Lifeform - by Jenny Slate (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER

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.

Review Quotes

"Jenny Slate, known for her crackling standup and for voicing Marcel the Shell, here turns her high-wattage attention to the messiness of falling in love, giving birth during a pandemic and adjusting to the "situation" of motherhood--all of it delivered in her singular, zigzagging voice." --New York Times

"Absurdist humor, magical realism, fanciful self-reflection--in Lifeform, Slate's second solo effort, she wields all manner of literary embellishments in the name of channeling emotional honesty."--Washington Post

"Fans old and new will revel in Lifeform's self-effacing humor and imaginative writing style. It's a delightful, memorable immersion in the lifeform that is Jenny Slate"--BookPage (starred review)

"At times whimsical in its flights of fancy and always surprising in the moments of lyrical grace it offers, Slate's book celebrates the transformative power of surrendering to love and life. Delightfully offbeat and unexpectedly moving."--Kirkus Reviews

"Imaginative, funny, affecting, and hard-to-classify... A wonderfully weird, incomparable, and utterly enjoyable book that readers will be glad simply exists."--Booklist (starred review)

"Funny, lyrical, and sometimes strange, these essays pulse with life..."
--Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Jenny Slate is an actor and stand-up comedian, and the author of the essay collection Little Weirds (an instant New York Times best seller), as well as the New York Times best selling children's book Marcel The Shell with Shoes On. Her feature film Marcel The Shell With Shoes On (which she co-wrote and starred in) was nominated for many awards, including a Critic's Choice, Golden Globe, and Academy Award. Jenny Slate lives in Massachusetts with her husband, daughter and dog. She is a graduate of Columbia University.