaching certification from American Ballet Theatre and an MFA in Creative Writing at West Virginia University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Chelsea, Mid-American Review, Perigee: A Journal of the Arts, Paste, Moon City Review, Fiction Writers Review, Redux, Cleaver Magazine, Poets & Writers, Dossier, Linden Avenue, Blue Lyra Review, Switchback, The Superstition Review, The Gettysburg Review and elsewhere. She serves as Assistant to the Director of the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop, and was the 2011 Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Penn State-Altoona. She is a member of the book review staff at The Los Angeles Review, as well as a member of The National Books Critics Circle and of the Dance Critics Association. Renée co-hosts the literary podcast SummerBooks and co-founded Souvenir: A Journal. Her website is www.reneenicholson.com.
QUOTE:
Meaty reads like a best-of collection from Ms. Irby’s blog BitchesGottaEat, but all the material here is new in these breathless, unconventional, bare-all essays.
Meaty: Essays by Samantha Irby, Creator of the Blog Bitchesgottaeat
Image of Meaty: Essays by Samantha Irby, Creator of the Blog BitchesGottaEat
Author(s):
Samantha Irby
Release Date:
September 23, 2013
Publisher/Imprint:
Curbside Splendor
Pages:
250
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Michael Adelberg
“[Ms. Irby is] a fresh voice and talent to be watched.”
Samantha Irby is black, heavy, underemployed, lonely, suffering from Crohn’s disease and an unhappy childhood in Chicago.
Like the modern-day Howard Beale, Samatha Irby is mad as hell, and she’s not gonna take it anymore. The result is Meaty, a collection of Ms. Irby’s autobiographical sketches, essays, and rants.
At first glance, Irby is the opposite of her more-famous fellow-Chicago memoirist-humorist-essayist, David Sedaris. While Sedaris is bemused and ironic, Irby is blunt and pissed off. But Sedaris and Irby share a common focus on the stupidities of our material culture and their vignettes have a similar underachiever vibe.
The following is a good of Ms. Irby’s mix of anger, humor, and smarts:
Dear White People, I love you because you mean well. I should clarify and say that I am referring to white people who buy North Face jackets and take their babies to yoga class, NOT these fucking Newport-smoking teen moms named “Destiny,” spelled with nine E’s. Those kinds of white people are terrifying. I like farmer’s market white people, the ones who are always dressed like they just finished climbing K2 when all they’ve done all day is eat samples at Whole Foods. The ones who try to convince me that a fifteen dollar jar of organically-grown, locally-sourced, environmentally sustainable white peach marmalade is a worthwhile fucking purchase. I’m black, ho. FUCK THE EARTH.
Dozens of similar examples of Ms. Irby’s acetylene-torch voice could be pulled from the pages of Meaty.
Ms. Irby is not interested in big issues or great causes. To the degree she touches on topics like feminism, environmentalism, and politics, it is to suggest that she doesn’t buy any of it. Environmentalists are silly; feminists are crazy for not taking the money of men willing to buy them a meal; Barack Obama is a “Halfrican” whose election is meaningless.
Meaty reads like a best-of collection from Ms. Irby’s blog BitchesGottaEat, but all the material here is new in these breathless, unconventional, bare-all essays.
If Meaty has a weakness, it is that the essays have a sameness to them, particularly when Ms. Irby discusses her sexual encounters and preferences. Halfway through Meaty, the reader already knows what Ms. Irby is likely to say about any issue. At this point, Ms. Irby continues to amuse, but she no longer continues to surprise. Thus Ms. Irby’s compiled work is less interesting than that of the best humorist-essayists of our time: Sedaris, George Saunders, Sloan Crosley, etc.
Along with young writers like Alissa Nutting and Laurie Weeks, Samantha Irby’s work proves that women can be just as witty, raunchy, and irreverent as men. Meaty is a best-of collection that contains some less-than-best-of material, but it still establishes Ms. Irby as a fresh voice and talent to be watched.
Michael Adelberg is the author of the award-winning history book, The Theatre of Spoil and Destruction: The American Revolution in Monmouth County, and three well-reviewed novels, A Thinking Man's Bully, The Razing of Tinton Falls, and Saving the Hooker.
The Magic of Writing
About
Subscribe by Email
5 hilarious things you can learn from Samantha Irby and her book Meaty
Leave a comment
By Mahjabeen Syed, March 7, 2014 at 10:53 am
5 hilarious things you can learn from Samantha Irby and her book Meaty
I feel like everyone probably knows who Samantha Irby is if not her by name, then maybe by her hilarious and very popular blog Bitches Gotta Eat or by her pieces in Jezebel, or in The Rumpus, or from hearing of her through The Chicago Tribune or The Chicago Reader or from the monthly show she hosts for the reading series Guts and Glory. Phew! Alright, let me give you a moment to recuperate from 1. Realizing this lady's a fucking G and 2. From getting over how small you may be feeling right now.
I recently read her book Meaty, which is a collection of essays and by fucking God, it is the funniest, finest, most-tragic, laugh-out-loud, and eye-opening book that I have ever read and I never thought it was possible to find an emotion gumbo of a book like that that could also hold my low-attention span attention. The book is fucking awesome which is why you should buy it. If not for that reason then for knowing that I only read my friend a couple pages of the book before she decided that she wanted that book for her birthday. Yeah, guys, it's really that fucking major.
The book is a lot about sex, relationships, dealing with Chron's Disease, and epic failures. Irby is known for her boldness so, stating the obvious, this is not for the modestly coy, cork in the buttonhole, and easily offended. Although, I think it is written with great craftsmanship, therefore, everyone should read it. Okay, I'm tired of blabbering. Here is a list of 5 things that everyone can learn from Samantha Irby's book Meaty and the woman herself.
Here's the beautiful ray of luscious sunshine
Here's the beautiful ray of luscious sunshine
1. Not all women like head. I admit this to my close confidants but I thought that today was the day that I would grow some kahunas and tell the general public that no matter how good you are, it still kinda sucks. Now, I don't speak for everyone, but before reading this book and talking to a couple friends I thought I was the only one who felt this way. I agree with Irby, I mean, why would I want someone's face right next to my wastebasket? Uh, no thank you. Be courteous, fellas, ask your lady friend if she likes that.
2. It really sucks spending the night at the guy's house. I know that movies stress that women really want to be asked to spend the night because it's sweet or something but really, we just want to be asked so we can refuse. Spending the night at a guy's place who is just a bootycall and not your boyfriend sucks melons and coconuts. Irby lists and elaborates on a few reasons for why it's awful, like; the dilemma of "to poop or not to poop here, that is the question," morning light makes us look crazy hideous, and the shame walk home in your crusty hardened crotch panties.
3. Best line in the book akin to, "Never shave your vagina all the way down to the root, no man is worth it, trust me." Also, grooming down there is a very scary and often a traumatic experience, always teetering on life or death because we are afraid of, "shredding our labia in a hundred fucking pieces."
4. Through this book, you can find out how Samantha has sex (don't give me that look, I know you're running to your nearest device to get you a copy pronto).
5. Because of this book I have realized that women go through waaaaay too much nonsense just to be prepared for getting laid. Having cute panties and bra, waxing/shaving/chopping of hair that is meant to keep us warm, getting our nails did, making sure we smell like a baby bottom feels, making sure our bottoms feel like a baby's bottom...etc etc etc. Men, all you do is do all the moving in bed. The least you can do is buy a girl a fucking rose and let her have another slice of cheesecake without looking at her like she's a beluga, yo. Just saying.
If you like my rants, funnies, and random facts, type your e-mail address in the box below and click the "create subscription" button. My list is awesomely spam free, and you can opt out at any time, but then who would entertain you? Uh, no one. Correctamundo.
Samantha Irby on being funny and “Meaty”
By Sarah Terez Rosenblum
on August 21, 2013
Samantha Irby is your new favorite blogger. Edgy and self-deprecating, hers is the voice of an astute outsider compelled to set the rest of us straight. Whether frankly discussing her struggles with Crohn’s Disease, riffing on the subject of lesbian crushes or writing poignantly about her childhood, Irby is fearless in her pursuit of humorous, sometimes horrifying truth. She spoke with AfterEllen about life as a blogger, feminism and Meaty, her new book of essays.
7124803769_b77088a08a_b
AfterEllen: You started out blogging. To what do you attribute the significant following you’ve attracted?
