Irby is forty, and increasingly uncomfortable in her own skin despite what Inspirational Instagram Infographics have promised her. She has left her job as a receptionist at a veterinary clinic, has published successful books and has been friendzoned by Hollywood, left Chicago, and moved into a house with a garden that requires repairs and know-how with her wife in a Blue town in the middle of a Red state where she now hosts book clubs and makes mason jar salads.
This is the bourgeois life of a Hallmark Channel dream. She goes on bad dates with new friends, spends weeks in Los Angeles taking meetings with tv executives slash amateur astrologers while being a cheese fry-eating slightly damp Midwest person, with neck pain and no cartilage in [her] knees, who still hides past due bills under her pillow. The essays in this collection draw on the raw, hilarious particulars of Irby's new life. Wow, No Thank You. is Irby at her most unflinching, riotous, and relatable.
"As fitting a response to 2020 as I can imagine... Wildly, seditiously funny.... Read Irby because she knows what it means to live with a fair amount of panic and largely indoors.... She might be our great bard of quarantine--with an unimpeachable daytime pajama look.... This is her voice: deadpan, confiding, companionable.... [Her] three collections, which span a decade, ought to be read together, with this latest as a coda, striking its valedictory note." - Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
"Samantha Irby's Wow, No Thank You is a gift that everyone should give themselves and each other. She writes with such wisdom about our culture and such honesty about herself. And nobody--but nobody--is funnier. Every time I read Irby, I feel freer." - Glennon Doyle
"Funny and sharp--it's a frighteningly precise look at the cultural landscape. I can only read one essay at a time--not just because I'm distracted, but so as to savour Irby's wit and wisdom." - Candice Carty-Williams, The Guardian
