Wow, No Thank You

Oddly enough, not the only book cover on here with that standout shade of green

Author: Samantha Irby

Publication: 2020

Genre: Essays

Oops - I meant to post this back in June and accidentally left it as a draft. Update as to why I haven’t updated in the next post.

This book seemed to be on everyone’s list last year, so I had to pick it up. It was fun even if I wasn’t quite the target audience. Irby and I do not appear to have much in common other than a female identity and some time living in the Midwest. I still enjoyed her insight and humor. It was witty and real and a quick easy read.

I totally related to ‘Are you familiar with my work?’ because damn, it is hard to make friends as an adult outside of work. ‘Country crock’ hit close to home with its clear-eyed perception of race and rural reality. ‘Hello, 911’, was pretty damn funny with its “GET ME OUT OF THIS SITUATION” one-offs. (“Hello, 911? I am the first person at this party.”)

I admit I was not a fan of the gross bits, funny as some of them were. (I also realized I had read ‘Hysterical!’ somewhere before.) Anyway, bit of a mixed bag overall. Enjoyed it fine, but might not seek out more of the same.

I’m not original and I’m sure someone has already made the following bookshelf juxtaposition, but I refuse to Google it to find out for sure.

Amy Poehler’s Yes Please beside Samantha Irby’s Wow, No Thank You

Bad Feminist (7/10)

This is, believe it or not, the first of these images I’ve used a filter on. Sorry for the reflection; I can never remember to take these in the daylight.

Author: Roxane Gay

Publication: 2014

Genre: Essays

I was SO close to getting through reviews for all the books I finished in 2020. And then I went and plowed through two more short books and now I have a backlog of four again. Where does the time go?!

Anyway, next up I tried out Roxane Gay’s much-toted essay collection to see what all the fuss is about. Bad Feminist, unfortunately, felt a bit dated in The Year of All Things Terrible 2020. Gay, writing in 2014, had not yet suffered through the last disaster of four plus years. (There’s at least one casual reference to Donald Trump as a useless rich person and not a menace to humanity.) A lot of essay’s subject matter has been brought to the forefront by movements like BLM and #MeToo in the intervening years. That’s undoubtably a good thing, it just makes the book read differently than it would have in 2015.

That subject matter sometimes worked for me and sometimes didn’t. I enjoyed Gay’s personal reflections and a lot of her cultural commentary. I was much less interested in her dissection of other media, particularly the few chapters early on where she writes about novels. Gay spends a lot of time describing the plots of other people’s books. I get it, I get it, there are links between each work she describes and they all make a point about how women operate in society. At the same time, if I wanted to know the plot of someone else’s book, I would read someone else’s book. There’s a whole essay rehashing the Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey series, for goodness sake. Gay’s writings about her own experiences (including her experiences consuming media) were much more compelling to me. YMMV.

At the same time, Gay gets high marks for pulling me across the page with her prose. She knows how to craft a beautiful paragraph with a sharp punchline of a concluding sentence.  And I can certainly relate to the concept of not doing feminism “right”, of not being a perfect woman or a perfect feminist. Bad Feminist is a hard look at some tough subjects, but it’s also an honest reflection on what it means to be a complex, normal, human.