In the opening essay of “Meaty,” she mordantly surveyed the damage. “It wasn’t so much a crack house as it was a rooming house that a lot of people who enjoyed smoking crack cocaine lived in, but ‘crack house’ rolls off the tongue better, so I’ll just call it that.” “Once upon a time, I lived in a crack house,” she writes in this new collection. She dropped out of college, lived in her car for three months, squatted where she could. Her father, an alcoholic, froze to death on the streets. Her parents died, six months apart, when she was still a teenager. She attempted suicide at 13, after years of strain. It can ascend to high silliness (a passionate, utterly unforgivable defense of the minor works of the Dave Matthews Band, for example) and then, without any strain, carry us into the darkest rooms in her past.Īs a child, growing up in Illinois, she was the sole caretaker of a mother with multiple sclerosis. This is her voice: deadpan, confiding, companionable. At best, she’ll concede to getting in her car and “looking at all the nature I don’t want to get on me.” “I like to sit at home in mild terror as the world rages outside without me, hoping that no one is going to drop by and expect me to come up with a humorous anecdote or ask me to have an opinion on something,” she once wrote. Samantha Irby, whose new book of essays is “Wow, No Thank You.” Credit. Pick up her new essay collection, “Wow, No Thank You” (as fitting a response to 2020 as I can imagine), or reach back to her previous two books: “Meaty” or her best, most spectacularly profane work to date, “We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.” Start anywhere, with any of her briny, misanthropic riffs on lust, marriage, aging, chronic illness, the art of “detachment parenting” two white stepchildren. If, in the grips of the pandemic, your ability to interpret an exponential graph has increased, well, exponentially, while your patience for narrative has plummeted, try Samantha Irby. Instead of a rule then, a recommendation, for this moment. For every rule I begin to establish, a hundred exceptions mushroom in my mind.

Could a book critic ever be so pragmatic? Eschew all books in the second person, avoid all books praised as “well crafted,” any novels blurbed by. I’ve envied Bourdain for the bluntness of that edict, its usefulness to the reader.

It’s been 20 years since Anthony Bourdain published his best-selling memoir “Kitchen Confidential,” with its solemn warning: Never order fish on Mondays.

Wow no thank you essays