JENNY SLATE WANTS TO BE TAKEN
seriously. She’s returned to Los
Angeles for her first round of
press ahead of a busy fall season—
her debut Netflix comedy special,
Stage Fright, premieres Oct. 22,
and her first solo book, Little
Weirds, hits shelves just weeks
later—and finds herself getting
defensive about the way her work
will be received. “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? No laughing mat-
ter. “I take myself seriously even if
I am, as a person, definitely a col-
lection of bubbles and springs and
things that make ding ing noises,”
Slate, 37, says. “I’m a major
boinker. I’m a boinky ding-dong
kind of person. But I’m not juve-
nile. I’m living an adult life.”
That croissant piece, titled
“Treat,” captures both Slate’s
boinky and adulting sides in a lit-
tle over a page. It appears silly at
first glance, a celebrity dabbling
in twinkly mystical prose, but
builds, bracingly, into a statement
of desire that’s at once warm,
heartbreaking, and erotic. “Trea-
sure 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.
Look at me and say, ‘Oh, I really
shouldn’t,’ just because you want
to have me so very much.”
Little Weirds is hardly a pithy,
dishy “comic’s book” in the vein of
what Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and
Mindy Kaling have helped to revi-
talize over the past decade. The
essays that follow “Treat” are
unclassifiable—too abstract to be
memoir, too interior to be fic-
tion—short entries that, taken
together, read like a strange, witty,
sad journey into the depths of
their author’s imagination.
Slate, a Saturday Night Live fea-
tured cast member for just one
season before being fired in 2010
(she dropped an F-bomb during
her first episode), has never
embodied mainstream Holly-
wood. Her breakout was the 2014
film Obvious Child, an indie rom-
com with a nuanced abortion story
line that premiered at Sundance to
great acclaim and won her the
Critics’ Choice Award for best
comedy actress. She’s ubiquitous
in TV comedies, memorably recur-
ring on critical darlings like Parks
and Recreation and Lady Dynamite
and voicing key characters on Big
Mouth and Bob’s Burgers, but she
has never led one of her own.
Recently, she writes, her life
“fell to pieces.” She experienced
heartbreak—her marriage of four
years ended in 2016; her highly
publicized romance with Chris
Evans began thereafter, but they
broke up in 2018—and a “loss of
confidence” in her work. “I was
constantly saying, ‘There’s some-
thing more that can be done with
my sadness than just shame and
heaviness and loneliness,’ ” she
BY DAVID CANFIELD
@davidcanfield97
JENNY SLATE
Little
Weirds
jenny slate
—
11.5.2019
says now. “But that’s a very hard
point for me to prove to myself.”
As she reflects on her year and
a half of solitude, of “stream-of-
consciousness” writing and the
compiling process that followed,
Slate’s distinctive voice and per-
sona—bubbly, bright, endearingly
shy—still sings. (For every painful
memory recounting, it seems,
there’s a “boink” utterance.) But
this was an emotionally taxing
process for her; you sense it as she
trails off answering a question or
unpacks what motivated the book
in the first place. “It was very, very
heavy lifting at times,” she says.
One piece, “I Died: Bronze
Tree,” emerged purely out of an
exercise Slate wrote for herself
after her divorce, imagining her
dream marriage; another, “I Want
to Look Out a Window,” is com-
posed of wishes for her future.
They’re devastating in their unfil-
tered honesty, even optimism.
“You’re sitting here, you feel
unlovable, you’ve had your heart
broken,” Slate says, remembering
the space that she was in while
writing. “What’s the version of
you that makes you fall in love
with yourself? Just put it down.”
Slate, based in Los Angeles,
spent the bulk of her time working
on Little Weirds in a beach house
that her parents recently had built
on Martha’s Vineyard in Massa-
chusetts. She was alone. There was
hardly any furniture. She’d wake
up early, make coffee, walk out-
side—nature and unusual life-
forms are central motifs in the
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