WordPLAY

Vanities /Books

In an intimate essay collection, JENNY SLATE expresses the weird and the wonderful

"HAVE YOU ANY experience with patients who suddenly understood something," writes Jenny Slate in her new essay collection, Lifeform (Little, Brown), "and then even though they had other things to do, they could not stop fixating on that new understanding?"

"You can be asleep in a stone for so long, and so much can happen without your consent, and so much can happen because you are awake in the stone but afraid to even make a peep," she continues. "But once you are out, once you get busted out, you can work freely and make up for lost time."

Slate has a flair for the fantastical and is deeply attuned to the ecosystems of relationships: Her 2022 film Marcel the Shell With Shoes On tells the story of a one-inch-tall shell looking to reunite with his family. Her debut essay collection, Little Weirds (2019), ripples with wonder for the natural world and describes love found and lost.

Since then, 42-year-old Slate has married writer and curator Ben Shattuck and become a parent, experiences she began exploring in her most recent special, Seasoned Professional. "Everything is becoming richer and wider," she says over Zoom from her home in Massachusetts. "I have so much more ability across the board not just as a performer but as a living, emotional person."

In Lifeform, Slate is busting from the stone. Written in five phases, from single life through pregnancy and parenthood, the collection blends Slate's trademark magic with incisive reflections on

love, family, and legacy, all coming together to create some of her most soul-searching work yet. In "Phase 2: True Love," she reflects on her fears of being forgotten when she leaves her love on an island. In "Phase 4: Baby," a dark purple hole visits her in the afternoon. In excerpts from a play called Schumacher, she tells the story of a young woman who goes to an "iced-cream social," conspires to give two naysayers truth serum, and then a tree bursts into the room and washes them clean in special pods.

"When I use metaphor," she tells me, "it's almost like I'm putting my entire experience on the back of a magical bird and saying, 'Take it from here.' I don't have to worry about it anymore. I can let the mystery be. If I dress it up with enough mysterious fuel and feathers, it'll just take off and I can remember that I'm me and not have to deal with the specifics of my experience anymore. I can be with a greater sense of mystery and unknown, and that makes me feel really alive."

MICHAEL COLBERT