To call Samantha Irby’s book scatological would be an understatement. This is a book about assholes – yes, the kind who cheats on you, or never calls, or is “a grown man with a college degree who told me that he only ate angel-hair pasta” – but most of all it is a book about Irby’s bowels and how they ruin her life. Meaty is – like Irby’s blog, bitchesgottaeat – an episodic collection of diaries, memories and views on life with no narrative beginning, middle or end. It’s in the tradition of Helen Fielding and Candace Bushnell, certainly, but this rackety life of dating, renting and running out of money is heavily overshadowed by Irby’s Crohn’s disease, and is set in the social media age. Irby will tell you how to cook an inflammatory bowel disease-friendly frittata, while hungover, for a date who has woken up in your apartment, and how to Instagram it, too. Or inform the reader that Martha Stewart “calls for fresh squeezed” orange juice “but, like, LOLWAT”.
From a chimpanzee with a photographic memory to beetles that navigate by means of the Milky Way, Tong’s revelatory examples inspire a sense of wonder. In doing so, the author succeeds in highlighting the folly of the idea of human exceptionalism and how, if we are to survive as a species, we need to get very good at scale, and fast. But she doesn’t preach, nailing the “show don’t tell” technique that is so important in such a work. The book doesn’t appeal to a mawkish sympathy for animals, merely showing why there is a balance to nature, while making clear that there is so much about other creatures we are blind to.
At first, I didn’t understand why I was asked to review “Uncanny Valley,” Anna Wiener’s memoir about working for Bay Area start-ups in the 2010s. Wiener reports on technology for The New Yorker; I’ve only written about technology to say that I think social media is very bad. I’m much more interested in metafiction than metadata, not least because I’m confident I can explain what metafiction is.
But when I started reading, I realized that former liberal arts majors who halfheartedly resist the app-enabled future — mainly through willful ignorance and sweeping complaints — are the intended audience for this book. Wiener was, and maybe still is, one of us; far from seeking to disabuse civic-minded techno-skeptics of our views, she is here to fill out our worst-case scenarios with shrewd insight and literary detail. It isn’t that those of us with skill sets as soft as our hearts don’t need to know what’s going on in “the ecosystem,” as those “high on the fumes of world-historical potential” call Silicon Valley. It’s more that everything over there is as absurdly wrong as we imagine. “Tone = DOOM,” I wrote in the margins, and that was before an up-and-coming C.E.O. introduces Wiener, a new hire, to his favorite dictatorially motivational phrase: “Down for the Cause” (DFTC).