There’s lots to chuckle at here, as Irby remains a winning, personality-driven, self-deprecating essayist.
More humorous life reflections from a seasoned raconteur.
In this third volume of essays (this one “dedicated to Wellbutrin”), outspoken blogger and essayist Irby offers opinions and reactions to many of life’s more uncomfortable and inconvenient episodes. Among countless other topics, the author discusses her confusion about health bloggers’ obsessions with “adaptogens and other beneficial herbs,” her “hostile, elusive, disrespectful” menstrual cycle, and her body. “I have been stuck with a smelly, actively decaying body that I never asked for,” she writes, “and am constantly on the receiving end of confusing, overwhelming messages for how to properly care for and feed it.” A linear timeline chronicling Irby’s attempt at partying while “staring middle age right in its sensible orthopedic inserts” is particularly hilarious and relatable for readers of a certain age. Even when the author describes pitching show concepts to Netflix or battling Crohn’s disease, her one-liners and comic timing remain intact. A lot of the best anecdotal material springs forth from the more embarrassing and cringeworthy moments of the author’s life. She envies those who can go out on the town and not become hindered with bathroom issues or people who effortlessly manage a household. Regarding children, she writes, “I jump away from children the way most people jump away from a hot stove—though she doesn’t “dislike them.” Some of the material in this latest collection has been covered in her previous two books, but Irby’s devotees won’t mind because her personal hyperawareness, brazen attitude, and raunchy sense of humor are in fine form, even when the writing is haphazard and frenetic. Ultimately, though, the author manages to shake things up and keep most of her observances fresh and funny, and she also incorporates more details of life with her wife.
There’s lots to chuckle at here, as Irby remains a winning, personality-driven, self-deprecating essayist.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-56348-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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