The results are thrilling.
Jenny Slate wants to be taken seriously.
“It feels like I’m flinging myself onto our culture,” she says with an embarrassed laugh.
But these memoiristic projects began as a personal endeavor.
That the book opens with Slate imagining she was born as a croissant?
“I’m a major boinker.
I’m a boinky ding-dong kind of person.
But I’m not juvenile.
I’m living an adult life.”
“Treasure me for my layers and layers of fragility and richness,” Slate writes.
“Name me after a shape that the moon makes.
Have me in a hotel while you are on vacation.
Recently, she writes, her life “fell to pieces.”
“But that’s a very hard point for me to prove to myself.”
(For every painful memory recounting, it seems, there’s a “boink” utterance.)
“It was very, very heavy lifting at times,” she says.
They’re devastating in their unfiltered honesty, even optimism.
“What’s the version of you that makes you fall in love with yourself?
Just put it down.”
There was hardly any furniture.
Slate read the whole book aloud, and they edited collaboratively.
Slate callsLittle Weirds"transformative” for her.
“Right when I left the island, I went to his house,” she says, smiling.
It’s a nice bookend to the backstory ofLittle Weirds, too.
I have almost all of those things now.
But when I wrote them [out], they felt very far off."
Rest assured, this is a Jenny Slate book:Little Weirdsis often very funny.
(One chapter is called “I Died: The Sad Songs of My Vagina.")
Same goes for herStage Frightspecial.
Taken together, they reintroduce Slate as an artist, showcasing her singular poetic forms of expression.
And she knows it perhaps that’s been most healing for her in all of this.
“There’s always been this sense that I’ve had that I’m begging.
“I don’t care to beg anymore.
I feel at peace.”
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