We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

Samantha Irby's essay collection blends personal memoir, cultural commentary, and self-deprecating humor across essays that trace her life from a poverty-stricken childhood in Evanston, Illinois, to the threshold of marriage and domesticity in small-town Michigan. Though loosely organized by theme rather than strict chronology, the essays build a cumulative portrait of a woman contending with chronic illness, grief, mental health conditions, body shame, and the slow, bewildering arrival of genuine love.

The collection opens with "My Bachelorette Application," in which Irby introduces herself through a mock questionnaire for the reality dating show The Bachelorette. She establishes the biographical coordinates that anchor the book: She is around 35, Black, fat, and has worked as a client services director at an animal hospital in Chicago since 2002. She grew up in Evanston with much-older parents and three sisters decades her senior. She has a cat named Helen Keller, ambivalence about marriage, and a history of unsatisfying relationships. The essay sets the collection's tone, mixing blunt self-assessment with absurdist fantasy.

Several essays reach into Irby's childhood and adolescence. In "Do You Guys Pay Your Fucking Bills or What?" she examines her compulsive spending through the lens of the poverty she grew up in, transacting life in currency exchanges, food pantries, and vouchers from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), a federal food-assistance program. Her first paychecks went to magazines, cassette tapes, brown lipsticks, and Doc Martens, items her classmates had that she spent years coveting. She has no debt only because she dropped out of college and never owned property, and her attempts at budgeting collapse within days.

"Happy Birthday" is the collection's emotional center. Irby recounts her father Samuel Bishop Irby's alcoholism, which included making grain alcohol in the bathtub and filtering shoe polish through bread to extract something drinkable. Her parents met when SB, who drove an Evanston bus, refused to let her mother Grace, a six-foot-tall ER nurse with three daughters from a previous relationship, pay the fare. After their divorce when Irby was four, Grace's multiple sclerosis worsened steadily. At 15, Irby watched her father move Grace out of a nursing home into his house to collect her $900 monthly care payment, without proper medical equipment. Grace deteriorated and was eventually returned by ambulance. During her junior year of high school, Irby lived with SB, who was physically abusive, once punching her in the eye and breaking her glasses and nose. He had severe heart disease and eventually fled to Memphis after stealing money from his employer. His cardiologist, Dr. Ira Weiss, brought SB back to Chicago at his own expense. The day before her eighteenth birthday, a detective called Irby at her college dorm to say SB was missing. He had walked out of a nursing home without a coat or socks and was found dead of hypothermia. At the funeral, which no church would host, Dr. Weiss sang the Lord's Prayer in Hebrew over the body, and Irby cried for the first time. A birthday card arrived from Grace, dictated to a hospice nurse because she could no longer hold a pen. Grace died a few months later, in June 1998.

"A Christmas Carol" covers Irby's dismal freshman year at Northern Illinois University (NIU), where she landed after being rejected by every elite liberal arts college she applied to. The essay culminates in a catastrophic winter-break road trip: Trapped in holiday traffic during a blizzard, her irritable bowels revolt, and she squats outside the car in the snow while her friend John, a senior she befriended on her dorm floor, coaches her through it. The car's radio picks up "Bittersweet Symphony," and then the car dies.

Irby's romantic history unfolds across several essays. "A Blues for Fred" chronicles her relationship with Fred, a man she met through her blog, who broke up with her at a restaurant because his desire for biological children outweighed their relationship. He asked whether she could physically chase a baby given her arthritis and joint problems. She blocked him on social media, retreated into two years of celibacy, then slowly rebuilt a friendship with him. "You Don't Have to Be Grateful for Sex" opens with a harrowing memory: At 13, a maintenance worker exposed himself to Irby while her mother was briefly away, then expressed disbelief that even a fat girl would turn him down. The essay pushes back against the notion that fat women should feel grateful for any sexual attention, recounting a series of men who expected precisely that.

"I'm in Love and It's Boring" contrasts the anguish of her relationship with Zachary Jones, a perpetually unavailable man she loved in her mid-twenties, with the steady love she finds with Mavis. She met Zac at a hip-hop show, rented an apartment for them, and spent years alone in its empty rooms. Mavis, by contrast, never disappears, never dismisses Irby's writing, and never lets too much time pass between texts. Irby calls this love boring, then identifies it as the best thing she has ever felt. "Mavis" details the physical dimensions of their relationship, from their first encounter at a downtown hotel to Irby's candid reflections on learning to have sex with a woman for the first time.

"The Miracle Porker" introduces Helen Keller, a sickly kitten abandoned at birth and brought to the animal hospital by Ken, one of the vets. Born with a tumor blocking one ear and membranes sealed over her eyes, Helen survived on formula and heating pads. The staff pressured Irby to adopt her. Irby describes seven years of mutual antagonism: Helen does not cuddle or purr, has bitten Irby hundreds of times, and regularly attempts to escape with delivery people.

"A Total Attack of the Heart" addresses Irby's mental health directly. She traces her depression and anxiety from childhood, when her distress was dismissed as moodiness or defiance rather than recognized as a mental health condition, through a suicide attempt during her freshman year of high school, to the panic attacks of adulthood. She discusses the stigma facing Black women with mental health conditions and reveals that her heart is enlarged. "Fuck It, Bitch. Stay Fat." examines Irby's relationship with her body, food, and shame. She describes failed experiments with Zumba, veganism, Nutrisystem, and prenatal yoga, and connects her disordered eating to growing up poor and anxious, with cheap carbohydrates as the only affordable substitute for joy. The essay reveals that her heart is in the early to middle stages of failure because she could not afford the medication she needed.

"Nashville Hot Chicken" recounts a road trip to scatter SB's ashes, which had sat in a Gap bag in Irby's hall closet for seven years. On Easter, at a public boat launch on Nashville's Cumberland River, Irby pries open the canister and tips it toward the water, but nothing comes out. When she shakes harder, a gust of wind blows the cremains into her face, coating her teeth, hair, and nostrils. Mavis drives to a fried chicken restaurant while Irby stands over a trash can, shaking her father's remains out of her hair.

"The Real Housewife of Kalamazoo" weighs the pros and cons of leaving Chicago for Michigan, as Irby dreads cohabitation, adjusting to life with Mavis's children, and the loss of her solitary habits. "Yo, I Need a Job." frames her departure from the animal hospital as a satirical cover letter, acknowledging that the job has been the one constant in her adult life. "Thirteen Questions to Ask Before Getting Married" reveals that the wedding is imminent. "Feelings Are a Mistake" brings Helen Keller's story to its end: After Irby moves to Michigan, Helen bites a visiting child and attacks the child's mother. A vet confirms Helen's lifelong health problems and poor quality of life. For the first time in their eight-year relationship, Helen climbs into Irby's lap and purrs. Helen is euthanized, and Irby eats half a rotisserie chicken in a parking lot, calling it the tribute Helen would have wanted.

The title essay closes the collection. Irby describes her social anxiety in granular detail: She agonizes over outfits, worries about whether restaurant chairs can hold her weight, and pre-rehearses answers to questions no one has asked. The essay ends with her declaration that she and her readers are never meeting in real life, a frank acknowledgment that the written version of herself will always be more controlled and more bearable than the anxious person who exists in the physical world.