Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby
Published 2020 · 288 pages · 70,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Memoir & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Satire & Humor
How hard is Wow, No Thank You to read?
Wow, No Thank You scores 17 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 22 out of 100
- Conversational, pop-culture-saturated vocabulary. Deliberately casual register.
- Sentence structure: 20 out of 100
- Abstraction: 18 out of 100
- Entirely concrete and experiential. Ideas delivered through anecdote, not argument.
- Information density: 30 out of 100
- Light, fast reading. Emotional and comedic density rather than informational.
- Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100
- Direct personal essay format. No structural tricks.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- Minimal symbolism. The comedy is literal and on the surface.
- Ironic distance: 42 out of 100
- High comic irony. Self-deprecation functions as both shield and weapon.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- Essay format with no suspense. Each piece is self-contained.
- Structural complexity: 12 out of 100
- Standalone essays. No overarching narrative structure.
How Wow, No Thank You is regarded
Wow, No Thank You holds a literary regard score of 36 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.