You won’t believe what Samantha Irby just revealed about hating your body!

As far as writers’ descriptions go, “humorist” has an old-fashioned, almost quaint ring to it, the literary equivalent of a haberdasher or a bluffer. But across four book collections, most recently the bestseller “Quietly Hostile,” Samantha Irby has always brought a luridly honest, never haphazard, and, it must be said, operatically scatological vivacity to the humorous literary essay. “I’m a little bit different,” says Irby, who is 43 and was supervising producer for the next season of the divisive “Sex and the City” revival, “And Just Like That,” which opens this month. “I have low self esteem and I put all my mental illness on the page.” Which, of course, is the key to muddled through. “I can look at my life,” Irby says philosophically, “and find the jokes.”

A recurring theme in your work is that you are a mess and don’t understand how to make life run smoothly. But do you think other people are walking around thinking, I have everything under control? I know people who have it together, that when I look at them, I feel even worse. My wife is very organized. She knows where her things are and she has routines. I see this in other people, and then I don’t know where my glasses are or where I put my shoes, and I think, “How am I going through the same life that they are going through?” In my writing, my goal is for people to say, “Oh, she’s in the same [expletive] I’m in.” Because with just your phone, it’s easy to feel like you’re the only one [expletive] All up. Everybody says: “Look at my children! Look at my friends!” I bet you eat whole grains and drink plenty of water, and here I am with brown urine and I can’t move.

Some people have an accepting attitude about their bodies. Is that a way of thinking or being approachable for you? Not for me. I admire people who wear short shorts and crop tops. It would just never be me. Maybe I was born too early to get on “I don’t give a fuck”. [expletive] if you see my legs” thing. I’ve never had that relationship with my body, and I think it’s made worse by Crohn’s disease and the arthritis that has come from Crohn’s disease. I can’t even move like I want. My brain is good; she has never let me down. The body has always failed me. It would feel dishonest of me to say, “I love my body, and you better love it too, because I don’t.”

Why don’t you like the beach? It’s hot. It’s dirty. The water is diarrhea, full of dead fish and insects and baby diapers. The sand is disgusting. It gets everywhere. It is impossible to clean. Do you need me to continue?

I realized from reading your stuff that you have written quite a bit about losing your parents. But no one ever asks you about pain. Is there anything you would like to express about it? I don’t know if this is controversial, but I don’t miss my parents. If they were alive like the same people they were when they died, they would be a total burden on my life. They died in 1998. It’s been so long it feels like I didn’t even have them. Do I know these people or are they a figment of my imagination that I have written about in these books? People don’t want to hear you talk like that, and I get it, but it’s real. I mean, my father was born in 1936 and he was a gambling degenerate. I can’t have that old man, he would be stealing my money. He’d show up in the middle of the night like, “Hey, I live here now.” [Laughs.] The bad things outweigh the good. We had our time, and we moved on.

It is funny. There are these cultural expectations about how we’re supposed to portray our feelings, but acting is really about making other people comfortable. Yeah! Whatever people’s relationships are with their parents, or any dead relatives, I’m like, “Oh, are you going to cry yourself to death? Good.” But my attitude of, “It’s like a relief,” not many people say that, and I feel like we should be able to! I’m a bitch. Have you ever seen a whole adult burst into tears over their father who died? a decade ago? Maybe their mothers were much better than mine, but come on! For! The thing is that people [expletive] on you for not suffering enough, but if you’re a slimy mess, they don’t want to touch you. They don’t want you to get snot on their shirt! When there is a person like me, he must be happy, because I am going to make a joke about my dead mom and then we are going to talk about something else. Put together a mess of a person? Nobody wants to do that. I was just asking how you were; I didn’t want to clean up the crime scene!

Sometimes I see expensive things, and I can’t believe they spent so much money and didn’t know how to do it right. No, that’s real. I think the hardest thing was, “Hey, we’ve got these new black and brown writers in the room,” and everyone just assumed everything they hated was coming from us. I mean, everyone was very sensitive. People were thoughtful about it. And have people be like, “That sucks. They weren’t even thinking.” No, maybe they were thinking too much. But I do not know. This next season, everything is going to merge. [Laughs.] People will hate season 2 too, but they will watch it.

There is this idea now that everyone is too sensitive to jokes. What do you think? I think I’m a little out of the woods because my main target is myself, but prank sensitivity runs wild for me. I grew up with old black comedians like Paul Mooney and Richard Pryor. I am not offended by anything. I don’t want to make this the fat guy show, but my sincere wish is that everyone has to live in a 300 pound body for a week. Because there are fat jokes where there aren’t supposed to be jokes, and you don’t see us on the street cutting off traffic with our big ass because there was a joke. It’s okay to be sensitive, but I don’t want to control what other people do. If I don’t like something, I don’t look at it, I don’t listen to it. But the thing now where it’s like, “I don’t like this; should not exist”? That’s crazy to me. It’s too much, and the rules change too fast. And I won’t, David. I don’t give a [expletive]. As long as I don’t hurt anyone personally, I don’t care.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations.

David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and writes the Talk column. He recently interviewed Emma Chamberlain on leaving YouTube, Walter Mosley on a dumber America and Cal Newport on a new way of working.