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.

It can ascend to high silliness (a passionate, utterly unforgivable defense of the minor works of the Dave Matthews Band, for example) and then, without any strain, carry us into the darkest rooms in her past. As a child, growing up in Illinois, she was the sole caretaker of a mother with multiple sclerosis. She attempted suicide at 13, after years of strain. Her parents died, six months apart, when she was still a teenager.

Her father, an alcoholic, froze to death on the streets. She dropped out of college, lived in her car for three months, squatted where she could. “Once upon a time, I lived in a crack house,” she writes in this new collection.

““It wasn’t so much a crack house as it was a rooming house that a lot of people who enjoyed smoking crack cocaine lived in, but ‘crack house’ rolls off the tongue better, so I’ll just call it that.”

” In the opening essay of “Meaty,” she mordantly surveyed the damage. She was 30. She had survived, but at what cost? She bore intense health problems and the bills to match.

“I don’t have a man in my life,” she wrote. “I’m not that smart. I have squamous metaplasia in my ileum. ” She had a broken foot that wouldn’t heal, a broken radiator, a broken computer.

She pined for parents, for someone to make her a mix tape. “I WANT A WINNING LOTTERY TICKET,” she groused. Irby wrote her own ticket. In “Wow, No Thank You,” we meet her at 40.

She’s graduated from the “trash-filled possum nest with intermittent basic cable” of her childhood, and married a calm, capable woman, the type who makes her own kombucha. She has moved from blogging to writing for the Hulu show “Shrill. ” “Meaty” is being developed into a television series. She goes Hollywood, in her mild way — microdosing psilocybin mushrooms and enjoying recreational IV treatments.

Life has never been better to Samantha Irby. Can she still be funny? It’s a gentler kind of humor we encounter here. The drama of publishing a book or pitching a show to Netflix executives (so many chairs in the room!

) can’t compete with the rawness and surreal scatological pageantry of the earlier essays. Nor must it. These three collections, which span a decade, ought to be read together, with this latest as a coda, striking its valedictory note and reiterating the refrain that runs through the essays. In a crisis, circling “life’s drain,” as Irby calls it, don’t cling unnecessarily to dignity.

But don’t for a second stint on the good snacks, or the good stories.