Samantha Irby: I’m really fucking funny. Plus i’m not an asshole. And I post pretty consistently. That’s the magic formula.
AE: How does your writing persona differ from your actual personality?
SI: In real life I don’t say “motherfucker” nearly as much as I do in my blog.
AE: Who are your influences?
SI: Funny people I love: Issa Rae, Retta, Franchesca Ramsey, Freshalina, Phoebe Robinson, Monique, Aisha Tyler, Janeane Garofalo, Mindy Kaling, Paul Mooney, Dave Chappelle, Amy Schumer, Amy Poehler, Cameron Esposito, Ever Mainard, Rebecca O’neal, Aziz Ansari, Kevin Hart. So many others.
AE: Your writing is incredibly honest. Do you ever second guess what you’ve chosen to share?
SI: Not ever. Except maybe I will a little once my boss gets his preordered “Meatbook.” In the book, I talk a lot about masturbating, and how much I love it, and it’s both disconcerting and hilarious to imagine my bossman reading that shit. Especially with the visual. But oh well. I’m sure he does it, too. (Ew, barf.)
meaty cover
AE: Readers feel a kinship with you because of how open you are. What sort of awkward situations has that led to?
SI: I embrace all awkwardness, all too-personal encounters. Girls bum-rushing me at the bar, weird emotional emails that make me cry for other people’s pain, ALL OF IT. I’ve been approached so many times on the street that it doesn’t freak me out at all anymore. The two best instances: once I was being interviewed and a woman came up to mm and I TOTALLY LOOKED FAMOUS and another time I was approached by some fans while on a date. I pretty much told a dude, “Oh yeah. You want to fuck me.”
AE: What would readers be surprised to know about you?
SI: That I don’t hate EVERYTHING. Just most things. And I’m way nicer than everyone expects.
AE: How did your book come to be?
SI: 1. Ugh I never wanted to write a book. I don’t know that I ever want to work on another. But I’d been writing and performing for a while, and one of my friends in the Chicago lit scene was an editor at Curbside Splendor, my publisher, and she was like, “Dude, you should put out a book.” It was for real that easy. 2. The book is a collection of personal essays that mostly center around my many physical and emotional disabilities and pooping all the time—gross out humor for the marginally grown up.
AE: Tell me why a site devoted to lesbians and pop culture should care about your book.
SI: Girl, I don’t know. You can’t even make people care about the homeless, and they are actually in need of support. Um, because I have a vagina? And I write about it a lot? Lesbians have vaginas, right? It’s a prerequisite? I also had a mom, do lesbians have moms?
Do they like cheeseburgers? Do they date terrible people sometimes? Do they laugh at dumb shit on the internet? Do lesbians poop?! Those are the things I like. And that’s pretty much what I write about. So if you like eating food and laughing at jerks, even if you are the jerk in question, then you might be interested in my book.
AE: In one of your blog posts you write about trying to figure out if you were on a date with a lesbian or just hanging out with her. It seemed like you were open to the idea, but what are the pros and cons for you?
SI: This is pretty loaded and I don’t want to piss off an online community of lesbians, so I will stick to the pros and cons of that particular experience. PROS: she’s awesome and funny and caring, plus she has nice lips and really good boobs. CONS: 1. She’s too smart for me. 2. She’s so selfless and compassionate that it makes me feel like a bad person. And 3. She is prettier than I am and F that. We’re still friends, because that shit was decidedly NOT a date. She crushed my heart under her mid-priced high heeled riding boot. It was devastating.
AE: Do you consider yourself a feminist?
SI: I love paying more at the dry cleaners, so no. Just kidding. yes times a billion.
AE: Care to weigh in on the whole are women funny debate?
SI: When people say women aren’t funny what they’re really saying in a way is that joy and pleasure and the agency to affect someone in that primal and profound way is the province of men. It’s simple and misogynistic in the most basic way, and it’s the quite possibly the most untrue thing ever.
AE: And what about rape jokes? Do they have a place?
SI: If you want to make light of your own, that’s your right. Anyone else’s is off limits.
AE: What advice would you have for wannabe bloggers?
SI: Get a job. A real job that pays well and hopefully has benefits. And maybe a retirement plan. Blogging for a living isn’t a real thing for most humans who actually need food and clothing and other tangible items to live. Also, it’s stressful to try and make your passion and/or creative outlet make money for you. Stress is for suckers. If you have gross pop-up ads on your blog how much do you make per click? $.0007?! (Just a guess. I don’t have ads on my blog.) GO TO WORK.
QUOTE:
The collection is far and away best taken in doses. It's like any smorgasbord. The offerings are tempting, and the urge to overindulge is strong. Resist the urge that you not grow indifferent to the charms of the groaning board! Read one or two of these tempting treats. Put the book down, pick up something grim and joyless for a contrast...are you caught up on your Bolaño reading? isn't there a new Murakami or something?...and then come back to laugh and learn."
Review of Samantha Irby's MEATY
MEATY: Essays
Samantha Irby. Curbside Splendor Publishing, $15.95 paperback (250p) ISBN: 978-0988480421
It's good to be young. I remember that. I'm not young anymore, and frankly wouldn't be young again for all the money there is. But that's age's privilege, to celebrate itself. Every age's privilege, in fact, and Samantha Irby celebrates being young.
In a very testy way.
Hell, if I had Crohn's disease, I'd be testy too. In fact, I am testy, no Crohn's needed. But Irby gets testy over very young problems, as in the essay "Would Dying Alone Really Be So Terrible?":
“I want to watch porn by myself, because a dude just won't let you take five minutes to masturbate without his dick thinking it's an invitation, and then that five minutes becomes twenty-five minutes (if you're lucky) of heat and sweat and effed-up hair and having to remake the bed and being late for work and even then, after all that grunting and shoving and groaning, you might STILL have to get your vibrator out while this motherfucker passes out on top of the shirt you'd taken out to wear to the office.”
This is the kind of problem a lot of folks of either gender and all persuasions would enjoy having, if the dating sites' usage and match-up numbers aren't complete lies.
Irby's brand of testy humor gets a laugh-out-loud funny workout in her meditation on the American obsession with weight, weight loss, effort-free weight loss, and laziness in "The Tapeworm Diet." She appears, on her teensy little blog avatar, not to be an immensely large person, but I don't know this for a fact as I've never met the lady. She claims to be sizable: "I eat bad things and go to sleep immediately afterward. There, I solved the mystery of fatness for you. You're welcome." Garshk, and here I thought it was my slow metabolism!
Irby then goes on to skewer the un-fucking-believable idiotic should-be-illegal insanities out there for an unsuspecting public to follow as diets:
“The Twinkie Diet.
A typical day in the life of Kansas State University nutrition researcher Mark Haub, creator of the Junk Food Diet, which consists of 60% junk food supplemented by a protein shake, multivitamin pills, and a can of green beans or four stalks of celery every day. He avoided meats, whole grains, and fruits. September 10, 2010: A double espresso; two servings of Hostess Twinkies Golden Sponge Cake; one Centrum Advanced Formula pill; one serving of Little Debbie Star Crunch cookies (my jam!); a Diet Mountain Dew (barf); half a serving of Doritos Cool Ranch corn chips; two servings of Kellogg's Corn Pops cereal; a serving of whole milk (squirt!); half a serving of raw baby carrots; one and a half servings of Duncan Hines Family Style Chewy Fudge brownie; half a serving of Little Debbie Zebra Cake; one serving of Muscle Milk Protein Shake drink; Total: 1589 calories.
Just reading that shit makes my fucking teeth hurt. I think I also might've just caught diabetes through the computer screen. This can't be life, right? Snack cakes and baby carrots? NO IT CANNOT.”
Sing it, soul-daughter. Couldn't have said it better myownself. The spoiledness of the average American is never in more breathtaking relief than in diet advice and weight-loss program information. Most people on the planet would like to have enough food to get full once a day. People here eat so much they need advice on how not to turn into land-blimps. Something is wrong with this picture. Samantha Irby makes you giggle as she pokes your social conscience, so permaybehaps people who need to hear will listen without realizing what they're hearing. It's the only way past their privileged-person defenses, the evidence shows.
The collection is far and away best taken in doses. It's like any smorgasbord. The offerings are tempting, and the urge to overindulge is strong. Resist the urge that you not grow indifferent to the charms of the groaning board! Read one or two of these tempting treats. Put the book down, pick up something grim and joyless for a contrast...are you caught up on your Bolaño reading? isn't there a new Murakami or something?...and then come back to laugh and learn.
