Wow, No Thank You.

by Samantha Irby

  intergenerational friendships! but not the gross kind! mentorships? fake adoptive dads!

  I am still friends with a shitload of my friends’ parents. They’ve shown up at my readings looking hilariously awkward and beaming with pride and I love that. And there’s definitely an element of them having guided a kind of rudderless person navigating a tricky early life? But, also, I went on vacations with them, hung out with them watching TV, cruised for dates, all that shit. One of the most fascinating things about my life to other people seems to be the many years I lived with and worked for Mel, my not-dad who found me toiling away in a job that was just barely keeping me afloat and brought me into his home to give me a second adolescence, even though I was almost out of my teens. I don’t want to get all Diff’rent Strokes reboot about it, but: Mel and I have a father-daughter witty repartee kind of thing. I’m black and he’s Jewish. I have chubby cheeks and he has a long, winding staircase. The whole thing just naturally lends itself to a half-hour situation comedy!

  the fronts we put up

  I’m bored by cool, icy girls who are effortlessly hip; quirky, adorable girls who are effortlessly hip; and brassy, sexy girls who are effortlessly hip. Why don’t we get to watch an awkward mess pretend that she makes her own osso buco bone broth to impress the self-described “foodie” who messaged her on Tinder even though he wore a fedora in his profile picture. I spent a lot of my twenties trying on new personalities, especially when convincing people to either be my friend or to have sex with me. Nothing drastic, just shit like going to experimental music shows or being really good about regular eyebrow maintenance.

  TV Sam lives in a shithole (so did the real one) and eats meals on the bus (ugh, I did this, too), but definitely has an Instagram corner in her tiny apartment. I feel like this is who I still am, posting soft-focus pictures of the clean and organized corner of my desk when just out of frame there’s a book and paper avalanche threatening to overwhelm me. We get a lot of messy girls on TV, but let’s add more. Someone who is buying a candle at Barneys downtown then is facing that shit LABEL OUT in the bathroom so when you go in there to fix your face and carefully look through her prescription bottles (wow, so does oregano oil really work? Does Zoloft???), you will know that you are in the lavatory of a classy bitch. Yes, she just split an oat milk latte between three different credit cards, but have you tried the Clé de Peau face cream she just casually left sitting on the table by the couch, next to some first edition Toni Morrison books arranged just so against that vintage-style milk bottle vase filled with fresh tulips? Has she had her teeth cleaned in the last seven years? Fuck no! But have you tried one of the vitamins she purchased at the suggestion of a targeted Facebook ad and has never taken but has beautifully displayed on the kitchen counter? Why, you simply must!

  depression/anxiety

  I am a high-functioning depressed and anxious person. I know it can manifest in myriad ways, but mine are these: (1) extreme inertia, but never at the expense of my employment, so mostly bailing on friends who want to hang out and feeling extremely apathetic toward doing “fun” things that aren’t lying very still; (2) self-soothing with food, though never in shocking amounts, mostly just staring into the void while eating ice cream over the sink, then realizing, “oops, the pint is finished”; (3) fear of trying new things or venturing out of a comfort zone, clinging to childhood demons as a means of never actually having to move forward; (4) blistering resentment for the outwardly happy and seemingly well-adjusted.

  I have a running inner monologue recounting every horrible thing I’ve said or done since I can remember first publicly humiliating myself, and the voice never shuts the fuck up or goes away even for a minute. Even my dreams are anxious. Last night I had a dream that I was walking around with a baby, a white one who was old enough to walk, and we were trying to catch a bus. Not a regular bus, but a Greyhound to who the fuck knows where. And in the dream, my heart is in my throat because I’m desperately trying to run-walk while holding hands with this stumbling baby and not miss the bus, but also I don’t want to set anybody off because I am yanking a blonde child through the streets and I’ve never tried but I assume if you get caught kidnapping a white kid they send you to Gilead for that shit. So, we finally catch up with the bus, and I toss the kid on, and I’m searching for a bus ticket in my giant bag and freaking out because everyone is watching me, and then this woman in a fancy daytime outfit pushes past me and sneers, “I don’t need this, I’m going to get on a Delta plane!” and then I woke up in a panic.

  My brain outlines every possible disaster that could befall me at any given moment: “Don’t cross against the light. If a car comes around the corner you’ll never move fast enough to beat it. Okay, fine, you made it across, but then you tripped on the curb. Did anyone see you trip on the curb? Yes, that guy in the blue shirt pretending not to have seen you trip on the curb definitely just saw you trip on the curb and was mortified that he might have had to help you up …” and on and on ad infinitum. Not that I need to make another Herman’s Head with all this, but have you ever watched Herman’s Head because that show was fucking funny.

