Lifeform
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
From actor, comedian, co-creator of Marcel the Shell, and New York Times bestselling author of Little Weirds, Jenny Slate, a wild, soulful, hilarious collection of genre-bending essays depicting the journey into motherhood as you’ve never seen it before.
What happened was this: Jenny Slate was a human mammal who sniffed the air every morning hoping to find another person to love who would love her, and in that period there was a deep dark loneliness that she had to face and befriend, and then we are pleased to report that she did fall in love, and in that period she was like chimes, or a flock of clean breaths, and her spine lying flat was the many-colored planks on the xylophone, but also she was rabid with fear of losing this love, because of past injury. And then what happened was that she became a wild-pregnant-mammal-thing and then she exploded herself by having a whole baby blast through her vagina during a global plague and then she was expected to carry on like everything was normal—but was this normal, and had she or anything ever been normal?
Herein lies an account of this journey, told in five phases—Single, True Love, Pregnancy, Baby, and Ongoing—through luminous, laugh-out-loud funny, unclassifiable essays that take the form of letters to a doctor, dreams of a stork, fantasy therapy sessions, gossip between racoons, excerpts from an imaginary olden timey play, obituaries, theories about post-partum hair loss, graduation speeches, and more.
No one writes like Jenny Slate.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Nobody writes about everyday experiences with quite the same sharpness, whimsy, and raw emotion as comedian and actress Jenny Slate. In her second book of essays, Slate explores everything from loneliness and grief to childbirth and motherhood, all with a poetic lyricism and visceral imagery that we found delightfully weird and utterly captivating. She ponders the uncertainties of entering her forties in a pretend letter to her doctor; she tells the story of how she and her husband captured a raccoon from the raccoon’s POV. Whether she’s diving into the frightening vividness of pregnancy dreams or describing her almost spiritual connection to her dishwasher, Slate manages to grab every relatable (and sometimes intrusive) thought that whizzes through her head so that she can examine it on the page with tenderness and honesty. This is a sweet, funny, and very moving read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The quirky humor of comedian Slate (Little Weirds) lights up these odd yet endearing essays, which trace her path to becoming a mother in the years after divorcing her first husband. Reflecting on the early days of dating her second husband, she recounts worrying whenever they were apart that he would lose interest in her, a feeling she gradually overcame through the strength of their connection. Two entries offer psychedelic accounts of her recurring dreams about a stork with "straw-like legs... strobing with filaments, threads of metallic light"; she interprets the creature's often gruesome deaths as symbolizing her anxieties about becoming a mother. Other selections send-up postpartum life, as when Slate writes in a faux letter to her doctor that her breasts were "dripping like mutant grapes from outer space." Another entry is styled as an obituary marking the death of Slate's former self, featuring the headline, "Woman dies of going the extra mile." Though Slate's eccentric comedy is a constant, she's not afraid to get heartfelt, as in the moving "Swan," where she meditates on losing her grandmother to dementia while raising her baby: "There is no way for us to have our loves without breathtaking pain, not because we love brutally but because we lose each other at different times." Funny, lyrical, and sometimes strange, these essays pulse with life.
