Wow, No Thank You.: Essays

“Convenience is the number one driver of everything I do.”

Throughout the essays, Irby depicts herself as taking the easy route in every circumstance of her life. She offers a multitude of examples, explaining that she knows nothing about home maintenance, wears the simplest clothing she thinks she can get by with, eats easily prepared food from convenience stores, and avoids large social gatherings when possible. These traits, though honestly portrayed, belie the reality that her physical health challenges require constant oversight and that living in abject poverty for decades robbed her of the opportunity to invest in those typical life choices—cooking, self-care, quality wardrobes—that she admits to desiring.

“My iPhone is my constant companion in this dull and irritating world. […] I remain in breathless pursuit, hustling to keep her both updated and paid for, connecting her to the fastest Wi-Fi speeds available, wooing her with exorbitantly priced protective cases and as many off-brand charging cords as there are outlets in my home. Yet my phone barely acknowledges that I’m alive—and that only makes me want her even more.”

Unlike some of her residences, vehicles, and important personal possessions, Irby’s iPhone proves the one expensive luxury that she acquires and maintains. As with other objects in the narrative, she personifies her smartphone and describes it in relationship to herself. Almost invariably, the body part, animal, or object she personifies treats her with scorn. Here, she pampers her adored phone, which does not respond in kind. Irby uses these essays to describe an existence in which any item that is not indifferent to her is intent on disrupting her life.

“Apple put this new Screen Time feature on the iPhone that’s supposed to, I don’t know, shame me into putting down the drug they won’t stop peddling to me. Every time I get that notice, I take it as a challenge to spend even more time messing around on my phone.”

This passage serves as a good example of Irby’s focus upon the welcome distractions of materialism. She captures the irony of Apple, which includes the Screen Time app to advise users of their total time spent using their phones, ostensibly so they can decide to be judicious and put their phones away, while at the same time working to make their product ever more seamless and addictive in order to maximize the time their customers spend using it.

“The closer I creep toward the precipice of 40, the more time I spend listening to the same songs I listened to in high school and combing through surprisingly vivid memories of my time there, which is wild, because I did not actually have a good time being young!”

Irby repeatedly makes reference to her app^roaching 40th birthday with ominous, seemingly fearful comments, describing this milestone birthday as a precipice or that she is “staring down the barrel^” of her 40th year. In this way, the birthday serves as a useful marker of narrative time, with the early essays preoccupied with the approaching milestone and the later ones reflecting on what it means to have passed it. These references track with a growing note of intimacy toward herself, her accomplishments, and observations about those currently in her life, such that readers may perceive her 40th birthday brought about a degree of mellowing.

“I killed mine [parents] while I was still a teen, because I knew that if I didn’t, my adult life would be ceaselessly tormented by the insurmountable demands of my overbearing mom and dad, people who couldn’t bother to teach me how to balance a checkbook but would nevertheless feel entitled to weigh in on my choice of career and life mate and Internet service provider.”

The author speaks ironically about her deceased parents, who died within six months of one another while she was in her late teens. Here, she describes the irony of her parents believing they had the right to be judgmental about her personal life when they were uninvested in her well-being while alive. She also suggests that being a parent implies the duty of teaching a child the necessities of cultural survival and that parents who fail in this duty forfeit the right to make value judgments about their children’s decisions.

“[…] first you have to recognize that there being one right, perfect person is a fallacy sold to you by romantic comedies. […] ‘Settling’ is a coarse way of saying ‘adjusting my expectations,’ and I think that gets a bad rap. Dude, I would rather settle than be ‘chronically unfulfilled due to my outsize desires.’”

In the essays, Irby describes numerous occasions when she pursued someone to whom she was deeply attracted, only to be ghosted. In other relationships, the idolized partner became a source of disenchantment. Perhaps as a result of those relationships, Irby exudes a cynicism about romance, permanent commitments, and monogamy. True to her beliefs as voiced in this quote, she does not express adoration for her wife, rather describing their relationship as a developing partnership.

