Hello Samantha, it's nice to meet you.

Hi, it's nice to meet you too.

Before we start, and I say this to everybody,

if at any point you feel like you want to restate something,

you don't love the way you said it, that's the joy of the podcast.

Please feel free to just take it again.

We want you to feel like you're sounding your best.

I'm going to say the most outrageous shit and then be like leave it in. Perfect, wow, love to hear it.

No one has ever taken that as a challenge before.

This is in conversation from Apple News.

I'm Shemita Basu.

Today, essayist Samantha Irby on how to like what you like

and not really care what others think. I read a lot for work, mostly news, some books, lots of heavy topics, you know, politics, state of the world stuff. But recently I picked up a book of essays that made me laugh out loud so hard I had tears streaming down my face and I

realized it's been so long since I nourished myself with a book that was purely

fun. The book is called Quietly Hostile. It's a new collection of essays by humor writer Samantha

Irby, really just a bunch of observations and musings from her everyday life, which might look a lot like yours, except

somehow way funnier the way she tells it.

She's got a growing fan base, and credits on several TV shows, too. She wrote my favorite episode of

the TV show Shrill which was adapted from Lindy West's book and she's part of the

writer's room on the Sex in the City reboot called And Just Like That. I recently sat down with

Sam Irby to talk about her process of writing during the pandemic, about sex in the city

of course, and about how important it is to just do things you enjoy even if they seem frivolous or stupid and because she does so many different things I started by asking her how she describes herself.

...