  self-sabotage/eating trash/not taking meds

  “Food is a temporary solution, but to a person with Crohn’s, it can be a dangerous one.” Doesn’t that sound like the first line of a future documentary I’m making about the time I almost fatally overdosed on garlic bread? Anyway, the initial Crohn’s diagnosis takes a battery of tests over the course of several months, and even then, once you’re diagnosed, it can take literal years to figure out the right combination of medications to take while also using the process of elimination to discover what foods trigger you. It’s different for every person, and while an anti-inflammatory diet can be beneficial, that shit is super hard and expensive to maintain. Not everyone can afford to eat an organic wild-caught salmon every single meal. And, it also isn’t a matter of just eating healthy. If I eat brown rice, I will be prostrate atop a river of undigested grains within hours. The basic beginner plan is to avoid milk and cheese and fibrous vegetables and take it easy while figuring out your trigger foods. Which, for a person who eats to feel better emotionally, is murder because what if popcorn ends up putting you in the hospital? The medications to treat IBD are outrageously expensive, and even when you are taking the best care of yourself, if you don’t have one hundred and eighty dollars for a month’s worth of Pentasa, you’re fucked. So sometimes model patients end up sick in the ER because they can’t get their meds. It’s a struggle.

  How does this fit into a comedy, you ask? Honestly, I’m not 100 percent sure. I’ve managed to make a career out of LOL, I SHIT MY PANTS, and so I don’t think it’s that hard to translate to another medium. More important than that, even if it’s not knee-slapping funny, it would mean a lot to me to put chronic illness in people’s faces, especially the silent kind that you might not even know a person is struggling through. I bet if you met me on the street, you wouldn’t automatically think “sick,” but if you looked at my last CT scans you would, and I want to represent for all my people taking twelve pills a day with bald joints and intestines lined with scar tissue.

  being okay with just being okay

  When rocking the boat and taking a leap of faith seem like the most terrifying things you could ever do, why try them? Isn’t everything just fine as it is? I think we all buy into the lofty ideals set by our teachers and parents, but there are actually people who are just fine punching a clock every day and then coming home to stare at their phones until their bodies are completely overtaken by sleep. I have never related to someone whose main goal wasn’t just getting a table at a good restaurant and being able to pay for it. All I wanted for myself at twenty-seven was to go to clubs and drink Coronas and watch people awkwardly flirting with each other while hoping that someone would flirt with me. That’s it. That was all I required of my life. Not everyone has the secret desire to be a pop star or climb their way up the company ranks, and wouldn’t it just be D O P E
see black girls on TV not doing shit?

  SEASON 3, SERIES FINALE

  The first time I flew to LA to sell this dumb show to executives, I was armed only with a backpack and a laptop and some Klonopin in case the West Coast’s chill vibe was no match for my stomach-churning Midwestern anxiety. Abbi, Jessi (who helped develop the show and was going to cowrite the script), and I had spent months and months building a skeleton of this idea and scrambling to get meat on its proverbial bones, while living and working in three different regions of the country. There are characters to invent, and those characters need backstories, and they need families, and they need to have places to live, and they need to look like something, and they need to have clothes, and they need to like bands, and they need to have allergies, and they need to have a signature cocktail, and they need to get laid and THIS is all the minutiae you have to devote energy to when you are populating a new world that has before never existed and have fifteen minutes to convince a Hollywood Person to buy it from you. Which, on the one hand, is thrilling. But, on the other, how do you confidently decide that this dude who doesn’t exist outside of the old edition of Final Draft I’m writing him in is the kind of dude who wears cardigans and has intentional facial hair. Am I allowed to write a fictional Latina character or is that appropriation? What does it mean to be the god of a make-believe universe?

  To this day, I do not own any impressive show-pitching clothing, and a thing about me that I am slowly learning is that no matter how much I attempt to go against my own grain, I will go right back to the thing I am most comfortable with no matter what. Which means that when I was faced with packing to go sit in a bunch of intimidating boardrooms, my closet yielded very few options that read as “professional” or “a solid investment for your streaming service.” So I just packed my regular pajama-adjacent cozy clothes, the shit normal people put on when they get home from a long day working outdoors in the rain: loose, comfortable exercise pants that you just sit in; a thin, worn T-shirt that might have some faded words on it; a soft cardigan. If anyone questioned my attire, I could pull a “there’s too much good stuff in my brain to also think about clothes,” and see if they’d buy it. Worst-case scenario: I could summon a few tears and sob, “I’m sorry, Mr.Showtime, I lost my luggage!”

  Pitching is weird because it feels like being a used-car salesman, except instead of cars you’re trying to sell a niche program that you definitively can’t prove anyone will ever want to watch. I can’t even guarantee that my nine friends will watch it. Do you know how many people who have been in my home have never purchased one of my books?! Several!!!! Our first pitch meeting was at Netflix and I tried to pretend I was relaxed and cool, which was surprisingly easy because I didn’t have to tone down my nerves as much as I had to dial back my dread. I am not a person who automatically thinks, “This is gonna be great! I’m totally gonna kill it!” It’s always like, “I hope the bottom of my chair doesn’t collapse,” or “Are any of these women tigers? Is it possible they can smell my fear?”