“Today, Emily and I share an office. […] She writes and illustrates gorgeous children’s books about little glasses-wearing babies who explore the ocean and learn about weather, and I do a lot of anxiety snacking while writing about my prickly labia and feeling self-conscious about the music I choose for us to work to. We have a strong, solid relationship.”

Irby places high value on friendship and notes that, in moving away from the Chicago area to much smaller Kalamazoo, she became bereft of friends. In her self-deprecating manner, the author portrays herself as unrelentingly clumsy in her attempts to acquire new friends. Emily, described here, is someone who decided to become Irby’s friend despite the author’s self-professed lack of social skills. This is an example of Irby using self-critical language to praise those around her for whom she cares. As the essays proceed, she uses the same device to praise her wife, Kirsten.

“I got my period for the first time, without warning, when I was in the fifth grade. Which, in hindsight, feels incredibly early?”

Unrelenting, significant physical problems are one of the chaotic elements Irby notes as a perpetual aspect of her life’s story. The author has been plagued with unpredictable, unmanageable menstrual periods from her 10th year. This was also one of the elements of her youth that set her apart from others her age and resulted in a sketchy social life as a young adult. The essay title, “Hysterical!,” is an ironic reference to the uninformed, misogynistic attitudes that often greet women dealing with chronic illness.

“I’m pretty sure my mom was annoyed at having to deal with this from a child so young, but listen, I’m not the one who brought home milk pumped with hormones. Like every other poor kid with sick or addicted parents, I knew that I needed to make myself small, that my problems should remain my problems only.”

Irby again displays the chaos of her early life as the youngest of four sisters. She hints at the resentment her mother felt toward her by saying that her mom got a hysterectomy immediately after the author’s birth. This actually implies that her mother experienced menstrual difficulty as well. Irby amplifies the disordered nature of her upbringing by pointing out that she was exposed to troubled individuals with addictions and responded by minimizing her presence. Her few references to grandparents center on her brief time of living in the home of her “mean grandmother,” who was restrictive and hostile.

“Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever watched birds eat from a feeder you filled and hung for them?”

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever been to couples therapy?

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever worn a T-shirt with words on it, then spent the entire day awkwardly waiting for people to finish reading your breasts?”

These three consecutive listings from this essay demonstrate three ways these proverbial observations can be interpreted. Watching birds eat from a feeder one created may interrupt romance because it is more fun than sex. Thinking about what is said during couples therapy may interrupt romance because it is more important than sex. The annoyance of remembering how people responded to the clothing you wore and how they looked at it may be so annoying that it interrupts sex.

“Baby, if I was rich, I would have all my rotted stump teeth cut out from my skull and replaced with piano keys. I am obsessed with rich people who don’t fix their crowded, overlapping teeth, because my teeth have always been a dead giveaway that I have nothing and came from even less.”

As an astute observer of human behavior, Irby points out the economic realities behind cosmetic dentistry. Middle-class individuals, she notes, invariably have their crooked, misaligned teeth and jaws corrected through braces or surgery, while for lower-income people, the cost of such interventions is often prohibitive. As a result, crooked teeth have become a marker of low social status. At the other end of the scale, the author notes, there are wealthy people who are so rich that they thumb their noses at straightening teeth in that, as she says, they do not need straight, “beautiful” teeth to prove to anyone that they have money.

“Loving yourself is a full-time job with shitty benefits. I’m calling in sick.”

After systematically reviewing what society views as necessary to take care of each part of the human body, Irby declares that the effort is too expensive, time consuming, and ultimately futile. Readers may note that the author has at least three health conditions—Crohn’s Disease, obesity, arthritis—that interfere with all attempts at self-care and beautification. Throughout the essay, she describes the ridiculous, self-deluding aspects involved in self-care.

