We Are Never Meeting in Real Life

Irby writes about being Black, queer, fat, chronically ill, and poor in America with a humor so precise and so unsparing that it becomes a form of witness. She names the specific indignities of navigating health insurance, dating apps, white liberal spaces, chronic illness, and her own body — not to make you feel better about any of it but to make you recognize it. The comedy is the point: Irby understands that laughter is what happens when something is both true and unbearable simultaneously, and she weaponizes that understanding on every page. The most important comic memoir on this shelf for the P&P reader who has been told to be grateful for what they have — a book that takes the full reality of a specific life completely seriously and finds it, against all odds, absolutely hilarious.