Slate’s memoir is practically poetic
‘Little Weirds’ chronicles loss and new love.
Reading Jenny Slate’s “Little Weirds” (out Nov. 5) is like digesting Shakespearean sonnets: It’s different enough from ordinary English that it takes your brain a few, very long sentences to adjust to its sweet, flowery prose.
But once you’ve recalibrated, the actress/comedian’s book becomes a dessert for the eyeballs that uses playful language to express deep sentiments about heartbreak, anger, wonder and friendship.
It’s also a romantic hope fulfilled. “Writing this book was a wish for love, and an understanding that if I didn’t find a way to find a self-love, that I really just wouldn’t be good for anyone, including myself,” says Slate.
The star of “The Secret Life of Pets,” “Venom” and the new Netflix special “Stage Fright” penned the fantastical memoir – which details real experiences of loneliness and daydreams of animals playing classical music – when she was single and grappling with divorce.
By the time of our phone interview, however, Slate has been engaged to art curator Ben Shattuck for a little more han a month. The two are about to embark
on a “Little Weirds” book tour.
“I like to be in conversation with the person I love the most at the end of a performance of pieces that I wrote in order to get myself back together,” says Slate about touring with Shattuck. “I like that our relationship feels like one of the many happy results from a lot of hard personal work.”
Shattuck makes an inadvertent appearance in “Little Weirds,” in a piece of the book Slate wrote about a trip to Norway with friends well before the two started dating. It’s an entry that shows romantic connection obvious to a reader – so obvious that I guessed it was about Shattuck – but maybe not to Slate herself.
“It was one of the first pieces I wrote for the book, and I definitely didn’t think I would see him again. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have written it,” says Slate, who doesn’t explicitly name Shattuck in the section where she meets a “dark-haired stranger” who paints her a picture of a blue flower and recites her verses from a poem in a dream.
“It happens to truly, strangely be true that my fiancé is that man!” Slate confirms.
The two didn’t get together until after Slate was on deadline to complete “Little Weirds” a year ago, and she wanted to get Shattuck’s permission to use part of an email she had sent him about his birthday, for her book.
In retrospect, Slate can see how her then-platonic emails, which were “letters about the earth,” were signs of an intense connection with Shattuck.
“I remember writing to Ben, and when I wrote to him I was really clear in my mind. He made my mind bloom in its best season,” she lovingly recalls.
Eventually, months after trading poetic, earthy messages, Slate reached back out and invited Shattuck to visit. Then, she visited him. “And, um, I basically just like kinda never left,” she says. “We just fell in love.”
Shattuck isn’t the only male who’s referenced but never named in “Little Weirds.” Slate’s dog is also in the book, but never called Reggie.
Slate’s A-list ex Chris Evans, whom she dated on and off in 2018, isn’t mentioned.
“I think I’m the only name that should really be in there,” says Slate. “This is my story and I think I’m very careful.
“Now, I say Ben’s name because, you know, he’ll be my husband and he’s in my life and he is OK with that. But I am very tired of my own name being tied to other people, especially men that aren’t making my work,” she says.
Ex-husband Dean Fleischer-Camp, with whom Slate co-created “Marcel the Shell,” does get a quick thank you in the acknowledgments at the end of the book, because “we still work together and he’s a very close creative partner.” But it took a while for Slate to be ready to talk about her relationship with Fleischer-Camp, in her writing and comedy, at all.
“I think once I felt like I was able to speak about it in a way that felt specific and concise and not hurtful for either either me or Dean, I felt that as long as I can make it really, really about me and about my specific feeling in my life as a person alone, I can do this,” says Slate.
She likens being ready to talk about her divorce, to being a trainer so comfortable with a reptile, that she can “go on TV and hold snakes.”
Today, Slate is confident that “I know how to hold this wild thing.”
And she knows how to write about it, in a language that she describes best: Her writing is “like watching a flower bloom in fast-forward on ‘Sesame Street.’”