Wait! I didn't mean learn! I meant enjoy! Enjoy, not something hard and boring like learn! (September 2013)
Purchase Meaty HERE.
Reviewer bio: Richard Derus is a biblioholic and a passionate reader. From underneath his tottering towers of unread tomes, he writes obsessively about his darlings at Shelf Inflicted (a group blog), Goodreads (where he is a Forbes 25 top reviewer), LibraryThing (where his personal library is comprehensively cataloged), and Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud, where many otherwise unknown books are praised, panned, or poked fun at.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me: Samantha Irby
By Sari Botton
July 25th, 2014
If you want people leave you alone, try reading Meaty by Samantha Irby in public. I did that a few months ago on a plane to LA, and received the strangest looks as I vacillated between laughter and tears with the speed and facility of a crazy person.
I loved the book. I was so moved by it, but also found it so funny. Irby, known best for her hilarious blog, Bitches Gotta Eat, is the rare comedian who touches you deeply as she cracks you up with straight talk about everything from her middle-aged thumb-sucking and Crohn’s disease (how very much it makes sex and dating suck) to condescending white people and her dead parents.
While I feel sorry for Irby, who was orphaned at eighteen and absolutely wish my parents no harm, I must also admit I envy her artistic freedom. We talked at length on the phone about the burdens and liberties that come with being a parentless writer.
***
The Rumpus: Not long ago I was reading your book on a plane to LA and I swear to you people were looking at me like I was crazy because one minute I was just crying my eyes out, and then about twenty minutes later I was cracking up. The book is both so touching and also just so balls-out honest, and I think that’s what makes it funny, too. You hold back nothing. This might sound crass, but how much of that has to do with not having parents anymore? It’s so sad that they died when you were young, and that your life with them was also so tragic, but it must be liberating as a writer to have no one to worry about.
Samantha Irby: It’s incredible, and I hope that you don’t hear that as my being callous. I’ll say I miss them, but I mostly miss the idea of having parents—because it would be crazy to miss my actual parents, you know, ‘cause they were both sick and old and dying and messed up, because my dad was an alcoholic. So I don’t miss that. I certainly don’t miss seeing my mom in a wheelchair in a nursing home. I miss the idea of sort of having adult parents that you can talk to in a normal, human way and have them relate. I love the idea of sitting down and talking to your mom as an adult mom. I’m into that because I don’t have it. I’m sure if my mom was alive, every time she called me I would be like, “What?” I miss having people I can easily borrow money from. Like everybody, I sometimes get crackhead broke, where it would be really embarrassing to ask people for money, and I think, If I had a dad, and that dad had a job, this is when I would call him. But as an artist, not having parents is really the jam. I can say whatever without worrying. There’s no one to whom I couldn’t say, “Fuck you.” I say what I want.
Rumpus: Wow. How freeing. I mean, I certainly don’t want my parents gone, but I’d like to feel more at ease about putting myself out there without worrying about upsetting them. It’s not even as if I’ve really done anything bad. I’ve just been a real, flawed human. But I have a lot of inhibition about letting them—and the rest of the world, I guess—know that.
Irby: And as an artist, if my parents were still around, I don’t know that I would be this free. I don’t know that I would be who I am. I don’t know that I would be writing, and I certainly don’t know that I’d be writing about the stuff that I’m writing about. I’d like to think that my personality has always been sort of upbeat and outgoing, but if there were someone who was like, “Yo, don’t write about your vagina on the Internet,” I don’t know if I’d be like, “You know what, dude? I think I’m gonna do it anyway.” I can’t say for sure.
Rumpus: How old were you when your parents died?
Irby: Eighteen. I don’t even know how to even be shamed in a child way anymore. I don’t even know what that kind of shame would even feel like. I do have a boss, and he has a wife. He’s a really nice, gentle kind of person. Sometimes when I write bad things he’ll say, “Oh, I read that thing you wrote, and it just broke my heart.” And I’ll just be like, “Shut up.” He would maybe be the one person whose judgment I would even pause to consider, but he doesn’t care, and I don’t just walk around talking shit all the time. I’m not on the train like, “Yo ass out.”
Rumpus: It’s not like 24/7 stand up?
Irby: No, no. I know how to be normal and eat dinner. But last night I was at dinner with some friends and I was talking about this friend of mine who was cheating on her husband, and I was just like, “Yeah, so, she was fucking this dude, and blah blah blah,” and my friend who was with me was like, “Oh man, you don’t ever hold back.” I was like, “No, I don’t.” But who wants to be around that person who’s like, “I know something, but I’m not gonna tell it.” I feel like it’s these experiences that get us through, and I feel like if my parents were alive, my mom would get this ’cause she was super progressive and independent or whatever. But if I was like, “Listen, mom, I know it upset you that I said ‘pussy hole’ on the Internet, but it’s about the shared experience. It’s about making somebody else feel better because they too have a pussy hole,” and I feel she would be like, “Okay.” Not “awesome,” but “okay.” But I don’t have to worry about it because, you know, my phone never rings no matter what I put on the Internet.
Rumpus: What about siblings or other relatives?
Irby: I have three sisters who are considerably older than I am. They’re twenty, seventeen, and fifteen years older. It was sort of like having four mothers. But we’re not traditional, and we’re not very close. We all kind of live in the same area, but I wouldn’t take a bullet for any of my sisters, just to put it plainly. If one needed a kidney, I’d be like, “Oh really? You don’t know anyone else who matches you?” I know one of them reads my stuff and loves it. She sends it to her friends. But the other two are a little more conservative, so I don’t think they read my stuff. But again, we’re not very close, and if they did read it and didn’t like it, I would just be like, “Well, I don’t care.” I don’t worry about hurting their feelings because I don’t write about them. So I’m like, “Because I don’t write about you, you should take that and shut up about what I wrote. Or I’ll just start writing about you.”
Rumpus: I rely on my parents’ inability to Google. Even though I’m forty-eight and married for the second time, I’m still worried about my parents thinking I’m a grown-up person who has sex or doesn’t always do the right thing. I guess most normal people don’t put evidence of those things out anywhere for their parents to find, but I want to feel like I can. I had a bad experience with that once. I wrote an essay for Marie Claire about getting divorced at twenty-seven, after at twenty-three marrying my second boyfriend ever. I didn’t know when or how you were supposed to have sex with new people. At twenty-seven, I had only gone around the bases with like two guys. I had no idea, like, how many dates do I show a nipple? And does that count as sex? I had no fucking idea. So I wrote an essay about it for Marie Claire about kind of landing on Planet Single. I asked my father to please not read it. He promised he wouldn’t, but then one day he called me and said, “I have written you a ten-page letter about what a disappointment you are, but my therapist won’t let me send it to you. I didn’t read the article, but people told me what it’s about, and my therapist won’t let me send you this letter because my therapist knows that you’re very defensive, so I’m not going to send you the ten-page letter about what a disappointment you are, but I just want you to know that.” When I tell that story, it sounds crazy to me, but at the time, it completely blocked me. I couldn’t write for years, and in ways, I’m still recovering from that as a writer.
Irby: My mouth is hanging open.
Rumpus: It was devastating to me. And then I wrote a “Modern Love” essay for the New York Times about my parents’ relationship and its effects on me, and he got very upset about that. We’re not speaking right now. I just needed a break so that I could figure out who I am and what I think without that influence, but I’m still kind of reconciling this whole thing of writing about myself, writing about my experience as a daughter, and feeling uninhibited. I kind of wish I could send him off to another planet where he can’t read anything from this planet. But I can’t do that, so this is a dilemma I live with.
It’s awful to say, but I wish I had the liberty that you do.
Irby: Oh no, I feel you. I mean, that doesn’t offend me at all. Like listening to you, I am getting all cringy for you because I understand. I feel bad for you that you’re an adult who has been married and you can’t write about your sex. You’re a writer who can’t write about a big part of your life. It feels like you can’t write about this big part that a lot of people write about, that a lot of people are interested in hearing about. Sex is one of those things that everybody wants to talk to you about, because they want to feel like they’re normal, like you’re normal, like the things they’re doing are the same things you’re doing. Or, what are you doing that they aren’t doing? Everybody wants to talk about it all the time. I feel so bad that you’ve got to sit down at your computer, and the first thing you think about is how you wish your dad wouldn’t read it. That, like, hurts me. And I want for you to have—I mean not enough to do something to your dad—but I want for you to have that freedom. Could you just say, “Listen, dude, don’t ever talk to me about what I write?” Is that possible?
