Jenny Slate Can’t Help But Care What You Think About Her New Book

Jenny Slate describes the experience of writing her first book as something akin to standing in the rubble of her life and sending a message out to the world that she was still here. The actor wrote Little Weirds after her divorce as a way to work through what it meant to be alone. “I was trying to become a new version of an adult and asking myself what adulthood is on the horizon,” she says. “I was among these fragments of my old life, but it turned out the fragments were messages and I was going to post them in the form of a book.”

In the years since Little Weirds‘ 2019 publication, Slate met someone new, got married and had a baby — all moments that became inspiration for her sophomore essay collection, Lifeform. Slate says she struggled to write this time around, and several of the chapters — like an essay about using a stork visualization to get through pregnancy and birth — are the result of months, if not years, of picking up, and then setting aside, her thoughts. “When I finally wrote this book, I realized how badly I wanted to do it, and that this is exactly what I wanted it to be,” she says. “I’m feeling a lot of happiness that I like it. But that doesn’t mean that if someone’s like, ‘Ew, what a gross, stupid book,’ that I won’t feel bad.”

Here, Slate speaks to The Hollywood Reporter (over Zoom from her Massachusetts home) about grappling with all of these emotions.

What’s your philosophy on writing — or doing stand-up — about things that involve other people?

I don’t feel any interest in making anybody feel uncomfortable. I need to have creative output, and without it I start to get super sad, but I would never place it above personal relationships. I get pretty angry at people who are like, this just needs to go in there, I’m sorry if it hurts your feelings but it does. I don’t understand that. I place relationship above all else, and I have no inclination to be in combat at all.

Is there a different threshold for your books versus stand-up?

Of course you have to do jokes in stand-up, but that isn’t to say there can’t be very tender, and fully sad, things in there. It makes me laugh when people are like, “Was that stand-up?,” just because there are sad parts. It feels like a knee-jerk misogynist reaction to vulnerability. That’s a digression. I think with either of them, I trust myself to know what my husband would and wouldn’t like included. He’s a fan of my stand-up so he knows what it is. I do feel bad every time I make fun of my parents. I just have so much love and respect for them. There was a joke in my special about me having to come to terms with the fact that my therapist isn’t my mom, and I had to call my mom and be like, this isn’t meant to imply that I wish Pamela was my mom and not you. It’s more that what I need from a therapist is to be her one and only. My mom was like, “Oh, Jen, I don’t care.”

Do you feel more pressure to have successful results when you release a book? Especially compared to something like the box office returns on a movie you’re part of? The figures for It Ends With Us come to mind.

I feel successful when I set out to do something, and when I make the thing I was meant to make. With books, I don’t look at things like quantities sold. I’m not very interested in that. I’ve had the opportunity to look some real markers of success in the face. And it’s not that I’m not grateful for them, because I certainly am. I’ve always been a student that wants an A. And it’s fun to be celebrated. But I also know that I feel a feeling of deep embarrassment when someone says good job about something that I don’t think was good. It’s not from pretension, it’s just that I don’t like how that feels. I don’t even know why it makes me embarrassed.

How do you know when you’ve done a good job?

If I fulfilled my responsibilities. Did I feel I was a dependable member of this community? Did I make people happy and laugh when they saw me? When I’m on a set, I’m there to do my work, to make relationshipsm and hopefully I make friendships. But it’s about serving that process, doing my work and then letting it go. I’m not the editor.

I’d like to say that if someone doesn’t like what I do in a movie or something that’s fine, but I don’t know. My husband owns the general store in our town, and last year I was there and heard a table of people talking about how they didn’t think I was funny, and it was gnarly. Obviously it hurt my feelings. It was like, “OK, this is what I’ve always feared.”

As in, it threatened to confirm your own thoughts of self-doubt?

I don’t think their opinions are the truth about me. I like my comedy. But it was shocking. I sort of felt like, “I’m not trying to upset you with my comedy.” I guess I have to be reasonable and realize that it’s normal for people to sit around and say, I didn’t enjoy this or that. But it was a weird move to sit in my husband’s store and do a comprehensive review of my work. They went through every area that I work in and just trashed me. It was like reading a comment section, which I don’t even do. I send the image and what I want to say to someone else and don’t look at the social media myself. One of them said, “I don’t like the roles she chooses,” which honestly is a compliment that she thinks I have my choice of roles.

Did they ever notice it was you? Do you have anything you wish you had said?

I couldn’t figure out how to get out of the store without walking by them. I’m not known for my incredible filter, but I also don’t think I’m impulsive. So I did end up going up to them, and I was crying, believe it or not. I was definitely weeping. I did not have a plan. And I was in a really weird outfit: it was my husband’s huge sweater, some pajama pants and L.L.Bean boots. I just walked up to them, and they saw I was crying but didn’t recognize me and one of them said, “Oh my God, are you okay? Can we help you?” I said, “I’m the person you were talking about, and I’m sorry you don’t enjoy my work but I really am trying my best, and I’m not trying to upset you.”

What did they do? I would disappear myself.

It was just crazy. One of the people sort of tried to defend what she said and I was like, “No, it’s cool, you don’t need to enjoy my work.” And then I was like, “I don’t even know why I’m standing here right now.” It was just so awkward. And unfortunately I ended it by saying — with no snark whatsoever — “happy holidays.” It was Thanksgiving. I don’t know if that’s victorious or pathetic. I was in such an adrenaline trance that I also can’t remember what anyone looked like.

What do you think about when you imagine your daughter reading this book one day?

I would assume one day she’ll read it. It would be weird to be like, “I don’t know if she’ll get to it.” But I hope that she’ll recognize me. That who I am won’t be shocking to her. There’s a piece in the book that’s like, I know you think I’m the person who is always spraying the Mrs. Meyer’s on the countertop, and that is hard for me. As a mother, cliché can sometimes really come for me. I think of myself as a fun, silly person but sometimes I’m like, “Who am I? The rigid person who’s like, ‘why did the breast milk get left out?’”

The idea of gendered clichés taking you by surprise seems, to me, to be a pretty universal experience in millennial motherhood.

It’s really scary. Gender stereotypes are a bummer for any of us. As a female actor I’ve always been especially aware of them. I’m always trying to fight them off. I never thought I would feel so threatened by deeply old-fashioned tropes, like feeling like a ball-and-chain. They’re not coming from my own partner. Like the idea of finding myself in the kitchen ­ — why do I like it in there? Am I an unconscious misogynist who is trying to prove my worth to a mean daddy God who wants me to be a nice clean mommy? But I think the way you quiet down those thoughts is making sure you’re always asking yourself the right questions and being in conversation with the ghosts in your conditioning.