“A guy with a salt and pepper 70s mustache casually wearing an inside vest with a laugh told me he might shoot me if I took my phone out to text in a movie theater from his assigned seat behind mine. […] I’m not ready for the kind of racism that screams: THE PERSON WEARING THIS RED HAT MIGHT HURT YOU.”

In this essay, the author deals with the culture shift she experiences in moving from the greater Chicago area to Kalamazoo, Michigan. One of the most surprising, disconcerting aspects for Irby is the prevalence of openly expressed racism and gender bias. She notes that, as a Black woman from a progressive region who is now in a lesbian marriage with a white woman, she has made herself a tempting target for those who wish to bully, terrorize, or seriously harm minority individuals.

“Over the last couple years [sic] I have had to learn to live in a house, and that is one of the hardest and most boring things I’ve ever had to do. [...] I’m not going to remind you yet again that I grew up in a trash-filled possum nest with intermittent basic cable, but in case you’re unfamiliar with the plight of my youth, let’s just say that the first time I had to work my own thermostat, I was 35 years old.”

The conveniences of The Spontaneous Life Irby experienced prior to her marriage collapse when she moves into her wife’s home in Kalamazoo. The author expresses dismay at the variety of items needing maintenance or repair. In previous residences, Irby writes, most often upkeep was simply ignored. Once living in an apartment, her maintenance requests were handled by a “super” named Joe who responded promptly, though in all her years of living in the complex, she never met him. Irby expresses dismay that she is now in the super’s position with no knowledge of how to accomplish the tasks her wife’s house requires.

“I was brought up in church, but taken there by people who smoked and drank and had multiple children out of wedlock. […] I’m not really religious and I’m ambivalent about church except for the music, of which I have many secret playlists that I listen to on the regular, but I also don’t like to mess with “the devil.” I mean, he’s definitely not real, but just in case?”

As with virtually all the essays, Irby digresses from the topic of the piece to share tangentially related remembrances. In this case, she begins by expressing the belief that the ghost of Helen, her deceased housecat, haunts her. This leads to a chain of reflections about the possibility of ghosts, a possible interaction with a spirit (that turns out to be the upstairs neighbor’s stereo), and the unlikely possibility that Satan is real. Everything pertaining to ghosts in her past may be sketchy, she notes, though she feels certain Helen is haunting her.

“If I wanted to be rejected, I would just get another evil cat, I said, and pouted. We sat there for what felt like ages, cooing and singing and trying to coach Pitchfork out of her shell. Kirsten rewrote her thesis while I did the last four years of my taxes, and still...nada.”

Having decided that cats are unaffectionate and that she and her wife are ready for a dog, Irby spends some time trying to woo a fearful shelter dog, whom she alternately refers to as “Backhoe, Wheelbarrow, Tractor, Hog Oiler, Cornstalk, and Pitchfork” (193) into interacting with them. Convinced that the dog is too “emotionally damaged” to adopt, Irby settles for a wicked kitten, against whose adoption Helen’s ghost protests. She alternately calls the new cat “Jackie Brown”—a reference to the indomitable movie heroine—and, in the acknowledgments, as “Carrots, who is perfect.”

“Don’t you also need—I don’t know—a strong character and moral center in order to guide a child through life? These two children in my house are not my children, so I’m off the hook I guess, but y’all know my luck is bad. […] I have not lived the kind of life worth emulating I didn’t have the kind of childhood I can look back on and draw wisdom from. I had bad parents!”

Not only does Irby express helplessness in caring for her new home but also in relating to her stepson and stepdaughter. Amazed at their intellectual abilities, she cannot relate to their academic needs, leaving her to wonder if her best chance to be a positive influence is as a role model. Here, she reflects on her extremely negative feelings about her own upbringing. Because her own childhood experiences were flawed and her parents were poor role models, Irby believes she cannot be a good example. Though she doesn’t acknowledge it, her recognition of these shortcomings itself implies a degree of wisdom and self-knowledge that her own parents never had.

