The Wildly Funny Samantha Irby Is Back, Not a Moment Too Soon

Books of The Times It’s been 20 years since Anthony Bourdain published his best-selling memoir “Kitchen Confidential,” with its solemn warning: Never order fish on Mondays. I’ve envied Bourdain for the bluntness of that edict, its usefulness to the reader. 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 [redacted].

For every rule I begin to establish, a hundred exceptions mushroom in my mind. Instead of a rule then, a recommendation, for this moment. 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. 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. Read Irby because she understands the mutinies of the body. She understands suffering and uncertainty, and is wildly, seditiously funny on both. Read Irby because she knows what it means to live with a fair amount of panic and largely indoors.

She suffers from depression (her new book is dedicated to Wellbutrin), degenerative arthritis and Crohn’s disease, which can require her to wear a diaper. To her, the three most terrifying words in the language are “outdoor music festival. ” One of her essays is a manifesto titled “A Case for Remaining Indoors” (her argument hinges on: “My boyfriend, the television, is inside”). She might be our great bard of quarantine — with an unimpeachable daytime pajama look.

What amateurs we are by comparison, stockpiling toilet paper and bleating about our sourdough starters. “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. At best, she’ll concede to getting in her car and “looking at all the nature I don’t want to get on me. ” This is her voice: deadpan, confiding, companionable.