I avoided Irby for a long time, having some impression that I was going to get a lot of self-important lecturing about everyone’s wokeness levels. I have no idea why I thought this, and I was totally wrong. I enjoyed her most recent book WOW, NO THANK YOU so much I immediately ordered her first one, MEATY. It’s not quite as fun as the other, because I think she was herself much less happy. This is the book of her rough twenties, the other of her much happier forties.
I have been struggling to articulate for myself quite what is so appealing about these books. I think it’s partly that’s its very freeing to have someone be so honest about themselves. I am not sure I need to know about her diarrhoea or about how she eats her dinner over the sink while masturbating or about how she sucks her thumb during sex, but it makes you feel like it’s possible to tell the actual truth about your own life without exploding.
I think it’s also the almost perfect contemporariness of the tone. I’ve never read anything quite like it. For example, here is part of a cocktail recipe:
Mix everything together in a punch bowl, then drink. And I feel you, I DON’T HAVE A PUNCH BOWL EITHER. But I do have a set of those nesting mixing bowls, so what I like to do is wash it really well, to make sure all the cookie dough crumbs and dried cereal milk is out of it, and let it double as a vessel for the booze.
Like, what is that CAPS LOCK? I love it.
Side point, she refers to her largish under-chin area (she’s on the bigger side) as her meatbeard. I am scarred and know this word will stay with me forever