Book Club

Credit: Chloé Horseman

Jenny Slate Gets Real About Motherhood

The 42-year-old's surrealist-but-digestible essay collection Lifeform is ELLE's inaugural Book Club pick.

By Lauren Puckett-Pope

Jenny Slate delightfully evades categorization. I could introduce her as an actress and a stand-up comedian, a voice actor and an author, recognized amongst fans as Marcel the Shell, or as Parks and Recreation's scene-stealing Mona-Lisa Saperstein, or as Allysa in the headline-making summer blockbuster It Ends With Us. But that short biography chafes against the breadth of her insights, or the whimsy of her much-less-public personality. This is precisely why her latest book, the surrealist-but-digestible essay collection Lifeform, is such a treasure—and the ideal inaugural pick for the ELLE Book Club.

In the nearly 45 short essays that comprise Lifeform, Slate navigates the jagged edges of her own self-doubt, anxiety, imagination, and mirth. Chronicling her recent life story in milestones—"Single," "True Love," "Pregnancy," "Baby," and "Ongoing"—she frets about her career, meets her now-husband Ben Shattuck, gets pregnant, worries about motherhood, gives birth, and slowly traverses the path of a woman metamorphosed. But Lifeform is not exactly a memoir; it's not so much about Slate herself as about the universal feelings she yearns to understand. Is she normal? Is anyone? What would that mean? Will her abnormality forever keep her at a distance from her loved ones? And as she makes a new being with her body, how will doing so remake her? As Slate writes in the book, "If you look at us from another world, from another planet, from the point of view of another species, it must seem psychedelic and excessive, how many times we transform over our lifetimes."

When Slate and I met over Zoom to discuss Lifeform, she sat curled up on a couch in her Massachusetts home, exuding a sort of hard-won peace—the sort of calm that's difficult to depict in a stand-up special, particularly one like Slate's jittery, "vocally acrobatic" February 2024 Prime Video special Seasoned Professional. But that respite—or, at least, the pursuit of it—is a hallmark of Lifeform itself, even with its many asides about Stonehenge witches, gossiping raccoons, Ghostbusters, and yogurt handcrafted by elves. Slate doesn't know how to be anyone other than herself. And we are all better for it.

In an edited excerpt of our conversation below, Slate describes how Lifeform came together, what goes into writing such a bizarre and beautiful book, and why she considers imagination not a form of denial, but a necessary prerequisite to truth.

Lifeform by Jenny Slate

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When did you start writing the essays in Lifeform, and at what point did you know they could make a good book?

I loved writing Little Weirds [her 2019 book], and it revealed to me that there's an entire area of work I want to be making that I'd never made before. So after that, I was like, Yeah, I will certainly write more books.

But then, in the spring of 2020, I found myself in my house in Massachusetts—my husband and I, we weren't married yet, but we drove here when COVID hit to get out of L.A. And when we got here, I got pregnant right away, and I was newly pregnant at the start of a global plague. And I was also, at the time, 38, and thought, Oh my God, what if I don't get let back into the world? I think a lot of people felt that way—whether or not you were growing a lifeform in your body.

I had spent so long trying to build myself into the performer that I wanted to be, and getting comfortable with myself and my own persona, to then feel like, What if none of this is even going to be here? So I wrote to my literary agent and said, "I think this is a good time for me to embark on another writing project," because I wouldn't have to physically be in a costume or in a place. I could be in my house as my body changed. But, instead, it was a ton of pressure, and I was pregnant and stressed, and I didn't feel like I had any coherent thoughts. Then I had my daughter, Ida, and there was what felt like a prolonged postpartum experience. I didn't really start writing this book until my daughter was two and a half.

That was really scary for me, because I was like, "Oh no, I made this commitment, and it seems as if I can't follow through because I've lost some sort of connection to my own voice." But really, I had been writing teeny tiny snippets and putting them down in my Notes app, or I had emailed myself. It's not like I didn't remember these things; I just hadn't seen them as anything of worth. I went back and looked at one of them, and all of a sudden the small note I'd written to myself—I knew how to run with it. I knew how to unfurl the thought.

I started to go through every single tiny thing that I had written down and expanded upon. I kept saying, "This is the doorway to the book. I don't know if this is the book, but this is what I have to work with." There were more than 80 pieces open on my computer at one time, and then I started to organize them into little piles and reorganize them. Finally, I realized, Oh, this is just the form of my life. I don't have to try to do some big fancy thing. The way that I speak and the forms that my emotions take once they become pieces of literature, they're already pretty surreal. They're already richly embroidered. I don't need to do anything except clinically label these phases in my life and put down in those spaces what I can.

Your work—across comedy, film, voiceover acting, writing, acting, etc.—is difficult to summarize. Do you view these elements of your work as existing in conversation with one another, or do you prefer to keep them compartmentalized?

