Her voice is nonchalant yet authoritative, never more so than in 'Superfan!!!!!!!,' her sprawling breakdown of the original Sex and the City (a show whose 2021 sequel, And Just Like That., Irby wrote for - and some say helped ruin, even by her own admission). These 17 pieces are more like essays crossed with stand-up bits, and that punchline-driven rhythm serves the book spectacularly well. Naturally, her running musical commentary says more about her.Ĭalling Quietly Hostile a collection of essays is a bit limiting. Elsewhere, the essays titled 'Chub Street Diet' and 'David Matthews's Greatest Romantic Hits' draw on her fixation with ostensibly uncool music - corny 1970s yacht rock and corny 1990s singer-songwriters - by structuring narratives around Spotify playlists. There's a meta-observation about relative size somewhere in that fact but, mostly, the piece is about exactly what it claims to be: Irby sucking down pot gummies and watching whale videos, or as she puts it, 'whales doing whale shit.' What starts as a standard stoner musing soon morphs into a pensive trip in which Irby yearns for peace and calm - and it somehow blindsides you with its abrupt shift from silly to profound. Take, for example, her two-page vignette called 'I Like to Get High at Night and Think About Whales.' The title is practically as long as the essay itself.

Luckily for the reader, she never wallows in loathing, self- or otherwise. By her own admission, she's lousy with money, she sounds like an idiot on podcasts, and she is more apt to down a six-pack of Diet Coke on any given day before she touches a glass of water. In her fourth collection of essays, Quietly Hostile, the bestselling author and television writer renews her love/hate vows with the human race - as well as her relationship with her own flaws and failings. But being human herself, she also trains her most critical - and most cynical - eye inward. Yes, Irby loves to observe her fellow humans. That is to say, she's a person who is fascinated by people - their obsessions, their hypocrisies, even the things they weirdly reveal about themselves in their anonymous, online product reviews.

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