Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby Page 0,112

it’s the layers of an onion until death claims me and I find relief in its cool embrace, and I know it took me a long time to finally call and I’m not 100 percent sure that this qualifies as an emergency, but I think I’ve reached my limit and I might need some help.

Okay, sure, I’ll hold.

an extremely specific guide to publishing a book

Here is how I got my books published so far. It is not that helpful!

I started my blog, bitches gotta eat, in 2008. Or maybe 2009? I’m not sure. I could look it up, but that’s boring! Actually, I first started a blog on MySpace because I wanted to impress this kid I thought wanted to have sex with me. I mean, he did the thing where he was very flirty, and seemed like he wanted to have sex with me, but he wasn’t overt about it, so I felt like I had to do something else to win him over. Okay, the truth is that he was very flirty, but not overtly so, and I don’t believe that people are honestly attracted to me without my first having to put on some elaborate show. And by “elaborate show,” I don’t mean “dress nice” or “deal with my seborrhea”; I mean “make them very specific playlists full of songs that prove how interesting I am.” From his MySpace, I gleaned that he was dating a poet. I cannot compete with a poet! I feel things very deeply, sure, but instead of making art out of those feelings, I cry inappropriately at commercials for new medicines. So he was dating a poet and she seemed cool and mysterious as poets do, and I immediately was like, “Wow, how did I waste so much time messaging a dude I can’t get with?”

I haven’t gone to therapy yet because I’m too fucking tired, but if I did my issues would boil down to:

Extensive childhood trauma caused by poverty, danger, illness, and grief

Callous detachment and fear of intimacy

Hours of time wasted on people who pretended to be romantically interested in me but just wanted me to tell them a joke

I don’t know that I have the resources to solve this crisis on a national scale, but listen, everyone: you can just ask people to tell you a joke. Leading people on is a hate crime. Especially when you could just say what you want and let them decide whether or not they want to give it to you without getting their romantic feelings involved. This is a careless thing that is probably unintentional sometimes, but, goddamn, just ask for what you want without looking up at me from under your hair (or whatever your chosen flirtation method might be), unless you’re truly trying to have clothes-on hand-sex, say what you want in a normal way so I don’t have to feel tingly and weird when I say no.

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I started writing short stories my sophomore year in high school. I had this amazing teacher, Nancy Kellman, who made us read Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery” (just, like, wow), and then assigned us to write short stories of our own. Mine was about a teenage girl who kills her mother because (a) I have always been incredibly dark and (b) I was afraid to write the tragicomic love story my heart desired, because what if she read that shit aloud to the class? Mrs. Kellman liked my story, and also sent me to the social worker for being disturbed, and throughout the rest of the year encouraged me to write more and met with me after school to work on all my nightmare fantasies.

Junior year I had a different teacher but I kept sneaking back to Mrs. Kellman’s classroom to slide my weird stories under her door, and she would give them back to me with very thoughtful critiques, and sometimes she left me little notes that were like, Bitch, are you okay? Not exactly, but you get it. My home life at the time was extremely chaotic, and my grades were definitely a reflection of that.