“[…] he is relentlessly optimistic, which is a feature of this industry that can be very confusing to a normal, realistic person who does not mind the truth. I have grown used to being ruthlessly edited and have zero ego when it comes to having my work corrected.”

Here, Irby describes her interaction with her Hollywood—not her literary—agent. She describes the hyperbole, faux assurances, and misleading verbiage spoken by her agent that she then experiences throughout her trip to California to pitch to studio executives the idea of turning her first book, Meaty, into a television series. Irby contrasts her glam interactions with the showbusiness individuals with the honest assessments she receives from her editors. The author places a greater value on hearing the truth than being showered with false compliments and unrealized hopes.

“A real office! With the desk and some chairs and a couple of windows plus a computer and a file cabinet! No one else seemed phased. Oh, sure, of course. They were bona fide showbiz professionals […] who probably had dozens of offices throughout their careers. Meanwhile, I wrote my last book in the handicapped bathroom at my old job during my lunch breaks.”

As Irby’s writing career blossoms, she encounters moments like this, when her work on Lindy West’s television series brings her to Los Angeles again for a summer’s work. She details the stark contrast between the moneyed process of a writers’ group sitting about a table and ordering a catered lunch every day and her prior spontaneous, unpredictable writing experience.

“America needs more moments like that. More fat people, yes, doing normal stuff that isn’t dieting or being sad. […] But for me, Shrill was an opportunity to put a […] fat lady who can’t sing on TV, and it made people so fucking mad, and I love that.”

Irby writes prophetically of the cultural shift attempted by the writers of Lindy West’s serial Shrill. The author addresses the stereotypical popular media treatment of every character with obesity: living in misery, desperate to lose weight but unable to do so. Irby considers it an act of defiance to portray the obese characters in Shrill as actual, multifaceted human beings.

“I can’t cite credible sources and exhaustive studies to prove that growing up poor is basically a financial death sentence no matter how well you do in later life because I’m not a sociologist writing a textbook but...If I had access to generational wealth I probably could be a sociologist writing a textbook!”

The setting of virtually every essay relates to the poverty in which Irby lived as a child and which fully descended upon her after the deaths of her parents, after which she found herself living in a car, bathing in hourly hotels, and accepting handouts from questionable individuals. Here, she expresses the idea that her poverty prohibited her from taking advantage of the opportunities readily available to those with economic means. She writes from experience about The Impact of Poverty on Opportunity.

“I have never had a school loan, never financed a car, never owned anything worth a damn. I wrote bad checks on an overdrawn account for a month when I was 21, but somehow I never ended up in jail. I did end up in the Chex-System, which is like poverty jail and meant I couldn’t get a real checking account at a recognizable bank for the seven years it took to be removed from my credit history.”

Once an individual is locked in poverty, the processes one faces tend to reinforce the lack of opportunity, thus perpetually inhibiting the potential upward movement of those below the poverty line. Irby demonstrates here that, poverty is a self-perpetuating cycle, always creating new obstacles that make it extremely difficult to escape. Even as a popular author, Irby continues to struggle financially.

“Hello, 911? My brain is a prison, and anxiety is the warden. I am besieged by the undeniable urge to peel off my skin like it’s the layers of an onion until death claims me and I find relief in its cool embrace [...] I think I’ve reached my limit and I might need some help.

Okay, sure, I’ll hold.”

Irby composes an entire essay of make-believe 911 phone calls resulting from various emotional crises she has experienced or imagined. In this last call, she admits that the emergencies are self-induced but still overwhelming. That the 911 operator puts her on hold is an expression of the author’s belief that society’s safeguards and safety nets are inadequate to deal with the issues people face today. That she is willing to be placed on hold by the 911 operator is the author’s expression of self-deprecation: though she has numerous legitimate concerns, she does not find herself worthy to demand care.