There is no summing up Sam—no writerly preface, no small-talk tidbits, no rundown of vital stats that can suffice. She is irreducible, like a prime number, or a quark. Mention a recent story about her that she didn’t much like, and she’ll snort. “I told my friend Robbie I wished that thing had been called ‘Fat Nigga Tells Jokes.’”
Irby is not actually an id, or a stunted adolescent. That perception comes from the pop-culture confusion of persona with person, Belknap says, and “the insistent insinuation of writer into subject. Because Sam adopts the form of ‘sassy black chick,’ that’s how she’s seen. . . . We have a lot of presuppositions about what sassy is, and about what black is, and what chick-ness is. She has an eagerness to defile that, even as she leverages it for her own purposes. There’s a great power in that kind of subversion, but you have to be attentive.”
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Topics of Irby’s that get all the press: eating, farting, masturbation, the grim details of hetero sex, etc. She’s got a frank and sort of nihilistically cheerful patter about shitting that belies the harsh reality of her own Crohn’s disease. She writes some—not much—about a seriously difficult childhood and does so in such spare, unadorned language that it leaves the reader a little flayed.
Irby, who lives in Rogers Park, has worked the front desk at a local animal hospital for 11 years, a job that both gives her health insurance—a necessity given her illness—and, she says, a degree of stability and consistency that has allowed her to write. Without the job—and a boss she loves—she says neither the blog nor the book would exist. Born and raised at the edges of Evanston, the third daughter of three, Irby lost both her parents before she was 20 years old. She writes about them, and about her hometown, with a simplicity and clarity that veers from the tender to the terrifying.
Irby’s writing has a powerfully intimacy, a direct connection between her and her readers. On the page, she’s more an essayist than a storyteller per se, with the essayist’s intellectual habits—exploring ideas, contradicting herself, poking thoughts to see if they burst, and then reveling in the mess. The character of “Sam” is an almost palpable person sitting across the table from you, saying whatever the fuck comes into her mind. This is no airy tiptoe through the prim traditional essay. This writing is in your face—but more than that, really, it’s under your skin.
“I am probably the most unhappy person you will ever meet. I am incredibly unhappy. Not in a way that makes me less of a joy to be around. People love being around me, I make people feel good, I’m good at listening, I’m good at saying shit to make you feel better, to make you laugh. People fucking talk to me because I’ll talk to you. If you’ve got shit you wanna hear, I’ll tell you. But I don’t talk about being just a miserable person.
“A lot of white people are like, ‘I don’t even see color,’ and I’m like, ‘Well, you should. I need you to.’ That says more about their biases than anything, because that means they think they couldn’t relate to someone ‘like me.’ People are like, ‘Wow, you really crystalized this for me,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I know. Shocking, that someone with nappy hair would have this same set of feelings as you.’”
By Samantha Irby (Curbside Splendor). Reading with Chris L. Terry, Bill Hillman, and Daniela Olszeska at RUI: Reading Under the Influence, Wed 10/2, 7-9 PM, Sheffield’s, 3258 N. Sheffield, readingundertheinfluence.com, $3.