  In the waiting room, three young guys with identical haircuts wearing matching blue-checked button-down shirts and pleated pants were earnestly rehearsing their spiel, and I looked down at the Old Navy sweatshirt I was wearing to meet these Vice Presidents in Charge of Development and wondered if I had maybe played it too cool. I had washed, yes, but I had bought my shirt for three dollars using Super Cash and my toes were exposed: Was it too late to change my idea to a surefire hit like a reboot of some ’80s show like Empty Nest or Amen? “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean ‘a fat show about diarrhea.’ I meant, ‘What if we made a black ALF?’”

  *

  It works pretty much the same way at all the networks you go to:

  You walk into the lobby slash holding pen slash upscale waiting room, then you either show or give your ID to a security person in a suit behind a desk who has some sort of appointment book or computer situation with all of the day’s hopefuls listed on it. They locate your name and determine who you’re meeting, then you either get your identification back or they remove a pointless organ (a gallbladder, perhaps …?) to deter you from stealing any Game of Thrones plot points that might be just lying around on a designer coffee table and hang on to your ID for you to collect after you’ve finished crying over your silly dreams in front of strangers.

  Someone takes you to the room where you’re going to meet the decision-makers, which is always uncomfortably quiet and has too many chairs. Or maybe we just showed up with not enough people? I’m not sure. When we were at Amazon, there were literally 126 seats crowded around the conference room table, so we had to play musical chairs to figure out where we should be nonchalantly seated by the time everyone else came in. Do we face the door? Should we crowd around one end? At each stop on our first tour of Santa Monica conference rooms, I would just loom awkwardly in the corner, too nervous to take the incorrect seat, and then start willing my armpits dry and wondering when someone was going to bust in on us with bottles of water.

  Maybe it’s the person who deposited you in the room, but sometimes a different person will enter with water and ask if you want something else to drink. I never drink the water because one meeting might be in Beverly Hills while the next one is in Santa Monica, and having to pee while mentally rehearsing a sales script during a long car ride is a nightmare. The drink person leaves, and then you get many minutes to sit and wait for people who know a lot about you and who you’ve never met before to come in and wait expectantly for you to make a good impression on them. I am afraid to talk during the waiting minutes, because I assume every place I go is bugged, so I just nervously look at all the posters and mourn all the shows I could be watching if I never went to sleep or wrote books. This is also a good time to try to adjust yourself in the chair, which nine out of ten times has fixed arms that painfully stab your hips.

  The show purchasers come in! These people are always very nice. The nicest people you have ever met. Sometimes they hug you, which is a very LA thing that I immensely enjoy. I love a hug! I’m very soft and easy to snuggle up against in a non-sexual way. They are always dressed casually, but in a way that lets you know their clothes are still expensive. (I make a mental note to try and find upscale sweatshirts for next time). Anyway, the meetings start informally. They ask you what your dog’s name is and if you’ve had dinner at ____ yet, real friendly and low stakes. So there’s some easing in, which is good; I like to give the sweat glands a good five minutes to simmer down before I have to launch into selling. At TBS, we talked about astrology (they brought it up, I swear!) and I instantly regretted not getting my chart read so I could sound ethereal and informed, but since I hadn’t, I just said, “I’m an Aquarius!” and poured a bucket of water out on the table.

  Before you get the meeting, your agent sends in all the stuff you’ve put together about the show you want to sell which, honestly, I never fucking saw? We might have to fully break the flaws in my operating system down another time, but I am not a control freak in even the most liberal sense of the phrase. I pay zero attention to detail and have very few accounting mechanisms, so if you say you’re going to take care of it and send a thing, then I’m just going to believe you did that and watch this cat video for the hundredth time. Pretty sure my agent’s assistant sent PDF copies of my book, or some chapters, or possibly a couple paragraphs? I never asked. But also, how much can you reasonably expect a person with access to unlimited Search Party reruns to read about your failed relationships and diarrhea before you meet them? Abbi, Jessi, and I had written a pitch document (read: a typed-out version of all the stuff we were planning to say about our show, the fine points of which we would probably mess up without notes). I paid very little attention to the staggering amount of miniscule details involved in this process, because the more things I could anxiously obsess over, the more “sell a major television network a show about my fictional life” felt like a thing I shouldn’t be attempting. The execs have a general idea of what you’re selling, s
o after the chitchat you just seamlessly transition into the sales pitch, which is so awkward it caused me physical pain. I am an awful salesperson. I would very much like to sell a show that is not about my life, because nothing sounds dumber than telling people who have to be polite to you why you are interesting. Also, I have to sit there in my regular-fat body (as opposed to television-fat, which is less fat than me but more fat than a GAP model) wondering if I need to reassure someone across these various tables that I had no plans whatsoever to star in this imaginary show. At FX, we were sitting in these low-slung chairs that were very fucking cool just shooting the breeze and at one point I realized I was in full shit-squat and had this sickening thought: “What if I can’t get up from this chair?” followed by an even worse one: “Does anyone in this room who is eyeball measuring my thigh circumference at this hideous angle think I actually want to be in this?”