book—and then put to paper what-
ever came to her. She couldn’t
articulate her process, but told her
editor, Jean Garnett, that she
needed to trust it. “It was some-
times a challenge, especially in the
early months, to accept the fact
that the book is...sort of unclassifi-
able,” Garnett explains. “But it was
also really exciting to embrace
that and lean into it, and to trust
Jenny’s process and vision.” When
Garnett received Slate’s final draft,
they met up at Garnett’s house
in New York’s Hudson Valley for
four days, sitting “in matching old
armchairs by a window, looking
out onto snowy trees, laptops in
our laps,” Garnett says. Slate read
the whole book aloud, and they
edited collaboratively.
Slate calls Little Weirds “trans-
formative” for her. “I also just
really learned how to be alone,”
she says—and then laughs, as if
just remembering that, yes, she’s
newly engaged (to writer/art
curator Ben Shattuck). He’d vis-
ited her on the Vineyard, as a
friend, while she was still writing
(“We didn’t kiss or anything ”).
“Right when I left the island, I
went to his house,” she says, smil-
ing. “I learned how to be alone,
and then I think that helped me to
be a better partner.” It’s a nice
bookend to the backstory of Little
Weirds, too. She thinks back to the
wishes of “I Want to Look Out a
Window”: “They were real wishes.
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 Weirds is often
very funny. (One chapter is called
“I Died: The Sad Songs of My
Vagina.”) Same goes for her Stage
Fright special. 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’m
begging for work, begging to be
given an audition for an actually
good film,” she says. “I don’t care
to beg anymore. I feel at peace.”
fall BOOKS special
PHOTOGRAPH BY DANA TRIPPE EW ● COM NOVEMBER 2019 87
