The difference I’m grateful for is while my disability has turned me into an overachieving self-punisher obsessed with external validation through hard work, Irby’s experiences of childhood neglect and of trying to speed date while wearing an adult diaper have made her “okay with just being okay.” When I read the sentence “I don’t do anything hard, because my life has already been hard” my outlook changed. We both have boundless appreciation for 90’s music. But we both have shaved heads to control the dandruff that can get into our eyelashes. I live with both parents while she lost both of hers young. We have different body types and traumas. We come from different races and class backgrounds. I want each of those women guillotined and their wealth redistributed. She can name each Real Housewife of New York. There are things I have in common with Samantha Irby and things I don’t. Even the notion of the body’s motions being loud is both a wry turn of phrase and a truism.

As someone with a chronic illness, I have been for several years. It dawns on me that I have already wasted an entire day. I wince against the sun’s garish rays, a sick feeling spreading through me. “I like to wake up naturally, gripped by a heart-pounding panic as the sun slices through my eyelids at noon, when it is perfectly aligned with my bedroom windows. Consider these lines from Irby’s opening essay, “Into the Gross.” I think they better express both the book’s overarching emotional state and why it has quite literally kept me from emotional collapse during this year that seems like it is actively trying to destroy us all so we as a species will stop decimating everything in our path. As someone who bought this book purely on the arched eyebrow I heard reading the title, I can’t overstate my fury at her publishers for not keeping either of those decisions. The book has a picture of a very fluffy, floppy-eared rabbit on the cover while her original vision was a hissing possum.

In an interview with Lindy West, Samantha Irby stated that the working title for Wow, No Thank You was Dying Is Fine.

Thank you samantha