Last night, Samantha Irby spoke at Wilson Abbey with Women and Children First bookstore as part of her tour for her reissue of Meaty: Essays. She had the audience in peals of laughter for most of the event, reading her iconic essay “A Christmas carol” from We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.
“Is there anything worse than being old?” Irby said early in the program. “Being alive, I guess...but being old is number 2.” She paused to interject things as she read, mentioning to us that “you don’t have to go to Oberlin to fuck a lot of idiots. Tell your children,” and mentioning later that the Matt Schaefer whose birthday used to be her pin number was in the audience. She asked him if he’d known, and he said no. “That’s the gross kind of weird I am,” she said to the audience, “the ‘use your birthday as my pin’ kind of weird.”
The rest of the night after her reading was a Q&A during which we learned plenty about the personal lives of some audience members, and friends of Irby’s hassled her good-naturedly from the back of the room with questions on which of them she’d rather date. Someone asked her about her wife, and why she hadn’t written many essays about women when so many of her essays were about her dating escapades. Irby said she’d dated women before, but they’d never inspired the same amount of hilarity because, as she said to cheers of agreement from the audience, “Women are just better.”
One woman asked for dating advice. Irby said that there’s an idea that no one dates fat women, and that it’s not true. She added that she finds the idea of Tinder terrifying, but went on to say: “When you do date people, don’t ever feel like someone is doing you a favor...Also, you won’t die if you don’t have their attention. Also...try to be gay. It’s easy to learn.”
Her current projects are turning the lens outward a little more, on subjects such as politics and mental illness. “I just wrote a piece for a publication called Anxy Magazine,” she said, “a magazine about anxiety, which just knowing about it, it makes me anxious.” She told a long story about a recent mental breakdown she’d had on arrival in DC on book tour, saying, “I could have jumped off the rood that day. It would have been well within my rights,” but also saying that “If you give me ten minutes, I can pick the humor out of any bad situation.” She’s also working in Hollywood, trying to get a Meaty tv show made, and is about to move to Los Angeles to work on another show.
One audience member expressed worry about the lack of blog posts she’s been putting up (which, come on, give the girl a break), but Irby assured the audience that a new set of challenges will always give her more fodder for her essays. “If you get bored, let me know,” said Irby, “I’ll set something on fire.”
