- Was that your original copy of it?
- No.
Okay.
That's an extreme reaction, I was just curious.
Oh, hi there, I'm Joel Stein.
If you're ever kind enough to invite me to your home
the first thing I'll do is a surprise.
But the second thing I'll do is look at your bookshelf.
I'm always curious, are there first editions?
Are you more of a paperback person or a hardcover person?
Do you dog ear your pages?
It's an amazing way to get to know someone
which is what we're gonna do today on "Show Your Shelf."
I'm so excited to meet today's guest, Samantha Irby.
Who's the bravest,
most honest humor essay writer I've ever read.
Her bio would make it seem like we have nothing in common
but nearly every essay in her amazing book,
"Wow, No Thank You," resonated with me.
We have the same socially anxious, self hating, lazy,
wondrous joy in the world.
My bookshelf tends to focus
on the socially anxious and self-hating part
but I'm guessing Samantha has more
of the wonder and joy and surprise.
I can't wait to find out if I'm right.
♪ Show your shelf ♪
♪ Show some spine ♪
♪ To staff your tiny jackets ♪
♪ Show me yours I'll show you mine ♪
♪ We're delighted to have you with us ♪
♪ Perhaps we appear pretentious ♪
♪ But we're sincerely here to share the wealth ♪
♪ So show your shelf ♪ ♪ Show your shelf ♪
♪ Show your shelf ♪
- Hello, Samantha Irby.
Thank you so much for being on "Show Your Shelf."
You are the esteemed author of many soft cover books,
including the 2020, "Wow, No Thank You."
- Joel, this is a highlight of my life, truly.
- I see things,
I don't feel like there's anything I'm familiar with.
What's Betty? What's "Caste"?
What is going on in here?
- Well, "Caste" is the new Isabel Wilkerson,
Like the followup to "The Warmth of Other Suns."
- Oh, it sounds familiar. - Joel.
- I know, what I'm learning from the show
is I've never read a book.
Everyone mentions books and I've never read any of them.
- But you're like a smart news-person.
Okay, first of all,
that book is too smart for me to even own.
So the fact that you don't have it
maybe you're not as smart as I thought
- See, this is why this is so dangerous
to show people your bookshelf
or to look at people's bookshelves.
It's so revealing and makes you so insecure.
So Isabelle Wilkerson is...
What's the book about what am I...?
- Well, it's not like a beat reading,
but I feel like as an African American, I have to have it.
"The Warmth of Other Suns" was about black people migrate,
migrating, is that the right word, from the South up North?
After-- - The Great Migration?
- Yes, see, you are smart.
I didn't go to college you did.
So "Caste" is a follow up to that.
It's about like race stuff.
If you came to my house and like pointed out that book,
I'd be like, "Okay, morning edition."
- I'd love to take a closer look at some of your books.
Can you give us a shelfy
- This is my dining room bookshelf, one of my many shelves.
It's just a carnage.
- It seems like there's books you're never
even gonna be able to reach.
What do you do if you need a book
behind some of those other books.
- Those books behind other books don't exist.
Oh, okay.
- Can you list some of the authors?
'Cause I can't see that well that are in front of you.
- Well, I have a lot of Jasmine Guillory's romance books.
There are some Mary H.K. Choi.
I have a lot of horror and thriller.
Some Lindy West, some Lena Dunham.
What else?
I love Marian Keyes, she's one of my favorite writers.
- These books are enormous.
- If I read a book, I want it to be substantial.
- What would surprise someone
if they came over your house and saw that bookshelf?
- Oh, I hear okay, some self help books.
This one is called "Brave on the Rocks"
and this other one is called "Spilling Open."
I think there was a time in my life
when I aspired to be like more of an artistic person.
I thought you had to be like a really deep writer.
I didn't understand that you could just be an idiot
and still write things.
It was good to read about her journey
but like I'm not deep, or spiritual, or truly anything.
- So the self-help book taught you
that you are not at a deep person.
