Editor’s note: This segment was rebroadcast on Nov. 3, 2025. Find that audio here.
Comedian, actor and author Jenny Slate knows how to add her own spin to an event.
When Slate showed up in Boston to read from her new book, “Life Form,” she brought a harpist to accompany her, Alix Raspé Gray.
Known as the co-creator and voice of “Marcel The Shell With Shoes On” and her best-selling essay collection “Little Weirds,” Slate’s latest book chronicles her journey of being single, looking for true love, finding it, having a child, and living that new reality.
“Life Form” started as small visualizations that Slate wrote down when she remembered — or found the confidence.
“It’s actually crazy how much confidence it takes to just even write down an idea,” Slate says. “At least for me, I get the idea and I want to write it down, but there’s also another part that is, like, ‘Oh man, it’ll feel so bad if this idea is stupid.’”
Slate revisited journals from when she was single to help her write about that period of her life.
“I really, really liked it because also, I could see how far I had come,” she says. “It’s sort of like if you go back to your elementary school and you see how small the toilets are. And you’re like, ‘Wow! I use the big one now.’”
In her last standup special, Slate talked about bravery in love and making new choices. Writing the book helped her work through shame around her trust issues and fear of betrayal, she says.
“It was good to go back and write those things because sometimes, even if we get over stuff and we’re like, ‘Phew, I’m so glad that I’m not like that anymore.’ We can just not want to talk about it at all,” Slate says. “But I feel more comfortable being myself knowing that I can say out loud, like, ‘Yeah, I used to be really scared and had really a big struggle with feelings about self-worth.’ It was very good for me to actually lay it all out and be like, ‘This actually just is not as gross as you think it is.”
In “Life Form,” Slate comes to terms with her own happiness. Slate once believed happiness came with a price and that she could never hold it for long.
“A lot of writing this book was clearing things out and just showing myself actually how robust my systems of sustaining personal happiness are,” she says, “but that they are really weird, but they’re the only ones that work. So I have to feed them.”
Slate writes one essay about giving birth to her daughter. Slate says she felt proud of herself but also shame that her daughter was taken from her and sent to the NICU — until she wrote the piece.
“I really, really, really want to be able to prove that things can exist at once,” she says.
All the vulnerability Slate puts on the page reflects who she really is, she says. She thinks it’s important to portray herself earnestly to readers and people in her real life.
“There’s stuff in here that is personal and that for many people would be in the area of privacy,” Slate says. “But this all feels really good to me, to be connected and to be consistently myself because I just think it would be really, really bad to know that people thought you were one way, but you’re actually something else.”
Slate says she’s overcome her old fears and feels safe in her life. But motherhood has brought her a host of new fears, including a fear of disconnection from the world of social media.
“The fears are bigger, and they’re way harder to figure out. And I am a very fearful person,” Slate says. “But the other side of that is, I know how brave I am because I know how scared I am.”
Find the harpist featured in this segment here.
Emiko Tamagawa produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Allison Hagan adapted it for the web.
Book excerpt: ‘Lifeform’
By Jenny Slate
Excerpted from “Lifeform” by Jenny Slate. Published by Little, Brown and Company. Copyright © 2024 by Jenny Slate. All rights reserved.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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