Samantha Irby

Samantha Irby built a following through a blog she started in Chicago in 2009, then moved into essay collections. Meaty came in 2013, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life in 2017, and Wow, No Thank You in 2020, which entered the paperback nonfiction bestseller list at number one and took the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for bisexual nonfiction. Those essays deal with leaving the city for Kalamazoo in Michigan and with the strangeness of writing for television; her credits there include Shrill, Tuca & Bertie and And Just Like That. Irby grew up in Evanston, Illinois, and nursed her mother through multiple sclerosis. Quietly Hostile appeared in 2023.