When did the notion
that one could write about oneself strike you first?
- When I read David Sedaris,
I was like "Oh, this dude has had an insane childhood,"
which I also had.
And he is writing about it in a very funny way.
And I was like, "I didn't know, you could do that."
And I was probably way too old to not know this
but I saw it nonfiction either had to be like history books
or like books about plagues or whatever, or like textbooks.
I didn't know that there was a market
for writing about your self.
- Do you have that Sedaris' book in front of you?
- Yes, "Me Talk Pretty One Day."
- So how old were you
or what point in your life were you in when you read this
and how did you hear about it?
- So I was in my early twenties
and I remember being on the bus, going to work,
and like reading the book and laughing out loud,
which of course I remember
because like someone on the bus was rude to me about it.
And every embarrassing--
- Why were they rude to you, what did they say?
- Shut the fuck up.
- What? No!
Cause you were laughing?
- Yes, people hate joy.
And I have like every embarrassing interaction burned
into my mind so I always remember that.
Despite like my spicy writing persona, I am conflict averse.
- I am extraordinarily, socially anxious
in a conflict avoidant way.
But in my writing, I am super aggressive and dick-like.
- Yes.
- And its almost-- - I can relate.
- I don't know if I do that just to get attention
or if I do it because I don't get to do it in real life
or it's the real me.
Why do you think you do that?
- Behind a computer where I am insulated
from people's reactions,
it's easy to be myself.
But out in the world,
I don't know if you have to be raised to have confidence
or I don't know what sort of alchemy...
I just I'm terrified of everything I always think I'm wrong.
I always think I'm doing something wrong.
It's terrible.
- There's a lot of David Sedaris
that he presents in a very shallow way that's super dark.
He presents his meth bender and his OCD
like they're charming funny moments,
but you read between the lines and he was addicted to meth,
and his life fell apart and it was scary,
and he was being horrible to other people.
- I know, I think that's like, what's so good
about his work is you're like, "Ha-ha-ha, this is terrible,"
but it's so funny and gray.
- You have, I'm told like many bookshelves in your house,
Why did you choose to show us this one?
- Well, first it's because it's the most beautiful,
it's very colorful and there's a wide variety of things.
There's like Isabel Wilkerson to show you
that I have a brain, but then there's--
- Wait, so when someone comes over your house,
what are you hoping that they see, Isabel Wilkerson?
Or what do you...
- I mean, I have to make a confession.
This is so stupid, why am I admitting this to you?
The rearranging I did was I had a bunch of writing awards
on the bookshelf that I didn't want you to think
I was an asshole who displayed her writing awards.
- But you are.
- So, what I really hope people see is that I've won awards.
- Well, then we should see it.
Where are these awards? - No.
- They just off camera? - I'm not getting them.
- Are they right below you?
- No, I've hid them in the other room.
- Are they huge?
- No, they're small and meaningless.
Okay. Hold tight, hold tight.
So this is the Root 100 award.
- That's a nice-looking award that's classy.
- That I got in 2017 for being one of the top 100 blacks.
- I have awards also.
Apparently - Oh, please show me.
- New York Association of Black Journalists, first place.
- You know, blacks and Jews we are like kinfolk.
- You chose, Terry McMillan's "Waiting To Exhale."
Was that your original copy of it?
- No.
- Okay, that was an extreme reaction, I was just curious.
- That was kind of an aggressive response.
No, my original copy I lent to one of my sisters.
So this is a used copy that I got
so it would look like I had battered this copy.
So it's sex in the city, but with more real problems.
- When did you first hear about it?
Where were you in your life?
- Oh, probably when I was like 10.
Every black woman in America was reading it.
All of the black women in my family--
- Why was that?
- My personal feeling is like
it was the first book of its kind.
So juicy and soapy, but also deals with like real problems.
It felt like revolutionary for 1989.
- How did the book affect you as a writer?
If at all, do you think.
