Wow, No Thank You: Essays

Relatable, amusing, and self-deprecating

If you are feeling lonely and isolated right now due to the pandemic, this book is the equivalent to mimosas with friends at brunch, losing your shoes at the dance club, or pretending to like an endive salad at a hipster restaurant. Irby is raw, funny, raunchy, and honest. She turns the humiliating experiences she has suffered with her Crohn's disease into funny anecdotes. She's humble about her successes and and gives advice for aspiring writers and comedians who want to follow in her footsteps. She talks about the mistakes she made as an orphan living in poverty, hooking up with the wrong people in her twenties in a way that points to the injustices and imbalances in society by making jokes instead of preaching. She discusses how she has grown as a person and matured into a still-not-so-confident middle aged woman who is going to wear those sweatpants out to a lunch date because she's sick of being uncomfortable. In other words, reading this feels like hanging out with an old friend where all pretense that everything is fine and perfect is abandoned.