Purchase a copy for yourself here!
Jenny Slate’s new book, Little Weirds, is hard to characterize in terms of format. It’s part memoir, part essay collection, part mini revelations. The comedian and actress writes about divorce, friendship, loneliness, and the patriarchy. Her writing is anything but direct, and she circles these larger topics somewhat hazily, with lovely and warm prose that offers little in the way of actual personal intimacy. She writes in the introductory chapter, “There is a free, wild creature up here, and now you must think about how to take her in and keep her alive. This is the tone that is rippling through the pages up ahead.” I had a hard time keeping this wild creature alive, and holding her in my mind felt quite slippery at times.
I picked up this book because I am a longtime fan of Slate’s work, especially her two film collaborations with Gillian Robespierre, Obvious Child and Landline. These are two of my go-to comfort films, they are warm and funny and make me feel safe and less alone. This characteristic warmth revealed itself in flashes in the memoir, particularly in a scene were she describes witnessing a boy asking his dog to sit on a skateboard, or when she describes the joy of getting dressed or bringing flowers into her home. She describes a moment where she and her mother come upon a flower and the delight they share in accurately identifying it, writing, “Information about art and nature feels like the best stuff to have, and if you have it, it is powerful and excellent to pass it on.” Small moments like these, and when she describes her cream colored skirt as “the tone of a slightly warm dessert-drink hiding in a cup, a secret gentle creamy treat for me while everyone else drinks a darker, more serious, scalding thing.”, are reminiscent of rarely-appreciated moments of sweetness and joy. For me, the strongest points of connection were the lovely passages about the closeness nature and the human soul, and about how absolutely profound that feeling the ground under one’s feet can be. The standout essay was “Letter: Superego”, which is fashioned as a letter from Slate’s inner self to outer self, reminding her of the danger in reading articles or essays and sharing them with others without internalizing them yourself. It feels like a clever reminder to practice what you preach while also being gentle to your own mind and spirit.
These bright and warm moments in the memoir remind me why I fell in love with Slate’s work in the first place, as she is funny in such a gentle and deeply human way. One wishes that this warmth and consideration could be extended to some of the other essays that feel a bit empty and vague, especially those about the patriarchy and divorce, which are clearly deeply personalized traumas for Slate, but feel a bit far away in her writing. If readers are looking for more intimate reflection, her new Netflix special Stage Fight is a great place to start, and contains some of the specificity and clarity that was missing for me in the memoir.