Unicorn should be a verb. As a verb, this would be what you do when you project all sorts of magical qualities onto somebody else. But I recently read an essay called “Samantha Irby Needs to Talk About Some Sh*t” and I was hooked. We’re talking immediate Google stalking. That’s how I knew that I could -- despite the title of her new release, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life -- meet her in real life. On Tuesday, June 13, Irby and Buzzfeed culture writer/essayist Scaachi Koul appeared at Literati where they read selections from their books and answered questions to a full house. I really, really tried not to unicorn them.

I was a bit tardy to the reading, but the best part of running late and standing in the back is you get to unabashedly check out others in attendance. Plus, diversity is perhaps best observed from the back. I examined a long pair of French braids resting on a light brown back. I admired about a half-dozen different heads of Afro hair in a variety of styles. Body shapes suggested women of all ages, and I saw way more skin tones on this sea of necks than the Crayola multicultural set ever came up with. There were even some men in the audience, their body language as attentive as the women who outnumbered them. The disadvantage to being in the back, beyond the obvious, is that laughter travels away from you; it’s more difficult to enjoy communal laughter from behind. While I had purchased both We Are Never Meeting in Real Life and Koul’s One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, I hadn’t made it all the way through the books. But I did arrive in time to hear Irby tell a tale that I did read where she describes having to relieve herself on the side of the road. Not number 1, number 2. It was wintertime. It was not a desolate road. Yes, I had read this chapter, but looking directly at the person who lived through this thing that made you sweat sympathetically and hearing the words come from her mouth is an entirely different experience. Koul shared also shared a visceral, body-related story. In the space of a chapter, she scratched up memories of those days when one hopes to remake herself, become reborn, those days when something like a T-shirt or a skirt promises to be the thing that changes your life. In this tale involving a dressing room, a skirt, scissors, and the thong that was maimed in the process, Koul brought the audience face-to-face with stone cold humiliation. As I watched the golden-hour sun stream into the window that framed these women, I tried to keep the unicorning at bay. But resisting this urge is a tall order when you’re looking at two bespectacled, brown-skinned, smart, funny women who probably have as much trouble as you do finding makeup that looks right on their skin. Both women touched on the idea of unicorning. Koul, in particular, talked about the tension that comes with writing nonfiction essays about one’s life. In addition to people asking her overly personal questions about her upcoming wedding arrangements in response to an Instagram post, she experiences emotional overflow from her readers. “Brown girls come up to me and just weep. They show up and they just fucking bawl,” Koul said. On representation, she continued, “I wish there was more stuff so they had the opportunity to dislike me more.” Irby touched on this idea when she told the audience that her book and Roxane Gay’s Hunger were to share a release date at one point. “Naw, man,” she said. “Two fat black girls’ books can’t come out on the same day.” She then talked about how she and Roxane Gay are sometimes confused for each other despite the marked differences in their work. If turning two very different people into one isn’t unicorning -- letting a person stand in for an abstract idea -- I don’t know what is. When asked what their recent reads were, they gave the audience a few books to explore. After they recommended each other’s books, Koul mentioned American War by Omar El Akkad. Irby mentioned The Mothers by Brit Bennett, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, and the forthcoming Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. In addition to recommendations, these women served up many laughs. “People ask me why I’m angry,” Koul said. “Is it men who ask you that?” Irby replied. “Of course,” Koul emphatically said, “it’s men who ask me that!” Another zinger came from Koul on the topic of Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau: “He’s super hot, but he’s useless.” They weren’t laughing, however, when asked about the path to publishing their books. Irby had 40,000 words cut from her manuscript and Koul had 30,000 words cut from hers. But as the audience tensed up at imagining this challenge, Irby and Koul joked that it just meant they had to come up with thousands of new words. This example illustrated how challenging the writing life can be and how much work goes into these books that were years in the making. It also reminded us how lucky we were to share an evening with these remarkable unicorns. I mean, writers.

Sherlonya Turner is the manager of the Youth & Adult: Services & Collections Department at the Ann Arbor District Library. She can be found diving head-first into all sorts of projects over at sherlonya.net.