Published in 2017
240 pages
Erin Chack was born and raised in New Jersey, where she formed strong opinions about bagels. As a senior writer at BuzzFeed her posts have received over 250 million views to date. She lives in Astoria, Queens, with plants that are definitely still alive and not dead haha why would you even suggest that. This Is Really Happening is her first book.
What is this book about?
BuzzFeed senior writer Erin Chack hits you in the guts, the feels, and the funny bone all at once with this collection of personal essays that reads like Sloane Crosley for the Snapchat generation.
In turns hysterically funny and heartbreakingly poignant, Erin recounts everything from meeting her soulmate at age 14 to her first chemotherapy session at age 19 to what really goes on behind the scenes at a major Internet media company.
She authentically captures the agony and the ecstasy of the millennial experience, whether it’s her first kiss (“Sean’s tongue! In my mouth! Slippery and wet like a slug in the rain.”) or her struggles with anxiety (“When people throw caution to the wind, I am stuck imagining the poor soul who has to break his back sweeping caution into a dustpan”).
Yet Erin also offers a fresh perspective on universal themes of resilience and love as she writes about surviving cancer—including learning of her mother’s own cancer diagnosis within the same year and her attempts to hide the diagnosis from friends to avoid “un-normaling” everything.
Honest, hilarious, and totally unfiltered, this sharply observed memoir introduces Erin Chack as a strikingly original new voice.
