We Are Never Meeting in Real Life: Essays
Samantha Irby, 2017
Knopf Doubleday
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101912195
Summary
Sometimes you just have to laugh, even when life is a dumpster fire.
With We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, “bitches gotta eat” blogger and comedian Samantha Irby turns the serio-comic essay into an art form.
Whether talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making “adult” budgets, explaining …
- why she should be the new Bachelorette — she's "35-ish, but could easily pass for 60-something"
- detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father's ashes
- sharing awkward sexual encounters
- dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms—hang in there for the Costco loot
… she’s as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1976-77
• Where—Evanston, Illinois, USA
• Education—N/A
• Currently—Kalamazoo, Michigan
Samantha "Sam" Irby is the writer behind the popular blog, Bitches Gotta Eat. She is also the author of two collections of memoir/essays, We Are Never Going to Meet in Real Life (2017) and Meaty (2013).
As if that's not enough to keep her busy, Irby co-hosts Guts & Glory, a reading series featuring essayists. She has performed all over Chicago, opening for Baratunde Thurston during his "How to Be Black" tour. She has been profiled in the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Reader, Chicago Tribune, as well as in TimeOut Chicago. Her work has appeared on the websites, The Rumpus and Jezebel.
Personal
Irby was born and raised in Evanston, Illinois, to parents who were older (37 and 45) and in ill-health. Her mother had MS and her father was an alcoholic. As Irby put it: “We were crazy poor — Section 8, food stamps, Social Security, disability." But she was still able to attend Evanston High School, an experience for which is ever grateful.
A chunky, kind of outcast black girl could be there and be really into Dave Matthews, but also into Cypress Hill. I had a lot of black friends, but also a lot of white, lacrosse-playing friends.
Since then both her parents have died.
Irby started Bitches Gotta Eat to impress a guy. It began as a personal page on MySpace written during her off hours as a receptionist at an animal hospital in Evanston. The guy became her boyfriend, but even though they parted Irby kept writing. In 2009, she turned the personal page into a blog.
It was just this thing that I could point people to if in real life — if I couldn’t prove to them that I was worth their attention. That’s, like, the saddest shit ever, but it’s real. A lot of good things have come out of my work, but I am not noble.
Writing is a form of catharsis for Irby. As she told, Chicago Magazine, "It's not brave at all; it's freeing." Irby finally left Evanston and moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan, to live with her wife Kirsten Jennings, whom she refers to as "Mavis" in her essays. (Adapted from various online sources including Chicago Magazine.)
Book Reviews
The second book of essays from this frank and madly funny blogger.… A sidesplitting polemicist for the most awful situations.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Essayist Samantha Irby is my very favorite sort of writer: stunningly direct, wildly hilarious, breathtakingly honest and, best of all, imminently relatable
Heidi Stevens - Chicago Tribune
Turn off the TV, let the dishes pile up, pull on your most comfy pair of sweats and settle into your reading chair. You’re going to be there awhile.
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
A memoir of the life of a sardonic, at times awkward, at times depressed black woman with Crohn’s (an inflammatory-bowel disease) and degenerative arthritis.… 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.
Kera Bolonik - New York Magazine
Irby…is so authentic, entertaining, and fearless, funny seems too concise a word to describe stepping inside her thoughts for a couple hundred pages. Her writing is both confident and self-deprecating and will strike readers in that perfectly relatable space between glorious confidence and average self-doubt. Essays about how much she despises her cat and an ill-timed gastronomical adventure are mind-blowingly hilarious, as are her musings on the great outdoors, her hypothetical Bachelor application, and Zumba. Other pieces, especially those involving her mostly-absent alcoholic father and her mother’s battle with multiple sclerosis are so vulnerable and fearless that they’ll stop you in your tracks. Irby doesn’t shy away from anything, and her brand of honesty is the kind that can inspire new writers and attract legions of loyal readers dying to meet her in real life.
Molly Labell - BUST
From the blogger behind Bitches Gotta Eat comes a seriocomic essay collection that will have you crying from laughter and then just crying. A boisterous medley of awkward sex, pop culture obsession and coming-of-age.
Oprah.com
Besides having one of the season's best covers…Irby's new collection of essays is an often riotously funny, unflinching, and never not provocative look into her life. Irby tackles difficult topics, like her estrangement from her father and how growing up in poverty has lifelong repercussions, including making it impossible to understand how to do things like "save for a rainy day." … Irby writes about the ways in which our society is so focused on aspirational living, that it neglects the people who are just trying to survive. But the book is never preachy, rather it is skillful in its ability to reveal the essential realities of how so many of us live and dream and hope and fail, in ways that are inimitably our own.
NYLON
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.… Personal embarrassment provides plenty of material for in-print or online entertainment.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
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