Rumpus: No, he and his wife wanted to draw up a legal document. They said that they were going to a lawyer to find out if they could get a document that would keep me from being allowed to write about them, which isn’t a thing that exists.
Irby: That is so insane to me!
Rumpus: And also my stepmother called to tell me that if my father has a heart attack and dies after reading something I wrote, it will be totally my fault.
Irby: Dude, how do we get you away from this? That’s my mission. It’s insane. I have a similar sort of thing where people I’ve dated have been like, “How do I know you’re not going to write about me?” And the first thing I say is, “You’re fucking flattering yourself for thinking that’s even on my mind, and also there’s no way to guarantee I won’t write about you other than you not being fucked up. So don’t be fucked up, and I won’t talk shit about you on the Internet.” So, I take it you’re not doing a memoir, because you don’t want any drama?
Rumpus: Well, I am. I’m writing pieces of it, and the big irony here, Samantha, is that my two day jobs are, one, I help people write memoirs, and I’m always telling them to get over their inhibitions about offending anybody, and two, I teach workshops for a non-profit storytelling organization called TMI Project, where I get people to reveal the part of the story they don’t want to tell. So the dilemma for me now is, okay, I took a year leave from my dad, I got a little braver, I published some stuff. Actually I published two anthologies this year, and I have another coming out in the fall. One of them is a reproductive rights collection, in which I wrote about my two abortions. I didn’t tell my dad that this book exists. I hope he’ll never find it, but I did it and I published it. And so I’ve felt a little bit braver in the past year with my dad off to the side, but now how do I go forward, how do I go from here? I mean, I don’t want to never see him again.
Irby: Yeah, okay, so I’m very sweet and nice, but I got a big asshole streak. If somebody in my life handed me a legal document, I’d be like, “All bets are off, bitch. You just changed the nature of this relationship.” I’d be like, “Yo, I can’t go through my life like waiting for you to die so I can tell these stories. I want them out there, I want to be writing them. Here is one. If you can’t handle it, fine, then you can’t handle me.”
I’m grateful that I had to be an adult and grow up and do all of this stuff so early because my not-giving-a-fuck age started way earlier than a lot of people’s, and the freedom feels so much better than the fear. Although I’ll share with you that some of my shit makes me want to throw up when I put it out there. My essay in Meaty about sucking my thumb, for example, that is the hardest shit I have ever written, telling people that. I’m about to be thirty-four, and I have no cure. I thought about going to a hypnotist just because it would be hilarious to write about, because of course everything’s got to be for a goddamn joke. But I did a signing and someone brought up the thumb essay, and she was like, “Thanks for writing about that,” and she said, “I still twirl my hair.” And I was like, this is different, but okay. My immediate thought was, Oh my God, I forgot that’s in here. It’s funny, some people might speculate whether or not I’m wearing a diaper or wonder whether the scars I wrote about are exactly where I say they are or think about me peeing on some dude, or whatever it is. That doesn’t get to me, but then I’m like, Oh my God, all 150 people in the room who’ve read this book know that I suck my thumb, and it makes me cringe.
Rumpus: What is it about that? Is it that it’s a behavior as opposed to something that happened to you, like your Crohn’s?
Irby: There are a few things about me that I feel speak to a sort of weakness, like my struggle with my weight, which is really not that much of a struggle because I’m not fighting very hard. I think that’s the sort of thing where people are like, just get it together, just go to the gym. I always eat lettuce. I think the thumb is in that same vein where it’s like, are you kidding? This is a problem I’m having as an adult, this is a coping issue. The two things are both coping mechanisms that speaks to some sort of deeper problem that isn’t being addressed that maybe should be.
Rumpus: Those were the places in your book where I laughed because the way you put things is funny, but I still had so much compassion for you.
Irby: Thank you. It’s the weirdest thing. I would eat a whole pizza and not care, but I’d wake up with a cracked red thumb, and I’m like, Oh, you are the worst.
Rumpus: So, there’s another tiny aspect to the thing with my dad, which is that there’s a small amount of money that when he dies, he keeps saying I’m going to get.
Irby: I was going to ask, but then I thought that was tacky.
Rumpus: My husband and I live really close to the bone, we don’t have money. We could really use some! Even though it’s not a lot, for us that money would be life changing, but I feel like it’s hush money.
Irby: My fear is that you hold back and hold back and hold back and be a good girl, you do what he wants, and then he dies and you find out somehow he rearranged the will, and you get nothing. Then you’ve spent all this time not doing what you want to do, and you get nothing anyway.
I don’t like that he’s doing this to you. “Don’t write what you want to write about. Don’t embarrass me. I might disown you. Don’t write about me or I will take legal action against you, and be nice and be good or I might not give you this money.” I mean, that’s so much for you to be holding back. And he’s got like a therapist who gets a vote on his interactions with you. I feel like you’re fighting a losing battle.
Rumpus: I’ve got all this pressure to not offend or embarrass him.
Irby: Girl, at forty-eight years old though?
Rumpus: I know.
Irby: I mean, your decision is your decision, but come on. I don’t know if the people you usually interview jump down your throat, but I’m doing it. You don’t have to be spiteful and petty like me. I’d send him something overnight and would be like, “This is the autobiography I wrote,” and the first page would be, “So I’m fucking this dude on my period, and he shit on me.” Um, that’s ’cause I am spiteful and petty, so don’t go out of your way to put it all in his face. But I feel like as women we have so many voices in our heads saying be this, be that, do this, don’t do that, don’t be that. I feel like your dad has to be one of the smallest voices in your head. His voice has to be smaller.
This is the freedom of the dead parent. I don’t have to have that reverence, that lightness and goodness. I don’t have to do any of that.
Rumpus: That’s amazing.
Irby: But here’s something. My dad’s lawyer brings her dog to the animal hospital where I worked, and I was in Chicago magazine, which is like the type of magazine your Jewish lawyer orders for her office. My dad used to drive her to the airport, and he’d have me in the car with him. He was like her chauffeur. And one day she was like, “I checked out your blog, and oh, the language, and oh, whatever,” and you could tell that she was waiting for me to apologize. So I just didn’t say anything, and then we had an awkward silence, and I was like, “What do you want me to say? Sorry? Or I’m ashamed? Tell me what you want, ’cause I don’t have the deference thing because there’s no parents around to shame me, so I get to look you in the eye as an adult and ask you what it is you’re trying to do to me. How are you trying to make me feel?”
Rumpus: Wow, what did she say?
Irby: She didn’t say anything. She just stood there and was just like, “Well, it was shocking to me.” And I was like, “Okay, but what am I supposed to do with that? Do you want me to tell you I’m sorry? I’m not sorry. I’m sorry you read it. If you can’t be supportive, I’m sorry you read it.” I don’t want anybody to put their shit on me. My dad used to say, “Never say, ‘I’m sorry.’” He used to say, “Sorry is for sorry people.” Growing up fat and being told you’re undesirable, you almost automatically start apologizing for yourself. I’m sorry you have to look at me cuz I’m gross. I’m sorry you have to move over because I take a little more room or whatever. You’re constantly saying, “Oh excuse me, pardon me, excuse me, I’m sorry.” And it’s one thing for me to say it because of my low self-esteem or however I’m feeling, but I can’t have a whole happy life and love myself if I’m walking around apologizing. So now when people sort of do that shit, like when they expect you to be ashamed of something, I just think, “Who are you to demand an apology of me?” And that’s sort of how I feel about your dad. Who is he to demand that you, Sari, live in a way that pleases him? He gave you life—thanks for that—but you’re not out murdering people. As an adult, you have to live in this specific way for him, or have to apologize for the choices you’ve made. Why? Because they offend him? Why is his being offended something that you should feel responsible for? Maybe he’s too much of a prude.
I don’t do a whole lot of apologizing, girl. And I want you to get out of that, too!
Rumpus: That’s why I picked you. I knew you were going to say that.
Irby: I’m gonna call you every week and be like, “Yo, don’t feel sorry for shit!” I don’t. Let me tell you, I got an email from somebody who reads my blog. You know, like during this whole book thing, I used to post once a week, I tried to post like once a week. It’s a big commitment. I was doing a lot of book stuff, trying to write a fucking book. Some asshole has the nerve to send me an email talking about, “God, girl, update your blog more.” And I was like, “Bitch, you mean this free thing that I put on the Internet on a regular basis that brings nothing but joy to your life? I’ve gotta apologize to you for not putting it up more?” She was like, “Where have you been, what are you doing?” What nerve to demand an explanation from a stranger on a free blog on the Internet. I mean, some people just bleed you dry. For some people it’s never enough. You are never going to be enough, you are never going do enough, so fuck ‘em.
