Meaty: Essays
by Samantha Irby
On This Page
Description
Smart, edgy, hilarious, and unabashedly raunchy New York Times bestselling author Samantha Irby explodes onto the printed page in her uproarious first collection of essays.Irby laughs her way through tragicomic mishaps, neuroses, and taboos as she struggles through adulthood: chin hairs, depression, bad sex, failed relationships, masturbation, taco feasts, inflammatory bowel disease and more. Updated with her favorite Instagramable, couch-friendly recipes, this much-beloved romp is treat show more for anyone in dire need of Irby's infamous, scathing wit and poignant candor. show less
Tags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Samantha Irby explodes onto the page in her debut collection of brand-new essays about being a complete dummy trying to laugh her way through her ridiculous life of failed relationships, taco feasts, bouts with Crohn's Disease, & more, all told with the same scathing wit & poignant candor long-time readers have come to expect from her notoriously hilarious blog, www.bitchesgottaeat.com.
In addition to co-hosting The Sunday Night Sex Show, a sex-positive live lit show, and Guts & Glory, a reading series featuring essayists, Samantha has performed all over Chicago. She opened for Baratunde Thurston during his "How to Be Black" tour. She has been profiled in the Chicago Sun-Times as well as in Time show more Out Chicago, and her work has appeared on The Rumpus and Jezebel. Samantha and partner Ian Belknap write a comedy advice blog at www.irbyandian.com.
I first reviewed this collection of essays for The Small Press Book Review.
My Review: 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?":
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:
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!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. show less
The Publisher Says: Samantha Irby explodes onto the page in her debut collection of brand-new essays about being a complete dummy trying to laugh her way through her ridiculous life of failed relationships, taco feasts, bouts with Crohn's Disease, & more, all told with the same scathing wit & poignant candor long-time readers have come to expect from her notoriously hilarious blog, www.bitchesgottaeat.com.
In addition to co-hosting The Sunday Night Sex Show, a sex-positive live lit show, and Guts & Glory, a reading series featuring essayists, Samantha has performed all over Chicago. She opened for Baratunde Thurston during his "How to Be Black" tour. She has been profiled in the Chicago Sun-Times as well as in Time show more Out Chicago, and her work has appeared on The Rumpus and Jezebel. Samantha and partner Ian Belknap write a comedy advice blog at www.irbyandian.com.
I first reviewed this collection of essays for The Small Press Book Review.
My Review: 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!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. show less
audiobook nonfiction, biographical essays - narrated by the author
Samantha Irby is always unflinchingly honest and open, and often hilarious - here she relates about her childhood (having to assume the role of caretaker of her mother after a brain injury) and about her ongoing struggles with Crohn's disease, and about her general ineptitude when it comes to certain parts of adulting as a 30-something independent woman. She talks a lot about sex in this, her first book, so I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but then again not everyone would be down for reading so much about pooping, either.
Samantha Irby is always unflinchingly honest and open, and often hilarious - here she relates about her childhood (having to assume the role of caretaker of her mother after a brain injury) and about her ongoing struggles with Crohn's disease, and about her general ineptitude when it comes to certain parts of adulting as a 30-something independent woman. She talks a lot about sex in this, her first book, so I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but then again not everyone would be down for reading so much about pooping, either.
This was Irby's first book, published in 2013 and revised and re-issued in 2018. I had previously listened to Wow, No Thank You. and enjoyed it, and this one is in much the same vein. It features Irby's signature frankness and willingness to "go there" - whether "there" be descriptions of the effects of her IBS or details of her sex life. It did feel like she was going more for shock value here than in her later essays. While I enjoyed this one - I don't mind bad language, gross descriptions, or nitty-gritty details - I do think it lacks the insightful humor of some of her later work.
3.5 stars
3.5 stars
Sisterhood was so much more fun when it was more sharing about farts and other gross bodily fluids and less rigorously refraining from shaming each other for our makeup or dating habits. More Blogspot (or Livejournal, R.I.P.), less Reddit. At least we have this book to remind us of that time.
I want Samantha Irby to write all the things and then I want to read them. Reading this book was like holding a mirror up to my own soul.
I picked this one up after a friend posted a glowing review of Irby generally (as like an internet personage you'd want to be best friends with) and suggested that this was one to read.
The thing is, it's a blog that has been printed and given a cover. I like blogs. The existence of blogs is the basis of my livelihood, and there is lots of great blog content out there. Some of Irby's content is in fact great blog content and some of it could be made into fantastic essay collection content. But for me that's kind of where it ends. I think that any number of the essays in this book would have made good reads as the sort of isolated things that pop up in my Facebook feed enough times that I finally then go read to see what the hype is about show more and wind up clutching my stomach laughing over. But as a collection of essays, this thing really just didn't work for me. It felt like I was binge-reading a blog, and that's just a different experience to me than reading a cohesive and polished book of essays.
I feel like Irby's got a hilarious, sad book in her, but this one isn't it. show less
The thing is, it's a blog that has been printed and given a cover. I like blogs. The existence of blogs is the basis of my livelihood, and there is lots of great blog content out there. Some of Irby's content is in fact great blog content and some of it could be made into fantastic essay collection content. But for me that's kind of where it ends. I think that any number of the essays in this book would have made good reads as the sort of isolated things that pop up in my Facebook feed enough times that I finally then go read to see what the hype is about show more and wind up clutching my stomach laughing over. But as a collection of essays, this thing really just didn't work for me. It felt like I was binge-reading a blog, and that's just a different experience to me than reading a cohesive and polished book of essays.
I feel like Irby's got a hilarious, sad book in her, but this one isn't it. show less
Hilarious and heartbreaking (but mostly hilarious). Profane, gross, TMI, an excellent way to spend the afternoon. If you've read and like her blog than you'll enjoy this book too. I loved the chance to get inside Samantha Irby's head and see how she thinks about things and some of the experiences that made her who she is.
Members
- Recently Added By
Lists
Featured in Fat Talk by Virginia Sole-Smith
103 works; 1 member
Author Information
7+ Works 3,467 Members
Smart, edgy, hilarious, and unabashedly raunchy New York Times bestselling author Samantha Irby explodes onto the printed pages in her uproarious first collection of essays. Irby laughs her way through tragicomic mishaps, neuroses and taboos as she struggles through adulthood; chin hairs, depression, bad sex, failed relationships, masturbation, show more taco feasts, inflammatory bowel disease, and more. Updated with her favorite Instagramable, couch-friendly recipes, this much-beloved romp is a treat for anyone in dire need of Irby's Infamous, scathing wit and poignant candoor. show less
Some Editions
Awards and Honors
Distinctions
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 2013
- Blurbers
- august, john; zulkey, claire; Maslin, Janet; Bolonik, Kera; Stevens, Heidi
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 477
- Popularity
- 63,428
- Reviews
- 21
- Rating
- (3.78)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 7
- ASINs
- 3
