Go ahead, fangirl over Samantha Irby like we are
Samantha Irby. (Photo by Lori Morgan Gottschling) The ‘And Just Like That…’ writer on Hollywood, boredom and why she loves Michigan SARAH BRICKER HUNT | QSyndicate As I tore through a used library copy of Samantha Irby’s 2017 bestselling collection of essays, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, in one sitting, I felt a kinship with the readers who came before me — the ones who collectively adorned the well-worn paperback with chocolate smears, left behind a series of coffee mug rings on the back cover and who had dog-eared the corners of dozens of pages, no doubt to quickly find the passages they, too, felt compelled to read aloud to their unwitting life partners or passive pets.
Before I’d finished, I’d ordered the others, Meaty and Wow, No Thank You, and I had pre-ordered Irby’s latest collection, Quietly Hostile, which came out in May.
Somehow, I’d missed Irby’s rise to the top of the humor memoir genre, perhaps distracted by things like the Trump era, a pandemic and warily considering what these new Nazis are all about.
I asked her forgiveness while expressing my thinly disguised new fangirl energy during a recent Zoom call, where Irby joined me from the home she shares with her wife in Kalamazoo. “Listen,” Irby begins, “I have incredibly low self-esteem and a massive ego somehow.