Rumpus: You don’t feel that it’s wrong for me then to tell this story? It’s my story. I don’t want to tell it to be hurtful, but it’s my story.
Irby: It’s your story. The lessons you learned from that experience are yours, and you should feel free to write about them.
Rumpus: I just wanted to run that by you, and see if I’m a really horrible person after all.
Irby: No. Here’s one of the things from my own life: I should have never been born. My fucking Crohn’s. My joints are destroyed and I’m hobbling around. Every time I sit in the bathroom for twenty minutes and text a dude, I think, you know, I never should’ve been born, and they knew, they knew. The doctor told them. But even if he hadn’t, my mom was forty and my dad was fifty. These were people who made a conscious decision to have a child and have their actions affect that child for the rest of her life. Your dad, he knew what he was doing. He was a grown-up, he wasn’t under the influence of anything or anyone. Whatever he decided to do during your childhood was a conscious choice. And maybe it sucks for him to see your interpretation of it, but that belongs to you. You were a kid who experienced his actions. You’re not writing about his childhood, you’re writing about your childhood, and seeing him through your prism is something you’re entitled to. When my dad punched me in the fucking face, two weeks before that I had seen Full Metal Jacket, and it came on TV again. I went into the living room where he was sitting and I made him watch that beginning part, you know, where the dude kills himself because he’s so bullied, and my dad was like, “So you think you’re trying to tell me something with that?” And I was like, “Well shit, I was hoping. Are you not picking up what I’m trying to tell you?” I guess my one regret is that he doesn’t get to read his adult daughter’s account of some of the things that happened from the perspective of a cognizant adult. The stuff I said to him when I was a teen, it’s easy to write that off as kid shit. I still love my dad, but I wish I could sit him down and write a beautiful essay about our life together or aspects of our life together, and give it to him and have him read it and see what life was like for me, if he was willing to see me as an adult. You know, you have ownership of everything in your life. You can write about it, and you don’t have to soften the words, you don’t have to change anything. It’s yours.
Also I just want to say, too, that I would understand if you didn’t write about him, or things that scare you. I would get it if you didn’t. ’Cause I don’t feel like people say that enough either. I’ll champion you to the end if you do, but I also get it and won’t judge you if you don’t. Sometimes shit has to happen first. You’ve gotta have a break, or somebody has to die, or you have to reach a fed up point in order to break free.
But you know, I mean, girl, we’ve gotta look at people’s intentions toward us. Anyone who would try to shut you down or shut me down is a person who doesn’t want the best for you. If I got on the phone today and I said, “Oh, girl, listen to your dad, don’t write your truth,” I’m not a person who has your best intentions in mind. And you should be like, “Thanks Samantha, good to talk to you,” and write me off as a person who doesn’t care about you—because I don’t if I tell you to shut yourself down.
***
Want to read more conversations between Sari Botton and brave writers? Visit the archives here.
***
Featured image © Joe Mazza at Brave Lux.
Sari Botton is a writer living in upstate New York. She is the editor of Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving & Leaving NY. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and more retrograde women’s magazines than she’d care to recall or admit to. She tweets at @saribotton. More from this author →
Samantha Irby talks 'Meaty'
Samantha Irby
E. Jason Wambsgans, Chicago Tribune
Courtney Crowder
According to Beyoncé's song “Me, Myself & I,” this is how the pop star deals with a breakup: “I realized I got/ Me, myself and I/ That's all I got in the end/ That's what I found out/ Ain't no need to cry/ I took a vow that from now on/ I'm gonna be my own best friend.”
Samantha “Sam” Irby, a writer, Beyoncé superfan and creator of the popular blog “Bitches Gotta Eat,” said she tries to handle the end of relationships similarly, but with one exception: She gets angry and/or depressed before she comes to terms with her situation.
“I would like to think that (Beyoncé's song describes) how I am, but it usually takes me a while to get there,” Irby said. “I usually want to burn their house down and then I eventually get to the point where I am like OK, it's cool. It's just me and it's cool.”
In many ways, Irby burns her own house down in her new essay collection, "Meaty," published this month by Chicago-based Curbside Splendor. Fans of her hilariously candid and irreverent blog will find plenty of her usual pieces on relationships gone sour, men behaving badly and poop, the latter an emphasis because of her Crohn's disease.
On the other hand, longtime readers will be surprised to find poignant stories of her painful childhood growing up poor in Evanston; her strained, sporadic communications with her alcoholic father, Samuel; and her extremely loving yet complicated relationship with her mother, Grace. Irby, 33, the front-desk manager at an Evanston animal hospital, lost both of her parents when she was a freshman at Northern Illinois University.
The book's combination of emotional prose and Irby's usual joke-filled, R-rated rantings mirrors her multifaceted life. The stories are marked by a deep appreciation for her roots and an eyes-wide-open, comedic outlook on life, which is best encapsulated by her blog's tag line, "Tacos. Hot dudes. Diarrhea. Jams."
Tacos
"You know what?" Irby said, laughing, after ordering iced tea at Metropolis Coffee. "I don't eat that many (expletive) tacos. … The best food ever is ice cream, but it is not cool to say that ice cream is the best food ever because that is such a sad fat-girl thing to say."
Irby has emphasized diet and her weight in her writing ever since she started her blog on MySpace in 2009. She said "Bitches Gotta Eat" began as a response to a lot of other bloggers writing as if their lives were "Sex and the City." She wanted to tell stories for the majority of women, whose experiences were not Carrie-perfect.
"I know a lot of people who are not getting called back (for dates) and sitting in bed eating chicken wings, and I am going to write this for them," she said, explaining the blog's mission.
She also started it to impress a guy.
"It's funny because people are like 'Why did you start your blog?' and it really was to bang some dude," she said. "I think I still write it to hopefully bang some dudes. When I started the blog, this dude was seeing a woman who was a writer ... and he would always tell me about her and I thought, man, I can write, so I started this blog to be like, look at me, I am funny and interesting. They broke up, we hooked up. We aren't friends anymore, but at least I got the blog out of it."
Irby makes an immediate impression with her frankness. She lets opinions and four-letter words fly and doesn't seem to care what anyone thinks. At the same time, she has a way of putting her company — and especially her readers — at ease.
"I (love) how unabashedly honest and open she is," Mariyam Hussain, a reader of the blog, wrote in an email. "Most people hide (especially in social media) who they really are, instead presenting an advertisement of who they want to be. Sam doesn't sugarcoat who she is to get fans, boyfriends, friends. And that is extremely liberating to read."
Hot dudes
Moving her hand through the air, Irby creates an imaginary scale as she remarks that her blog, and by extension her book, is for women, gay men, cats and straight men, in that order.
"Men can enjoy it, but they can't laugh too hard," she said, "like some of this s--- is not for you, sir. It is for us ... I want to make women laugh. I want to make women feel less alone."
In a recent blog post, Irby wrote about why she hasn't had sex for about a year, marking what she called her "celi-bration." Readers flooded her inbox with "me too, girl" exclamations and "thank you so much for writing about this" stories.
Irby said she regularly receives emails from readers who say it's nice to know someone else is going through the same thing.
Lisa Nohner can relate.
"Beneath the hilarious (and sometimes tragic) gut busting comedic voice that is 'Bitches Gotta Eat' lies a brilliantly observant woman whose struggle with love, relationships, games and property are familiar to us all," Nohner, a fan and a creative writing instructor at New Mexico State University, wrote in an email. "I love her work because she's not afraid to say what me and my fellow chronically single cohorts can't: No one cares about your baby's Instagrams."
Keith Ecker, Irby's co-host of the reading series Guts & Glory, takes issue with the idea that the blog is for women, citing themes in which both genders can find some connection.
"Whether we have two X chromosomes or an X and a Y, we're all human beings," Ecker wrote in an email. "We all know what it's like to have a bad date, to be lonely, to feel slighted, to be the odd duck, to (poop) on ourselves literally and figuratively."
Diarrhea
When Irby set out to write her book, which includes almost entirely new essays, she said she wanted to make "poop-sized" chapters.
