We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (Irby) - Book Reviews

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