Blog 6

 I think that the element of Samantha Irby's writing that I most admire is summed up in a line from the introduction to Kendra Winchester's interview of her - that her prose style feels "like she's just sitting across from you and just telling you this story". In my opinion it can be easy for autobiographical storytelling to begin to feel self-serious or stilted, even in attempts to be humorous. It's difficult to tell a personal story to an audience of strangers in a way that doesn't distance yourself from it, and lose its emotion and authenticity in the process. Samantha's blunt, irreverent, casual style totally avoids this. 

Reading Samantha's blog posts, I feel like I could be reading a long message from a close friend, typed and read in the middle of the night when everything is hilarious and we're both too loopy to feel embarrassed of ourselves. Even down to the blog posts' lack of capitalization and improper punctuation, every aspect of it feels personal and confidential, like it's a confession told just to you, to make you laugh, to help you know her, even though it's a blog read by thousands. 

Even in her published books, which conform more to grammatical formatting rules, her voice is casual and personal, still allowing her sentences to flow from topic to topic organically and still bending grammatical rules to emphasize the meaning or to suggest the written equivalent of comedic timing.