"So you can leave it in the bathroom and read it every time you take a dump, and one day you just finish the book," she said.
Irby's discussion of poop transcends scatological humor. Her serious case of Crohn's disease often leaves her feeling like a car is driving through her mid-section. She said it sometimes gets so bad she wears pads in case of accidents.
As with so many comedians, her humor comes from pain.
Some of the essays in "Meaty" confront the more difficult times of her life head-on. In a piece titled "The Triplets," Irby describes finding herself living in a crack house at 19, while in the chapter, "My Mother, My Daughter," Irby recalls becoming her mother's caretaker at age 9, after her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and sustained a major brain injury during a car accident.
"I don't feel like my blog is a place where I want to get too morose and sad, and so I thought the book was the place to explore some of that stuff and give people this other side of me," Irby said. "I wanted to show people that I have had experiences that deserve more careful handling (than in my blog)."
Meaty "is different from her blog in that she shares in a different way," wrote Keila Miranda, an assistant at Mark Music and Media Law in Los Angeles and a reader of the blog, in an email. "I really hate myself for using the word 'brave,' but she shares in a brave way … but while still being real and funny and not precious. I cried the whole time I read the chapter about her mom, and had to put it down for day or two because it really affected me."
Jams
In the early days of "Bitches Gotta Eat," Irby often posted playlists of jams (songs) to go with her posts. (Irby said she liked MySpace because of the ability to have a song playing when a visitor clicked on her profile.) Among her favorite artists are Beyoncé, Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco and Liz Phair. "I am really into strong chicks," she said.
"I'm always listening to music, especially when I write," she said. "And sometimes you just need to lay in bed and cry to a James Blake song, you know? It's therapeutic."
For some readers, Irby's blog is equally therapeutic. Hussain talked about the "universality" of her writing. Nohner connected with her candor, and Miranda pointed out passages that spoke to her.
"People live in fear that if anyone got to know the real them, the weird, secret them, with all their awkwardness, insecurities, weird personal habits, that they'd be horribly rejected and shunned from society," Robyn Pennacchia, host of the recently ended reading series Sunday Night Sex Show, wrote in an email. "Sam throws everything on the table, and people love her for that because they wish they could be that fearless, and because she gives them hope that they could do the same thing and still be loved."
In the end, Irby is never really alone — a lot of (rhymes with britches) gotta eat.
Courtney Crowder covers the Chicago literary scene for Printers Row Journal.
"Meaty"
By Samantha Irby, Curbside Splendor, 250 pages, $15.95 paperback
Nonfiction Review: “Meaty” by Samantha Irby
February 4, 2014 at 6:00 am by Brian Hieggelke
meatyRECOMMENDED
A lot of “Meaty”’s reviews can be summed up this way: “lol omg this girl is talking about how she craps her pants she’s so awesome.” Reading reviews like this, one gets the idea that all Samantha Irby talks about is shit. This is very off-putting if one does not want to read about shit. And it’s very unfair to this slim essay collection, reducing it to a defecation bonanza. So perhaps it’s a good thing Newcity is late to the reviewing feast upon “Meaty.”
Most people would be annoyed, eyebrows raised, a knowing smirk, if upon meeting someone for the first time, they mentioned within five minutes that they wanted a MacBook Pro, they vomited on the train three times in the past eight months, and they needed some more friends. For some reason—her utter lack of guile, perhaps—Irby comes off as charming rather than spoiled or demanding. And eventually, the reason for this tone’s revealed. A girl who grew up taking care of an invalid mother, who accepted her lack of good looks at an early age, who liked hanging out with the moms at parties, who never had anyone to show her how to balance a checkbook: this girl cannot be spoiled. It’s just not possible. At the risk of armchair psychology, her past might be why Irby is so into spoiling herself.
This is not a pathetic book by any means. Irby is laughing at herself and showing great wisdom in doing so. Part of it might be the if-you-don’t-laugh-you’ll-cry thing. Part of it is just sheer outlandishness. The girl’s a great storyteller, but anyone who can pull six half-German, half-black kids who all have names that start with K out of their ass in an attempt to impress judgmental college classmates is going to have a good story to tell. She also doesn’t mind putting down an entire week’s expenses (a lot of burgers and beer and brunch) in print. Clearly not every essay in “Meaty” is a joyful one: grief and privilege and romantic angst make their appearance. But Irby takes such clear joy in getting her point across, in provoking the giggle or the gasp.
That’s what those shit-obsessed reviewers are shocked by—a writer who wants to sit down and get to know the reader, and does so by revealing the dirt under her own fingernails. Some people like a girl with dirty fingernails. And a lot of people do, and should like this one. (Liz Baudler)
“Meaty”
By Samantha Irby
Curbside Splendor Press, 250 pages, $15.95
Bitches Gotta Laugh: A Discussion of Meaty by Samantha Irby
By Mikaela Jorgensen
meaty.jpgSamantha Irby's much anticipated collection of essays, Meaty, is out today. If you're not sure whether or not to purchase it, read contributor Alba Machado's and my discussion below! (Hint: Buy it.)
Mikaela: As somebody who had never read Samantha Irby's blog, Bitches Gotta Eat, I didn't know what I was in for, though I quickly found out. I feel that I know Samantha Irby better than I know most of my friends after reading this book, from her bowel movements and sex life to her experiences and hopes. I laughed a LOT and felt a bit emotional during some of the more serious essays. What was reading Meaty like for you, as someone who has read her blog?
Alba: I discovered Samantha Irby a couple of years ago, when she read for the Funny Ha-Ha series at the Hideout. She made me blush in the best way ever. It's a talent she has. It's not just that she talked about peeing on a man's face; it's that she did it in this absolutely candid, intimate check-this-freaky-shit-out kind of way that made her story seem somehow as ordinary as it was outrageous--something casual, something you'd laugh about over coffee. She has the gift that Toni Morrison says is the true test of a writer's power, to "familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar." Since then, I've gobbled up her online work, first the joke advice column that she wrote with Ian Belknap at irbyandian.com, "advice for jerks, written by assholes," then Bitches Gotta Eat. And of course, I was really excited to read Meaty. It did not disappoint. Laughs were had. Numerous times. But the book also veered into unexpectedly tragic terrain, and for that, I would have liked to have read it at a slower pace, given myself time to process and reflect on one chapter before moving onto the next. Meaty seems an appropriate name. You need time to chew on it!
Mikaela: Meaty felt like a memoir to me, a very modern and unique one. Samantha does an interview with herself; a list of how she spent her money for one week; an explanation on "How to Get Your Disgusting Meat Carcass Ready for some New, Hot Sex" and ridiculous diets; recipes; letters to her new boyfriend, black people and white people; a description of how she imagines other people to have sex and how she has sex; and an imaginary television show outline, to name a few. I never knew what to expect and was always left guessing.
Does this feel like a memoir to you?
Alba: We do learn a lot about Irby's life in these essays. But to me Meaty feels like more than just a memoir, since it's also heavy on the advice, opinion, analysis, and rants. I loved that early in the book there's an imagined date between Irby and us, her readers, and that she envisions us asking her questions like, "Do you still have your tonsils?" and "Would you ever bungee jump?" Mikaela, we've both been on a date with Samantha Irby! And do you remember what she said when we got to the restaurant? She said, "I am not wearing the right footwear for a place this goddamned fancy, and I am probably too poor to eat here in real life, so I am really hoping that you are a gentleman and that this $15 pasta is on you." She is as playful as she is brutally honest. Are there any essays in the book that were particularly fun or memorable for you?
Mikaela: I laughed and smiled and shook my head many, many times as I made my way through this book. I especially enjoyed the essay where Samantha's friend's dad, Mel, takes her into his luxurious home, pays for her to get a degree, and lets her drive his Mercedes. She ends up telling her uppity classmates that the car is her rich German husband's, and that they have six strapping sons. At the end, years and years after this happened, she confessed to Mel the lies she made up about the two of them. His response: "Sam," he said gravely, "I'm not mad that you lied. I'm not even mad that you kind of made me look like a pedophile. I understand why you did it, and I'd understand if you needed to do it again. Just remember next time that I am a MOTHERFUCKING JEW."
And now for something completely different. The chapter that left the biggest scar on my heart, My Mother, My Daughter. It begins with, "My mother became my daughter when I was nine years old." Samantha had to mask the fact that for years, she was going to school and returning home to care for her very ill mother, from age nine to high school. Eventually her mom was put into a nursing home, and Samantha wondered, "Who gives a fuck about my floundering GPA when I can't be there to stop them from hitting her when she doesn't move fast enough?"