- So, I hope this doesn't sound like corny,
but especially in the eighties and nineties,
there just was not a whole lot
of well-rounded black female representation.
These like glamorous women with like exciting problems,
It was like my first time seeing that
and it really does, not to be too cheesy,
but it really does open up something in you
to see yourself represented.
You need to read it. - Okay, I will.
- I mean, my fantasy now is
that you're like at a cafe somewhere reading
"Waiting to Exhale," and someone walks by and it's like,
"Is Joel Stein reading Terry McMillan."
- How does something make it to this bookshelf
instead of the other bookshelves?
- Well, we live in a segregated book household, my wife's--
- Oh you do.
- Oh yeah, yes.
She caught up...
Okay, another thing I didn't waanna tell you
but now I'm telling you,
she color codes her books.
So, she has like rainbow bookshelves in the other room.
- What does that mean rainbow bookshelf?
- Where like all the red spines are together,
the orange spines...
- Oh, I do not like that.
Your third book is, and we've never met.
I only know you through your writing.
This didn't add up for me at all.
It was "Carried" by Stephen King,
that's your original copy? - Yes.
- Well, from Walgreens,
it's all bend up and dog eared.
I'm a big fan of the mass market Walgreens checkout book.
Those are the ones that are keeping publishing alive.
I'm buying literature, you're buying literature,
but most people are buying like James Patterson
and I love those books.
- So you're at a Walgreens at what..?
How old do you think you were at this point?
- Oh, I was definitely in high school.
So I'm in Evanston, Illinois
bought "Carrie" deeply identified
with the outcast of it all.
- So, what's going on for you in high school
that you're relating to "Carrie?"
- We were super poor,
and so Evanston is an incredible place to grow up,
especially if you don't have any money
because everyone else has money.
So the poor kids benefit
like the public schools are really good.
Here's an experience
that sums up my entire high school experience.
One day I was at school in the cafeteria line
and this girl turns to me and is like,
"That's my dad's shirt."
And I'm like, "What, how, what do you mean?"
And she's like, "That's my dad..."
It was like some golf shirt
that her dad had given to Goodwill
that we bought 'cause we were poor people
and I'm wearing this girl's father's old shirt
and his name was inside the shirt on the tag.
And that is like...
She wasn't even mean about it, but you know how...
I just wanted to crawl into a hole and die.
- So how does that feel?
- Like death burning me from the inside out.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that happened
like my freshman year of high school.
And I read "Carrie" like sophomore, junior year
and I was like, "Oh a person who is picked on,
"who exerts revenge against everyone who tormented her."
I deeply, well, I didn't ever get any revenge.
I suppose I'm getting my revenge now
by being very successful.
I love Stephen King so much.
He's such a good storyteller.
I love everything he has ever written.
I've read most of them--
- How much time do you spend reading per day?
- I've had a lot of time of being alone.
Not all of us can be popular and exciting, Joel.
Some people sit home and cry and read.
- Did you open the gift I got for you?
Now, before you open it,
know, it is a book you probably asked.
And it's a book that I thought represented
who I think you are before we ever met.
And I mean it in all the best ways
- Is it gonna be a book about toilets?
A book about bad personalities?
- Oh my God.
Okay, camera.
- It reminded me of you
because Nora Ephron was so smart
and didn't take crap, but was so kind and so honest
about how her own body made her feel
and what it was like to be a woman in comedy and that space.
And then she turned her own life into movies
kind of like you do with TV, when she wrote heartburn,
and just the honesty, I think more than anything else,
so, it reminded me of you.
- This is so great, Joel.
This is so nice.
I have not read any Nora Ephron's
But I'm very excited.
Also, I feel bad about my neck
I feel that very deeply.
I feel bad about all my parts.
So, this resonates, I'm so excited.
- Thank you so much
for being on show yourself and revealing so much
as I knew you would about yourself and your shelf.
- It's been incredible.
That's what we're here for.