Samantha Irby on the art of confessional writing

Samantha Irby is not shy about her shortcomings.

The blogger and author of the essay collections “We Are Never Meeting in Real Life” and “Meaty” writes both openly and hilariously about dealing with Crohn’s disease, awkward dating experiences and bad habits. She treats every subject — her love of junk food, reality TV and her difficult childhood — with the same tender and foul-mouthed frankness.

She’s currently on a book tour promoting the recently rereleased “Meaty” (Vintage, 272 pp., $15.95 paper). We caught up with Irby — who is as laugh-out-loud funny in real life as she is on the page — to talk about it. This conversation has been edited.

You wrote a book called “We Are Never Meeting in Real Life” and you are currently on a cross-country tour meeting all the people who read it in real life. Do you feel like you cosmically wished this upon yourself, somehow?

I would say yes, except I’m going to shift the blame a little bit to my editor, because I wanted to call the book “Everything Is Garbage.” But she was a little apprehensive about it, and I was like, I’m not an expert. I’ve never really done this before so I’m going to go with what you say.

She came up with a list of things, and “We’re Never Meeting in Real Life” was on there and I was like, yes, that sounds like me. So it’s sort of half on her and half on me that I am now forced to weather people making that joke a million times.

You’ve been on the road to promote the re-release of “Meaty,” your first book of essays. What is it like revisiting your old work?

Excruciating. Reading the first pass I was skimming, trying to spare myself humiliation. Reading something from years ago is just like reading my high school diary or something, where I’m like, “Oh man. I can’t believe that I thought that. I can’t believe that I wrote that.” But this time everybody’s reading it.

And then they were like, “Yeah, we want you do to an audiobook.”

Oh, God.

Yeah, and I did that, and um, I just wanted to peel my skin off like an orange. The first thing I thought was, “Why didn’t we let this die? Why didn’t we pretend I never wrote this?” Yeah, it was excruciating.

Is there anything you’ve written about where in retrospect you’re thinking, “I wish people didn’t know that about me?”

All of the “I pooped my pants,” that kind of stuff, I never regret it. The only things I do regret are any sort of vulnerability or sadness where I feel like I’ve conceded something to someone else. So when I write about getting my heart broken, and that person is still alive and can maybe read it and know how much they hurt my feelings.

But really, I never regret it because part of why I keep doing this is because I get feedback from people that’s like, “That thing you wrote really helped me.” If my talking about getting my heart hit by a bus is helpful, then I’m cool with it. 

I feel like what you do is a lot harder than what I do. You share such intensely personal things. I won’t even mention on Twitter that I have a husband. I don’t want people to know about me.

I feel like journalism is a little harder than what I do. Because my subject matter never changes. For me, once I started with the oversharing, the telling 90 percent of everything, I can’t stop now, you know what I mean? I can’t all of a sudden be like “No, the door is closed.”

Also in general, I just am a pretty confessional person, because it feels freeing to me. I am the kind of person who walks into a room and says, “Oh my God, I’m sweating, I can’t wear deodorant because I’m allergic to it, and I have to take a dump, see you in 10 minutes.” The freedom in that is worth more than the embarrassment.

But also I’m kind of shouting my stuff into a little echo chamber. You have to choose to click on my blog, you have to choose to buy my book, so it feels safer — there’s a little bit of safety in my particular brand of oversharing.