Samantha's writing abilities impress me to no end. How can she make me laugh so hard and blush one chapter, then make my heart break the next? I completely understand what you meant, Alba, when you said you needed more time to digest certain parts. How do you move on from an essay that ends with, "Children should never die before their parents?"
Samantha Irby takes off on 'Real Life' in return
Samantha Irby
Chicago Tribune
Darcel RockettContact ReporterChicago Tribune
Samantha Irby thinks her life would be the kind of sitcom that's more situation than comedy, where the sad trombone plays while the credits roll.
So she writes in her latest book "We Are Never Meeting in Real Life," an essay collection due out Tuesday. It took three years for Irby to put it together, but fans of "Meaty," her 2013 book, will not be disappointed.
In her follow-up — a second volume showcasing her "Irbyness" —she shares snippets of her life, including growing up with a mother who had multiple sclerosis and an unreliable, alcoholic father. She offers tales of public defecation, makes her case for staying indoors("words like "outdoor music festival" are why I am so glad summer in Chicago lasts approximately seven minutes"), and contemplates other intricacies of life: love, depression, money management, medications for her Crohn's disease, and being that "friend without kids."
But Irby is at her best when she cracks wise about the black experience —like the time Irby attended a wedding in Naperville, only to run across a Civil War reenactment and Black Republicans in the same day. Or her first time venturing out to a cabin in the woods —"(I)t is the plot of every horror movie you've ever seen: white person convinces black person to pack up her hair grease … and reparations money in the hopes of spending a long relaxing weekend in (vaguely authentic-sounding pseudo-Native American word) (Lake/Falls/Island/Coast) doing white-people things like lying in hammocks and eating fresh apricots. Black person dies before you've even made a dent in your popcorn."
Irby launched her "B— Gotta Eat" blog in 2009, but it feels like she's been living in a corner of our brain for longer than that. Irby, 37, a native of Evanston who moved last year to Kalamazoo, Mich., talked to the Tribune by phone about her work. Here's an edited transcript.
Q: Are you excited about Rachel Lindsay, the first black woman to star on "The Bachelorette?"
A: I'm more nervous than I've ever been. Like one of the dudes is going to call her "Hot Chocolate," and then I'll have to throw my TV out of the window. When they go to the home visit episode, what are these guys' racist grandmas going to say? I'm super excited, because she seems like she's really smart. She's a lawyer. I'm really proud of her, but then I'm immediately terrified for all the potential ways she could be disrespected. I'm going to watch it, but I may have to do some deep breathing before it comes on.
Q: "Meaty" is in development for an FX series. How is that going?
A: Jessi Klein and I are working on the second draft of the pilot. I hope they like it and let us make it. We don't get to see a whole lot of just regular, kinda nerdy, but not-nerdy, just regular black people on TV. Black people, who have a little money, but not a lot, but aren't destitute on the street and who've grown up with all sorts of people. My biggest dream is to have a main character on television … regular, fat, black people … and have some black love on TV without it being a thing. I'm really stoked to be writing a person with bowel disease. So, I'm really stoked to get to hopefully put poop on television in a relatively seriously way, but not in a way to bum you out.
Q: Have your ever thought about writing fiction?
A: I have thought about it. And I have some little notes on young-adult novels that I would like to write. I don't know if my agent can sell it, but I do plan on writing it.
Q: Name one thing people don't know about you?
A: I watch a lot of NBA, but I listen to and watch a lot of sports analysis. I have more favorite analysts than I do players. Sports is where I get my fix of outrage and gossip and all that good stuff, but it doesn't have any consequences. What do I care if the strike zone has changed? It doesn't matter. It's just fun to listen to people fighting.
Irby will discuss her book at 7 p.m. on June 8, at Wilson Abbey, 935 W. Wilson Ave. She will also appear at 10:30 a.m. on June 10, at the Chicago Tribune's Printers Row Lit Fest. For details, visit www.printersrowlitfest.org.
drockett@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @DarcelTribune
'We Are Never Meeting in Real Life'
By Samantha Irby, Vintage, 288 pages, $15.95
Next post like this »
« Previous post like this
What We’re Reading in May!
By The Rumpus Book Club
April 17th, 2017
We’re thrilled to share that our May Book Club pick is We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby! Samantha is the author of Meaty: Essays and creator of the blog “bitches gotta eat.” The essays in We Are Never Meeting in Real Life span topics as varied as living on a budget, explaining why Irby should be the next Bachelorette, a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father’s ashes, and advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms. Roxane Gay writes:
Reading Samantha Irby’s We Are Never Meeting In Real Life cracked my heart all the way open. The essays in this outstanding collection are full of her signature humor, wit, and charming self-deprecation but there is so much more to her writing. For every laugh, there is a bittersweet moment that could make you cry. From black women and mental health to the legacies created by poverty to dating while living in an all too human body, Irby lays bare the beautiful, uncompromising truths of her life. I cannot remember the last time I was so moved by a book. We Are Never Meeting in Real Life is as close to perfect as an essay collection can get.
Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Club by April 20 to participate in our month-long reading of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, which will culminate in a live, online (and almost definitely hilarious) discussion with Samantha Irby about the book!
Learn more about The Rumpus Book Club here. More from this author →
Filed Under: Book Club Blog
Related Posts
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Samantha Irby
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Terese Mailhot
What We’re Reading in February!
What We’re Reading in January!
What to Read When: A Holiday Book-Gifting Guide
Other Cool Stuff
Reading Ferlinghetti in the Age of Trump
The Tension of Identity: Hands That Break and Scar by Sarah A. Chavez
Poetry Is a Manifestation of a Life: Talking with Marvin Bell
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #128: Dunya Mikhail
TORCH: The Reunion
QUOTE:
"In her collection of essays We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, Samantha Irby has done the impossible. There are books full of poop jokes. There are books that make salient points about African-American women and mental health. There has never been a book that does both, let alone does both well--until now.
Review: ‘We Are Never Meeting in Real Life’ by Samantha Irby
12 Apr , 2017
Betty Scott
We Are Never Meeting In Real Life_9781101912195_21754
In her collection of essays We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, Samantha Irby has done the impossible. There are books full of poop jokes. There are books that make salient points about African-American women and mental health. There has never been a book that does both, let alone does both well–until now.*
Even if you have never read Samantha Irby’s excellent blog, Bitches Gotta Eat, you’ll feel like you know this woman on a deep level by the time you finish the second essay, “A Blues for Fred.” It is the moving account of finally finding a man who has both curtains and towels after dating a string of adult children, only to see the relationship end in heartache. It comes right after an essay where Irby describes her large ankles on an imaginary reality show application, but it’s also right before one about a “pig demon from hell.” She later juxtaposes the fact that working class families who lack the ability to invest in turn cannot teach their children about financial planning, thereby perpetuating a cycle of poverty, with a joke about pooping at parties. In another essay, she paints an intimate portrait of an erotically-charged moment between her and a sexy musician, then graces her readers with a poop joke.
Lest this review sell the book short, it must be said: these are all truly excellent poop jokes. Some of them have somewhat elaborate set-ups, while others catch you by surprise. They puncture the heaviest parts of this book and let out some emotional weight, much like a colon emptying into a toilet. Just when you think the book is about to make you cry, it makes you burst into laughter instead. If you did already start crying, you just sit there cackling with snot dripping off your face, wondering if laughing this hard at someone’s account of being in the emergency room with a heart problem makes you a terrible person. No, it doesn’t make you terrible. It makes Samantha Irby a rare talent.
Saying that We Are Never Meeting in Real Life is full of heavy material without being burdened with pretension or melodrama understates what Irby accomplishes. The realness and candor here aren’t preachy or moralistic–Irby’s dark humor and self-deprecating style charm you into wanting to read more about how the diet industry is full of toxic garbage. Also, Irby has lived a hell of a life. Have you ever wondered about the cliquey old women doing aqua-aerobics at the Y? About the illegal sprinkling of cremains? Do you have questions regarding the wearing of strap-on dildos? This book has answers. You’ll also find some fun linguistic creativity. Won’t someone please get “turtleneckini” into the Oxford English Dictionary?
While it’s not for the prudish or for readers who prefer emotional honesty sweetened like tea for a smooth ride down, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life is a must-read for pretty much everyone else. If you only read one brutally honest book of essays laced with scatalogical humor this year, it should be this one.
