Samantha Irby. Curbside Splendor Publishing, $15.95 paperback (250p) ISBN: 978-0988480421
It's good to be young. I remember
that. I'm not young anymore, and frankly wouldn't be young again for all the
money there is. But that's age's privilege, to celebrate itself. Every age's
privilege, in fact, and Samantha Irby celebrates being young.
In a very testy way.
Hell, if I had Crohn's disease, I'd
be testy too. In fact, I am testy, no Crohn's needed. But Irby gets testy over
very young problems, as in the essay "Would Dying Alone Really Be So
Terrible?":
“I want to watch porn by myself,
because a dude just won't let you take five minutes to masturbate without his
dick thinking it's an invitation, and then that five minutes becomes
twenty-five minutes (if you're lucky) of heat and sweat and effed-up hair and
having to remake the bed and being late for work and even then, after all that
grunting and shoving and groaning, you might STILL have to get your vibrator
out while this motherfucker passes out on top of the shirt you'd taken out to
wear to the office.”
This is the kind of problem a lot of
folks of either gender and all persuasions would enjoy having, if the dating
sites' usage and match-up numbers aren't complete lies.
Irby's brand of testy humor gets a
laugh-out-loud funny workout in her meditation on the American obsession with
weight, weight loss, effort-free weight loss, and laziness in "The
Tapeworm Diet." She appears, on her teensy little blog avatar, not to be
an immensely large person, but I don't know this for a fact as I've never met
the lady. She claims to be sizable: "I eat bad things and go to sleep
immediately afterward. There, I solved the mystery of fatness for you. You're
welcome." Garshk, and here I thought it was my slow metabolism!
Irby then goes on to skewer the
un-fucking-believable idiotic should-be-illegal insanities out there for an
unsuspecting public to follow as diets:
“The Twinkie Diet.
A typical day in the life of Kansas
State University nutrition researcher Mark Haub, creator of the Junk Food Diet,
which consists of 60% junk food supplemented by a protein shake, multivitamin
pills, and a can of green beans or four stalks of celery every day. He avoided
meats, whole grains, and fruits. September 10, 2010: A double espresso; two servings
of Hostess Twinkies Golden Sponge Cake; one Centrum Advanced Formula pill; one
serving of Little Debbie Star Crunch cookies (my jam!); a Diet Mountain Dew
(barf); half a serving of Doritos Cool Ranch corn chips; two servings of
Kellogg's Corn Pops cereal; a serving of whole milk (squirt!); half a serving
of raw baby carrots; one and a half servings of Duncan Hines Family Style Chewy
Fudge brownie; half a serving of Little Debbie Zebra Cake; one serving of
Muscle Milk Protein Shake drink; Total: 1589 calories.
Just reading that shit makes my
fucking teeth hurt. I think I also might've just caught diabetes through the
computer screen. This can't be life, right? Snack cakes and baby carrots? NO IT
CANNOT.”
Sing it, soul-daughter. Couldn't
have said it better myownself. The spoiledness of the average American is never
in more breathtaking relief than in diet advice and weight-loss program
information. Most people on the planet would like to have enough food to get
full once a day. People here eat so much they need advice on how not to turn
into land-blimps. Something is wrong with this picture. Samantha Irby makes you
giggle as she pokes your social conscience, so permaybehaps people who need to
hear will listen without realizing what they're hearing. It's the only way past
their privileged-person defenses, the evidence shows.
The collection is far and away best
taken in doses. It's like any smorgasbord. The offerings are tempting, and the
urge to overindulge is strong. Resist the urge that you not grow indifferent to
the charms of the groaning board! Read one or two of these tempting treats. Put
the book down, pick up something grim and joyless for a contrast...are you
caught up on your Bolaño reading? isn't there a new Murakami or
something?...and then come back to laugh and learn.
Wait! I didn't mean learn! I meant
enjoy! Enjoy, not something hard and boring like learn! (September 2013)
Purchase Meaty HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Richard Derus is a biblioholic and a passionate reader. From underneath
his tottering towers of unread tomes, he writes obsessively about his darlings
at Shelf Inflicted (a group blog),
Goodreads
(where he is a Forbes 25 top reviewer), LibraryThing (where
his personal library is comprehensively cataloged), and Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud,
where many otherwise unknown books are praised, panned, or poked fun at.
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