Samantha Irby and Jenny Lawson

In Conversation with Kate Baer

Due to an unforeseen health issue, Samantha Irby will not be able to appear at the Book Festival. Jenny Lawson will still appear as scheduled. Please send any questions to shop@midtownscholar.com.

 

Sunday, October 22nd | 3:00 pm

Join acclaimed humorists Samantha Irby and Jenny Lawson for a conversation on their recently published memoirs, filled with deeply relatable and frank discussions of their experiences with life (in all its ups and downs) and mental health.

Samantha Irby’s career has taken her to new heights. She dodges calls from Hollywood and flop sweats on the red carpet at premieres (well, one premiere). But nothing is ever as it seems online, where she can crop out all the ugly parts. In Quietly Hostile, she takes us on an outrageously funny tour of all the gory details that make up the true portrait of a life behind the screenshotted depression memes. Relatable, poignant, and uproarious, once again, Irby is the tonic we all need to get by.

As Jenny Lawson’s hundreds of thousands of fans know, she suffers from depression. In Broken, she brings readers along on her mental and physical health journey, offering heartbreaking and hilarious anecdotes along the way. A beacon of hope and a wellspring of laughter when we all need it most, Broken is honest, unflinching, and brilliantly hilarious.

Irby and Lawson will be in conversation with New York Times bestselling poet Kate Baer.

Featured Books: Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby and Broken (in the best possible way) by Jenny Lawson

Event Details:

  • This event is free and open to the public. No registration is required, but we’d appreciate an RSVP over on Facebook!

  • All book festival events, unless otherwise noted, will take place at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore’s main stage.

  • Seating is general admission; first come, first served.

  • A public book signing will immediately follow the discussion. Purchasing an author’s new or previously published book from the Midtown Scholar Bookstore is required for entry to the signing line. (Additional copies of a book, purchased elsewhere, may also be signed if time permits).

About the Speakers

Samantha Irby is a writer whose work you can find on the internet.

Jenny Lawson is an award-winning humorist known for her great candor in sharing her struggle with mental illness. She lives in Texas with her husband and daughter and was constantly “buying too many books” (“Not a real thing,” she insists), so she decided to skip the middleman and just started her own bookshop, which also serves booze. She has previously written Let’s Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy, both of which were #1 NYT bestsellers.

Kate Baer is the 3x New York Times bestselling author of What Kind Of Woman, I Hope This Finds You Well, & And Yet. Her work has also been published in The New Yorker, Literary Hub, Huffington Post and The New York Times.