It is a very human book and it left me wanting more of Irby and her work.This overly manic collection from blogger Irby ( We Are Never Meeting in Real Life) hints at the author’s talent, but ultimately disappoints. Is the writing perfect? Not by any means, but it gets to the heart of each issue with aplomb. The humour is so vivid, with so many laugh-out-loud moments, there’s a real danger that the excellence of Irby’s writing could be obscured. Using refreshingly different essay forms throughout the book, Irby avoids reader exhaustion – a real risk because this is high-octane stuff. But soon you will find yourself on a rip-roaring tour through Irby’s life, filled with honesty, belly laughs and more than a few poignant and hard-hitting moments. Do we really need another fat woman laughing at herself, no matter how hilarious? There’s a certain amount of tuning-in to be done, to get into the flow of Irby’s razor-sharp mind and writing style. There’s a lot of self-deprecation and this can, at first, be grating. Throughout this collection, we get up close and personal with the inner (and sometimes frighteningly outer) workings of both Irby’s body and mind. Irby’s closeness to financial and physical precariousness combined with her willingness to enter situations she feels unprepared for make us loyal to her-she again proves herself to be a trustworthy and admirable narrator who readers will hold fast to through anything at all. Irby defines professional lingo and describes the mundane details of exclusive industries in anecdotes that are not only entertaining but powerfully demystifying. She proves we can still trust her authenticity not just through her questionable taste in music and descriptions of incredibly bloody periods, but through her willingness to demystify what happens in any privileged room she finds herself in. If anyone whose life is being made into a television show could continue to keep it real for her blog reading fans, it’s Irby. Her essays poke holes and luxuriate in the weirdness of modern society.

From relationship advice she wasn’t asked for to surrendering her cell phone as dinner etiquette, Irby is wholly unpretentious as she opines about the unspoken expectations of adulting. Haphazard and aimless as she claims to be, Samantha Irby’s Wow, No Thank You is purposefully hilarious, real, and full of medicine for living with our culture’s contradictory messages.

Wow no thank you essays