In her 2013 debut Meaty, New York Times Bestselling author and “Bitches Gotta Eat” blog creator Samantha Irby made an indelible literary impression with her collection of hilarious and often poignant essays about sex, race, society, friendship, work and living with Chrohn’s disease. With her blog and the subsequent publication of Meaty, Irby established a sincere and relatable voice at a relatively young age. Currently on tour promoting the rerelease of Meaty, Irby is a nervous traveler and understandably misses wife Kirsten when she is on the road, but she enjoys meeting fans of her work, adding: “I can’t believe people pay for my stuff.”
When it was decided that Vintage would move forward with the rerelease of Meaty, Irby wasn’t tempted to change the actual substantive content, but she did see ways to improve the final product. “For the (rerelease) I wrote new recipes at the end and we grouped the essays differently,” Irby explains. “It’s actually copyedited, which it really wasn’t before and I’m sure they read better and cleaner. I mean I have evolved in five years, so I was looking at things and I thought, ‘You know, I can make these jokes funnier,’ but my editor said, ‘No, we need to keep the integrity of this thing.’”
“Broad City” cocreator and star Abbi Jacobson was so taken with Meaty’s uninhibited charm that she contacted Irby about developing a TV show based on the book and later helped to bring Jessi Klein, executive producer and head writer of “Inside Amy Schumer” into the fold. For the past two years, the project has been in development with FX, but according to Irby, this is no longer the case. “We have a ton of ideas, we came up with a framework and developed a script,” Irby says. “Now, we’re just trying to find the best home for it.”
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In 2017, Random House LLC released Irby’s New Year, Same Trash: Resolutions I Absolutely Did Not Keep, a Vintage e-book short, and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, a book of essays. Well-received by critics and fans for its unfiltered and wry depictions of race, awkward sex and bad habits, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life became a New York Times Bestseller. Irby was also featured in Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America, which was also released last year.
When Irby was initially approached by friend, author and Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America co-editor Kate Harding about participating in the project, she was excited to be included, but felt that perhaps she wasn’t the right fit for the collection, due to the fact that she doesn’t deem herself political or, to use her term, scholarly. Irby, however, was eventually convinced and contributed an essay entitled “Country Crock,” in which she describes living amongst Trump signs, her transition from city dweller to country life with wife Kirsten, unintentional/hipster racism, feeling liberal and the fallacy of a post-racial America.
Considering Irby’s participation in an essay collection intended to empower and promote viewpoints from a diverse group of female writers, as well as her uncompromisingly honest and thought-provoking body of work, it seemed natural to ask Irby whether she herself felt empowered as a woman and as a writer. And while Irby is ecstatic at the thought of fans interpreting her writing as empowering, she is reluctant to describe herself in those terms and instead focuses on the freedom she feels to express herself.
“I think I have a lot of freedom in my writing that not a lot of people feel or write with, and I don’t have a lot of the traditional things that could hold me back from being free,” Irby explains. “My parents are dead, so nobody is going to sit me down at Thanksgiving and be like, ‘You know that thing you wrote about your vagina is disappointing to your father and I.’ I’ve always had a cool boss, who has let me write what I want, and supportive friends. I don’t censor my writing, because if people don’t like what I write, they’re not going to like me,” Irby continues. “I think when you’re free enough to write about things that are scary or are things that other people won’t write about, like writing in graphic detail about inflammatory bowel disease, and feelings of anxiety, grief and fear, those are things that people shy away from. I think I do have this gift of being able to find the humor in bad or sad or upsetting situations and that freedom is an empowering feeling.”