I don't think I try to keep anything away from anything else. I think, in my self-created work, there are some subjects and some styles that don't fit into certain art forms. The way that I wanted to express myself concerning the last six years of my life…I did as much as I could in my stand-up special, Seasoned Professional, and it had to be funny. It's a dual objective of being funny, and also of holding the truth of my experiences that I feel so strongly about.

Sometimes, I feel I still have more to say—or I want to say the same thing, but I want to endow it with a tenderness that didn't get to its fullest level because I was doing stand-up.

Through Marcel the Shell, through Stage Fright, Seasoned Professional, Little Weirds, and Lifeform, I can certainly step back and see my identity—not a persona, or a created thing, or something that I wear, but something I feel privately and publicly, which is an urgency around connection. I'm a person who really wants to participate in resourcefulness and ingenuity in order to have a functional life that, as Marcel says, is not just about surviving, but about thriving, enjoying oneself in specifically self-crafted ways.

That is throughout my work, and it is who I am, and it's what sustains me. A lot of times, I feel like my own created work feels like a person planting a flag on a foreign planet. I don't know if this life we're all in is the foreign planet, or if I'm the alien. But I feel at once so connected and sometimes so separate, as many people feel, that I think sometimes all you can do is plant a flag to articulate how far you've come in order to still be here.

Tell me about how you wrote this book. What did your writing setup look like? Did you keep specific rituals? Were there essential elements you needed for a productive day of writing?

It was a few months of a very exact process, which was getting up with my daughter at around 6 A.M. and having coffee. My mother-in-law would come at 6:30, and she would play with Ida, and I would go back to my bed, and my husband would go and sleep in Ida's bed. We switched off every morning with Ida.

I would get back in bed, I'd drink my coffee and look out the window while listening to NPR's Up First, just getting the news, and then I would set a timer and journal for eight minutes. Then I would open my computer and sit in my bed, and I would pick a piece from the 80 or so pieces that were open and just think, What do I want? I'm interested in this.

And then I would start, and at 8 A.M. our real childcare would begin, and our nanny would come and she and Ida would play, and I would be able to hear them playing and running down the hallway. And sometimes they would come into the room, and I would feel really good because I was not alone. I need ambient noise and people around in order to focus. It's very hard for me to focus when I'm by myself.

Then I would just Edith Wharton—sit in my bed with a gigantic Hydro Flask of water. I would sit in there until probably noon, occasionally going to the bathroom, and then my eyes would hurt, and I'd have to walk around and do some housework for a half an hour, and then I would write until about 2 P.M. again, and then my brain would be pretty weird and wobbly, so I would stop.

Credit: Getty Images

Having done that process over and over, and making a whole book out of it, what is the best piece of advice you'd give someone trying to sit down and write a book?

If there's something you're attracted to, put down the elements of it on the page. Even if you can't complete [the piece] that day, and even if it changes into something completely different or you never use it, make contact with your process as your process itself forms.

I was always intimidated by the fact that I didn't have a process [in the beginning]. How do you write a book if you've never done it before? But if there's something that is interesting to you, even if it's just a list of observations, put it down—don't let it pass. And if it doesn't feel like you're interested that day, don't push it. Put your creative process into something else.

There are days, for me, where I experienced light cognitive exhaustion, and at that point, as they say, the well needs to fill back up again. Replenishment is a real thing. One thing I've really depended on is: The creative process is always available to you, even if you're not going to work within the area you thought you were. You can still engage, and it's worth it because then you don't feel like an imposter in your own agenda.

There's an essay in the book called "The Graduation Speech," which was recently excerpted in The New Yorker. In that piece, you talk about imagining your morning yogurt as a "ceremonial custard" created by "a small enclave of elves." That daydream, really, is about creating moments of magic for yourself—of using your imagination as a route to joy and enchantment and fulfillment. That's something children often find easy to do, but adults…not so much. As an adult, are there times when it's harder to create that enchantment for yourself? And how do you conjure it again?

There are times when it is hard. If I'm in a phase of feeling depressed or really, really lonely, I can forget how to begin. I feel [the solution] is talking to people that I can take risks around, that I can then try my hardest to describe myself to—and know that those people love me. While I was talking to my dad and my aunt recently, I thought, Oh, right. These people, they remember me. They remember me from before. I've lost touch with the part of myself that I felt was lively and special, but they remember, and I suddenly remember as well.

Being a person who participates in redefinition—or creating a different context so you're not participating in denial—is not the equivalent of rose-colored glasses. You're not trying to see the world differently. You're trying to help support the feelings that feel at odds with the person you want to be.

If I am feeling well, which includes sometimes feeling sad, and I'm feeling capable—if I'm feeling like myself, basically—those little games, those little interplays, are asking to be worked with. Even today, I was putting my dishes away and putting my groceries away after I went to the supermarket, and I noticed what I was imagining about myself as I was doing it. It's about being able to be yourself, but needing relief from either being invisible or from things that are mundane, and realizing that you gave it to yourself. I find that to be so soothing. Playing games and imagining other contexts that don't erase my own creates so much more space in my life.