We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

April 1, 2017
A blogger (Bitches Gotta Eat) has to laugh to keep from crying--or maybe killing somebody--in this collection of essays from the black, full-figured female perspective.The second collection of essays by Irby (Meaty, 2013) explores what it means to be "fat and black." Though she has an active and diverse sex life, the author seems to prefer staying home with her cat, with whom she's "trapped in this mutually abusive codependent relationship." She watches a lot of TV and eats a lot of junk food while watching junk TV. She prefers writing jokes for online consumption rather than interacting with so-called real people in the so-called real world. "People are boring and terrible," she writes. "I am boring and terrible. My funny runs out, my cute runs out, my smart sometimes hiccups, my sexy wakes up with uncontrollable diarrhea. I have an attitude. And a sharp edge!" Irby shows her sharp edge throughout a collection that touches on topics ranging from the potential pros and cons of living in a small town, her employment adventures at an animal hospital, her upbringing with an alcoholic, abusive father and the mother he exploited, her preoccupation with death, and her unpredicted path to lesbian marriage. She responds to a pre-marriage questionnaire that asks, "how important is sex to you?" with "Is there such a thing as 'the opposite of important?'....Hopefully lesbian bed death is real and not another unattainable fantasy the Internet has lied to me about, like poreless skin." Though the collection is uneven, and many of the pieces strain for effect, some are very funny, some of them ring painfully true, and the best do both. Consider the essay about what happens when all of Irby's friends have reached the birthing and raising children stages, and she has no experience around kids: "I forget when they're within earshot and say mean things about dead people or recount in excruciating detail the highlights of my most recent gynecological exam." Personal embarrassment provides plenty of material for in-print or online entertainment.

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 15, 2017
In her new book of essays, Irby, author of the blog bitches gotta eat and a previous essay collection, Meaty (2013), is once again the inimitably candid, uber-confessional friend readers will happily spend a few hundred pages with. Master of both in-your-face jokes and clever, sneaking humor, Irby fills out her application to star on The Bachelorette, the show where a woman is surrounded by 25 slabs of brisket clamoring to drink her dirty bathwater. She relays a bathroom emergency on the side of a gridlocked highway. She and a friend escape relatively unscathed from a Civil War reenactment in the Chicago suburbs. Writing about topics like growing up poor, anxious, and unhappy, turning 18 at the same time her wayward father died, dealing with depression ( Do black girls even get to be depressed? ), figuring out how exactly one is supposed to deal with money, or the special challenge of understanding a loving relationship after so many bad ones, Irby's brilliant blend of honesty and humor will have readers' tears streaming for all kinds of reasons.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)