*Unless you count her first book, Meaty, but this one is even better than Meaty.
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby (Vintage | 9781101912195 | May 30, 2017)
Texas Book Festival 2017: Samantha Irby
Meet the author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life in real life
By Beth Sullivan, 10:00AM, Fri. Nov. 3, 2017
The title of Samantha Irby’s latest essay collection might be We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, but that doesn’t mean it’s never going to happen for us Austinites. At this year’s Texas Book Festival, the hilarious and unapologetically candid writer will offer die-hard fans and new readers the chance to hear her discuss her raunchy tales IRL.
Samantha Irby (Photo by Kirsten Jennings)
The first of Irby’s panels, “Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance and Revolution,” will be in conversation with Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding, editors of the essay collection Nasty Women, as well as fellow contributor (and former Chronicle staffer) Sarah Hepola. Though she says she’s not comfortable writing about politics, Irby felt it was important to contribute her work to the collection nevertheless. Referring to her role as a writer following the 2016 election, Irby told the Chronicle, “It’s going to be my job just to keep making jokes and keep trying to help people laugh.”
Her second event, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Everything,” with Scaachi Koul, will cover Irby’s We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. In her second essay collection, Irby chronicles everything from a trip to Nashville to scatter (and maybe taste, you’ll have to read to find out) the ashes of her estranged father to the reasons why one should “fuck it, bitch” and “stay fat.”
Prior to her published essay collections, Irby first rose to fame with her blog “Bitches Gotta Eat.” Today, she still returns to some of her blog posts for new essay material, though it’s a sometimes uncomfortable process. “It’s easy to be like, ‘Oh man, I’ve already tackled this before. Let me go through the archives and see how much of this is still relevant to me.’ But also it feels kinda gross,” says Irby. “Especially when time passes, I think, ‘Oh, I don’t say amazeballs anymore.’ It’s dumb things that come back and convict me.” More often than not, though, Irby jokes, “I’m usually pleasantly surprised to find that I am consistent in either a good or a bad way ... young me didn’t embarrass current me nearly as much as I expected she would.”
An out, queer writer, Irby’s work is popular among queer and non-queer circles alike, although she says readers are occasionally surprised to find out she’s married to a woman. In Irby’s opinion, she thinks her queerness is sometimes overlooked since so much of her earlier material on “Bitches Gotta Eat” revolved around her experiences dating men. “When I was writing about dating a lot, it was always to make fun of dudes. I’m just never going to talk shit about women in my work. I don’t want to drag a woman I’ve dated.”
In We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, however, Irby writes in detail about her relationship with her wife Kirsten Jennings. One piece, in particular, titled “Mavis” (also Irby’s pseudonym for Jennings) hilariously details the first time Irby and Jennings slept together. And while the essay breaches some intimate topics – like the couple’s awkward fumblings with a strap-on dildo and Irby’s musings on cunnilingus – writing about her relationship with Jennings was never off-limits. “It was never an option for me to not write about her because it’s such a big part of my life,” explains Irby.
There are, of course, some elements of their relationship that Irby won’t include in her work. Irby says she uses her writing – both on her her blog and in her essay collections – as a way to work through complicated experiences, but that doesn’t mean she’ll include every little fight or disagreement she has with her wife. “Writing about Kirsten and being true to my readers and people who have come to expect a certain level of transparency while also not betraying anything about her – I still feel like I’m finding that line.”
And if running a hugely popular blog and churning out critically acclaimed essay collections wasn’t enough, Irby also finds time to write Marie Claire’s book recommendation column, an advice column for Shondaland.com, and is in the process of adapting her first essay collection, Meaty, into an FX TV series. For now, though, Irby is thrilled about returning to Austin for this year’s Texas Book Festival. As she recently talked about on her blog, Irby battled some serious dehydration the last time she was in town for a book tour stop in June. “This time, I’m hoping to at least have some good drinks and some good tacos for a couple of days.”
“Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance and Revolution” takes place Sunday, Nov. 5, 11:30am, at Capitol Extension Room E2.012. At 2:30pm that day, catch Irby at “What We Talk About When We Talk About Everything” in Capitol Extension Room E2.014.
QUOTE:
Irby uses a killer sense of humor to do battle with a life that undermines her almost every step of the way.
‘We Are Never Meeting in Real Life’ by Samantha Irby
Review by Gena Hymowech
August 6, 2017
In the essay collection We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, Bitches Gotta Eat blogger Samantha Irby uses a killer sense of humor to do battle with a life that undermines her almost every step of the way. There’s job crap, dating nonsense, homophobia (Irby’s bisexual), racism, self-esteem issues, and a body & mind plagued by illness. Her audience is anyone who enjoys Larry David, Nora Ephron, and Luvvie Ajayi; the depressed; the angry; the anti-social; those who are generally disappointed by life not meeting their extremely low expectations; or just anyone who wants to be taken on a hugely satisfying emotional journey. Irby shows you that someone else is having as tough a time of it as you are, maybe even tougher. And you know what they say about misery loving company.
The first chapter is a mini-autobiography disguised as an application to get on The Bachelorette, but Irby isn’t trying to be America’s new sweetheart or some perfect wife. She needs a partner who can love her
first thing in the morning. Also, when I’m drunk and refuse to shut up about getting McNuggets from the drive-thru. When I fall asleep in the middle of that movie you paid extra to see in IMAX. […] When I am blasting “More and More” by Blood Sweat & Tears at seven on a Sunday morning while cleaning the kitchen and fucking up your mom’s frittata recipe. […] When I beg you fourteen times to read something I’ve written, then get mad when you tell me what you don’t like about it and I call you an uneducated idiot piece of shit. Lovebird city.
She also takes the show to task for how it tries — laughably — not to seem racist. (“No, she’s never going to pick Marcus or Jonathan, but she will keep them on life support for however many episodes it takes to satisfy the NAACP.”) She imagines a more realistic show, one in which “elimination ceremonies are taking place in the bedroom.” (“Blows air into my vagina? NO ROSE.”) Irby gets us thinking about how not real reality TV is while we look on the ground for where our jaws have fallen.
Evil cats also piss Irby off, and she hilariously anthropomorphizes her own, a stinker named Helen Keller, in “The Miracle Porker.”
I hate this bitch and she hates me. … She eats and craps and scowls at me judgmentally from her perch atop my pillow, silently critiquing my outfit choices through narrowed eyes. (“Sure, you look good in that” — she’ll snarl at my elastic-waisted QVC jeans — “I mean, if you think so.”)
Helen is represented by the cat on the cover, and when you get a book with a cat on the cover, and a title that makes you think it’s going to be all about the Internet, you hardly expect to be punched in the guts by an essay called “Happy Birthday.” Here is Irby recalling how badly her father screwed over her ill mother:
The state was paying my mother’s nursing home rent to the tune of nine hundred dollars a month, and my dad figured that if he could somehow get her into his household, that money could be his. […] She needed a nurse. She needed a bed that she could raise and lower. She needed a feeding tube. She needed a call button and a daily doctor visit and occupational therapy because she couldn’t remember how to use her hands anymore and, for the nine hundred dollars my father had already gambled away on the lottery, she didn’t have any of those things.
In “Nashville Hot Chicken,” Irby imagines life if both her parents were still alive and it’s not a pretty picture. She believes she would be an adult living at home, connected by the womb to an emotionally manipulative mother, unable to pursue a proper romantic life, and dealing with a lying father who doesn’t stay around long enough to do much of anything. Obviously, she loved them, but there’s no denying life is easier when people who take so much out of you are gone. In that same chapter, Irby describes getting rid of her father’s ashes, and it’s like something out of a Mel Brooks’ movie. This is an author who is not afraid to say things you shouldn’t or look for humor in places you’re not supposed to. This is pure bravery on the page.
Language sticklers might take issue with Irby’s preference for long sentences. Reading one of them is like driving with someone who insists on taking the scenic route when a great shortcut is available, but eventually, you’ll likely come to appreciate her style.
Irby’s wife once tweeted something along the lines of “reading your book [Irby’s first one, Meaty] and never wanna stop.” I felt the same way about We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. And no, I may never meet Irby in real life, but I won’t stop hoping.
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life
By Samantha Irby
Vintage Books/Penguin Random House
Hardcover, 9781101912195, 288 pp.
May 2017
Related Posts: