Grab the Lapels

Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby

Here we are with the fourth collection of personal essays by Samantha Irby. Quietly Hostile was published in May of 2023 and continues with similar themes from her previous books: Irby’s body deteriorating, being married to a woman, her experiences as a scriptwriter, her traumatizing youth, and her love of TV. However, after joining an online book club to discuss Quietly Hostile, I realized that Irby may be narrowing her audience. While her books are meant for anyone with a bawdy sense of humor, she speaks mostly to Millennials.

For example, Irby loves television. In Quietly Hostile, she includes an essay about her time writing for the Sex and the City reboot. The essay is broken into sections in which she describes a few episodes of the original show, which ran from 1998-2004. After her description, she comments on the truly wild things we accepted as viewers back then, and occasionally adds how she would change the episode. Sometimes, the Sex and the City episodes are so bizarre (people often say the show has aged like milk), that it is hard to tell what Irby imagined versus what really happened, elevating this essay into some pop culture/Irby inventiveness amalgamation. If you weren’t alive to binge watch Sex and the City as it came out, you’ll find this chapter boring, as many people commented on Goodreads.

Another chapter is about the Dave Matthews Band and why Irby, a black woman from Chicago, loves his oeuvre. She produces various songs’ lyrics, analyzes them (most are about sex), and why Dave Matthews, in his drug rug fronting a jam band, is so irresistible. Do people even know Dave Matthews anymore? Did he not penetrate (heh) into their high school years by providing a soundtrack to life? Again, I argue this is a Millennial book, which is why I found it so enjoyable. Irby and I are only five years, I believe, different in age.

To be even more narrow, I suggest this is an “elder Millennial” book, a term I only heard a few years ago. Generally, Millennials are ages 28-43 right now. Those on the younger end may be happily getting married and pregnant, but for those of us on the older end, it’s weird to be asked if/when we’re going to have children. Don’t you see my lil wrinkles or my husband’s gray hair? For Irby, she was asked — by an ex — if she felt bad she didn’t have a child in the past with the ex, and her response is fitting. Even when we were young enough to do it more easily, some of us were not meant to be parents:

“Don’t you wish you had a kid?” Do I wish I could stand idly by and witness all the things I hate about myself manifested in, and mirrored back to me by, a person it’s against the law for me to kill?

The whole chapter starts with how a kid just like her would be terrible (one line about the two of them sitting around, not doing laundry, and eating chips had me laughing). But it moves into a story about her and her wife getting a pandemic dog and how it is untrainable, undesirable, janky pound dog — and all Irby wanted was for the dog to not embarrass her. Although the chapter started out personal to me and my age group, it shifted to include anyone who went through the pandemic (surprise, if you’re alive, that’s you). Thus, several people in my book club connected to the majority of Quietly Hostile.

If you’ve come to expect humor from Irby, the kind that makes you bray out a laugh like a surprised donkey, then you won’t be disappointed. Most of the laughs come from her various handicaps, from Crohn’s disease to anxiety, from a hand brace to orthopedic shoes. This go around, I’m laughing because the phrasing is funny even when the concept is not. In fact, there’s a repetition of Irby’s wishes to not be living because living is hard, but this is not a book about suicide or wanting to die. Here’s an example of what I mean:

I wouldn’t have taken so many antibiotics if I’d known I was just gonna grow up to fall the fuck apart the same year I finally nursed my credit score over the 700 line.

In this fourth book, Irby’s writing is even sharper than it was before. The sentences read like they’ve been mulled over and drafted and redrafted. While her earlier books (see below) were funny, Quietly Hostile is evidence of a honed craft.

I encourage you to read Irby’s books in order for maximum context, but it is not necessary:

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Published by Grab the Lapels

I'm a graduate of the MFA fiction writing program at the University of Notre Dame, which inspired me to follow along with trends in teaching, publishing, and reviewing. I also have an MA and BS from Central Michigan University. I used to teach composition, creative writing, and literature in higher education, then did a brief stint at a civic theater, followed by two years at a references desk at a public library. I'm now working toward my ASL Interpreter license.

41 comments

  2. I’m always interested as to which writers can make pop culture make sense and seem alive even if you’ve never seen it or never heard of it before. Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House is brilliant at this, as was Elissa Washuta’s White Magic. I’ve never seen an episode of SATC, so I wonder how that essay would land with me.

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    • I think Sex and The City is hard to explain if you didn’t live through it because it’s pre-smartphones, pre-online dating being normal, and it’s all about going out to clubs and bars and wealthy white women. It’s a lifestyle most of us will never know, and add on it was all “dumb tech” for Gen X and Millennials. No Twitter to teach you about any kind of sensitivity, etc.

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  4. It does seem strange to write an essay about Dave Matthews in 2023! But it’s nice that Irby is honing in on her voice and her audience. A little while back someone referred to me as a millennial, clearly meaning to reference me as a young person and I had to laugh because we millennials are not young anymore!

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    • No, currently, many Millennials are struggling with “parenting” two generations: their elderly mom and dad, and their young children. Plus, we got all the financial crises thrown at us, so in general, Millennials are struggling adults whom Boomers cannot conceive of as anything but college students. I finished my bachelor’s degree 18 years ago.

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      • I don’t know if this is a uniquely Boomer thing but one thing I’ve noticed in recent years is their refusal to accept that they are now seniors. My mom still insists that she is middle-aged and it’s like, Mom, you’re probably not going to live to be 170! So if you accept that Millenials are no longer young people, you have to also accept that Boomers are definitely not young.

        Wait, how did you finish your Bachelor’s 18 years ago? Aren’t we the same age? Are you a prodigy? I graduated from high school 20 years ago.

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        • That’s interesting about Boomers not realizing they are senior citizens. I never thought about it that way, but that explains a lot. They still see themselves as the mom and dad as opposed to the grandparents.

          I graduated high school in 2003 and finished my bachelor’s in 2006.

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          • I think we all to a certain extent struggle to see our own age. I’m still 24 in my own head! And a lot of Boomers are much more active now than their own parents were at this stage in life. I’m also surprised by how many Boomers still have living parents.

            I graduated in 2003 too but was slower to do my undergrad so finished in 2008.

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              • You’ve got double boomers! My mom’s parents were in their 40s when she was born so they were always old in my memory and they’ve been gone since I was about 10. So I’m always a little surprised when people my age have grandparents still even though it’s not that unusual!

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                • I had a great-grandma up until maybe 10 years ago, when I was in my late 20’s. That’s what happens when a family has kids close to 20. Some babies were planned — graduate, marry ASAP, have a baby 1-2 years later — and some were surprises (my mom was a surprise, for instance).

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                  • That’s pretty neat, to be able to interact with multiple generations like that as an adult. I wish I could have known my grandparents when I was an adult. My brother is 41 with an 18 year old so he could theoretically be a grandparent well before 50 and then a great-grandparent by 70. So I can see how it would work out.

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                    • That’s so cool! When Pearl was a baby I wanted to get a photo of her with her dad, her grandpa, and her great-grandpa, as well as one with all 4 of her grandparents. My last great-grandparent died when my older brother was a toddler and no one took a photo of the generations together. And my grandpa died when I was a baby so I still think it’s pretty cool that my girls have all 4 grandparents!

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      • Oh my, I’ve just written a two paragraph response and the block editor would not let me write a third paragraph and suddenly the whole lot went into the ether stopa two paragraph response and the block editor would not let me write a third paragraph and suddenly the whole lot went into the ether. so I’m going to make this one long paragraph. My first point was that I don’t believe many Millennials would be caring for elderly parents. A recent Newspaper here agreed that elderly should not be used for people under 80 years old and few Millennials I think would have parents who are over 80. I think we’ve discussed this elderly business before? And I’m not going to give up on it – ha ha! No elderly person here in other words! And not in great grandpa Bill, who is one year older than I am and still driving tracks for a living! And then to be fair I think over all times I think, that is, not just Boomers, parents are surprised to find their children have grown up. I find it astonishing to have a 40 year-old son. That said, I can clearly see the struggling adult in him – two young children and a mortgage will do that! Anyhow, I do like the sound of this book and think I could comprehend much of it even though I couldn’t relate to many of the specific cultural references. If the writing is good, then I think the message can rise above the cultural references – which as you know is why I still find Jane Austen relevant.

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  5. I’m always drawn to Irby’s titles and covers, but I’m not really a humor reader and am at the youngest spectrum of the millennial age range so I feel like I’d miss some of her points (I was single-digits years old for most of Sex and the City’s runtime lol). But she’s got such a loyal fan base and entertains so many, that I’m always happy to see glowing reviews of her work. Glad you had a good time with this one!

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    • Yeah, I think you wouldn’t like her work if you’re not into humor and are younger. It is nice to have a writer pander to my life experiences, though. For a while, I thought it would never happen. A surge of books by and about “twenty-somethings” filled the market for a while, there.

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  6. Ok the way you describe laughing at Irby’s writing is perfect. It is literally the exact way I laugh at her books, and your description. I do indeed bray like a surprised donkey. EXACTLY like that.

    I suppose we are elder millennials now, aren’t we? I turn 39 in April and I can’t believe I am this close to 40.

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    • I turn 39 in May, so I’m right behind you. We are totally elder Millennials. I’m amazed at how much experience I share with younger Gen X. Take a show like Daria, which aired on MTV from 1997-2002. I absolutely relate to and understand her life, despite being a few years younger (according to the show, she graduated in 1999, making her 3-4 years older than I am).

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      • I remember my kids, perhaps mainly my daughter (who is a couple of years younger than you are as she turns 37 in May) watching Daria and I was entertained by it. As I recollect, she had a lovely, fresh voice.

        re-Bill‘s comment below I have HEARD of the Dave Matthews band couldn’t name a song. I have watched a small number of Sex and The City episodes, so I understand its basic premises and characters, but we weren’t much into watching commercial television. However, my daughter and I did watch and love The Gilmore girls!

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        • When Sex and The City came out, I don’t think we had HBO, which is where it aired. Plus, I don’t know that I could have ever convinced my parents to watch that show with me. They tend to be more Law and Order people instead of Sex and The City people.

          Whenever I feel a bit lost, I will rewatch all of Daria. I have the whole show, minus all the cool music they had in the original TV series, which was amazing, but is too expensive to license in a box set of DVDs.

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  7. I’m a bit older than Millenial (my kids might be older than Millenial – and yes, two of them don’t have children) but I watched a lot of Sex and the City twenty odd years ago, and still watch excerpts from time to time. I’d be interested to read an analysis, it was an important moment in popular culture.

    Never heard of Dave Matthews, or his Band.

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    • It was a huge cultural touchstone, so the fact that it has aged like milk doesn’t bother me. It captured how people thought or wanted to be in a certain time.

      Dave Matthews was super popular in the late 90s and was beloved by college students everywhere. He’s still around, but he really was a 90s vibe. He combined acoustic guitar, soul singers, and jazz to make an excellent sound, plus lyrics that often told a story.

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  8. I’ve definitely heard of Dave Matthews Band, but only used as a jokey reference in other American media – so until just now I actually thought it was a fictional band! I have also never seen an episode of Sex and the City – I would probably have been too young for it when it first came out, and I don’t think it really made it big over here anyway. The age gap between older and slightly younger millenials is an interesting one. One of my close friends is 38 (five years older than me), which obviously feels like no difference at all now – I have more in common with her than with friends my age who have married and had kids. But every now and then one of us make a reference to something and the other will say “huh, I don’t remember that at all” and it will turn out to be a result of the slightly different time period in which we were teenagers!

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    • I think those five years make quite a difference simply because you would have grown up with technology longer than your friend had. Jumping right into a machine that basically makes cultural references all the time has a huge impact on what we know.

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  9. My friends and I were huge DMB fans in high school, but by sophomore year college I wasn’t that into them anymore. I also loved SATC when it was on – I’d go over to a friend’s house to watch that last season, when I was also nursing a broken heart and it was like her way of caring for me – come watch this ridiculous show and eat junk food with me! Fond memories. I might read this book or listen to it on audio. I’m Gen X, BTW (46 years old.)

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    • I didn’t realize you are 7-8 years older than I am! Definitely Gen X. So cool! I know people who lived DMB but hated going to see his shows live because each song turns into a 20 minute jam, and you end up being there for HOURS. If standing for hours isn’t your jam, then the jam band is not for you.

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