Samantha Irby’s Quietly Hostile
A True Stories Book Club reading guide & excerpt
Hello,
First of all, there is one space left on my retreat in Salt Lake City in October - more details here.
Now, to the matter in hand. May’s True Stories Book Club is on:
Wednesday 22nd May 2024
6pm UK/1pm ET/10am PT
This month, my guest is Samantha Irby, online humorist at bitchesgottaeat, screenwriter and author of some of the funniest and frankest memoirs you’ll ever read. Quietly Hostile is no exception. Here’s a reading guide to get you up to speed - and there’s an exclusive excerpt at the end of this post too!
Just in case this is your first book club, here’s what you need to know:
Free subscribers get a reading guide and an audio recording of the live event.
Paid subscribers can join us live online for the discussion - a link and password is at the bottom of the page, after the paywall - and you can send in questions for Sam by posting them in the comments.
If you can’t make it, a full replay will be available as soon as possible (or a little later in your podcast feed).
You don’t have to read the book to attend the event - but however you use it, hopefully the book club will inspire you to find some brilliant new books and authors!
About the book
Fan of Samantha’s previous memoirs Were Are Never Meeting In Real Life, Meaty and Wow, No Thank You will know the score already: Quietly Hostile is a series of hilarious personal essays that will have you squirming in discomfort and squealing with delight, sometimes in the same sentence. If you’ve not read any of her work before: prepare for furtive joy, and a fair quantity of horrified laughter.
No writer tells the truth like Samantha Irby. She’s a virtuoso in voice and tone, equally at home discussing bathroom disasters, finding true love, grief and sex, all of them handled with her trademark deadpan sincerity. She does not hold back. But this is Samantha Irby: pandemic edition, touching on the bleaching of groceries, the adoption of a slightly weird dog, a brush with anaphylaxis and some fairly niche pornography.
Oh, and also her encounters with the fans of Sex and the City after working on the script for And Just Like That. These people are invested.
Don’t be fooled by Samantha’s self-effacing prose: this woman is a powerhouse.
I also strongly recommend this as an audiobook!
Essential links:
Samantha talking to Elamin Abdelmahmoud for the Commotion podcast
‘Samantha Irby Says It’s Okay to Hate Your Body’ in The New York Times Magazine
About Samantha Irby
Samantha Irby is an American comedian, essayist, blogger, and television writer. She is the creator and author of the blog bitches gotta eat, where she writes humorous observations about her own life and modern society. Her books We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, Wow, No Thank You, Meaty and Quietly Hostile are New York Times best-sellers. She has been a writer and/or co-producer for TV shows including HBO's reboot of And Just Like That, Work in Progress, Shrill, and Tuca & Bertie.
Here’s an extract from the essay ‘the last normal day’, taken from Quietly Hostile.
Oh, the halcyon days of February 2020, when we had no idea just how much our future selves would regret not hauling our asses out in the snow to expectorate in each other's faces while pressed uncomfortably close together in some dark and overly sexy bar.
I like to have the news on in the background when I'm puttering around at home because I find the tone-modulated droning of newscasters oddly soothing, and my preferred way of learning what's happening in the world is to absorb it via osmosis, never directly because that feels too stressful.
So in the weeks prior to mandatory lockdown (Is that even what it was called?), I hadn't panicked because, like, when everything is breaking news absolutely nothing is breaking news? How do you know if it's nuclear war or if it's just a celebrity getting divorced when all you hear echoing from an adjacent room every single time anyone does anything is *dun DUN dun!* [the serious news intro theme] "Breaking news at the top of this hour lin an animated yet sober newscaster voice]. Good evening, America, I'm Brick Shetland, reporting live from the newsroom ..."
By March, cable news was breathlessly reporting that people in Europe and Asia were coughing to death from some new easily transmissible virus unlike any the world had ever seen and that airports were shutting down, but then with the exact same urgency an anchor would be reading a rundown of the then president's angry tweets, and no one I knew really understood the magnitude of the crisis that was about to be upon us because none of my friends are epidemiologists and we all have access to the same CNN. In Chicago, I would go to work at a studio in Edgewater in the morning then return to my temporary home overlooking the screeching L and cheerfully lit Merchandise Mart at night, and I did all that again and again and again and again, and then suddenly the headlines screamed.
WASH YOUR HANDS
ORDER DELIVERY FOR EVERY MEAL BUT OPEN THE DOOR FOR THE DELIVERY PERSON AT YOUR OWN PERIL
SPRAY YOUR MAIL WITH LYSOL, BLEACH YOUR GROCERIES
CANCEL ALL YOUR RESTAURANT RESERVATIONS
IF YOU SO MUCH AS LOOK AT AN UBER YOU WILL DIE
WASH YOUR HANDS
ORDER EVERYTHING YOU POSSIBLY CAN ONLINE AND BURN YOUR PARCELS UNDER THE SUN BEFORE THEY CROSS YOUR THRESHOLD
IF YOU ARE NOT AT HOME, GO TO YOUR HOME AND DON'T LEAVE, UNLESS YOU NEED TO GO TO WORK AND-FINE, OKAY, SWING BY THAT BIRTHDAY PARTY IF IT LOOKS FUN
GOOD LUCK FINDING SANITIZER!
GLARE AT ANYONE WHO SO MUCH AS CLEARS THEIR THROAT IN YOUR GENERAL VICINITY
STOCKPILE TOILET PAPER FOR NO DISCERNIBLE REASON
PEOPLE ARE DYING AND WE'RE GONNA LET THEM
SHOULD YOU BE WORRIED THAT YOUR CAT HAS COVID????????
PURCHASE THE DIGITAL VERSION OF CONTAGION ON AN IMPULSE AND TRY NOT TO SCREAM TO DEATH IMAGINING THAT AS OUR COLLECTIVE FUTURE
MAYBE IT'S FINE FOR YOU TO GO TO THAT OUT-OF-TOWN WEDDING?
WASH YOUR HANDS
But no one really knew anything. At least not definitively, from what I could tell through my passive consumption of broadcast news. Everyone in the writers' room kept going to work because our em-ployer, Showtime, was expecting a season of television from us in exchange for all the Thai food and LaCroix they'd paid for, and also because the papers were casually like "Maybe Steam Clean the Shit Bought at Walgreens When You Get It Home, If You Feel Like It" and not "WARNING WARNING DO NOT BREATHE COMMUNAL AIR."
I hope you’ll be able to join us live next Wednesday to meet Sam - I cannot wait. Paid subscribers: we’ll get an event link in the Chat on Monday, I promise! We’re trying to make sure the new platform is exactly right, and that’s harder than I thought. But we’ll get there!
Take care,
Katherine
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