“Little Weirds” by Jenny Slate Is What We'll be Reading Over Break
Jenny Slate was born in March. “I was born on the boundary line between hot and cold,” she writes, “at the intersection of the two elements that make a clap of thunder.” Slate’s book of essays, Little Weirds, is a lot like that, a collection of clever lines from a talented writer and comedian, and extremely worth your time. But almost as a bonus, it manages to be a lot more too; something more profound.
If you’re looking for the candid, autobiographical Jenny Slate from her Netflix special, Stage Fright, this isn’t it. Little Weirds is a poetic and dreamlike book, a testament to the power of fantasy and language that hits your feelings where facts and pictures can’t. Many of the essays contain scenes and stories that are, on one hand, totally ordinary and relatable, and on the other, completely surreal.
A girls-only getaway that leads to a fantasy make-out with a rabbit. A trip to Norway, amid heartbreak, isolating and crushing for the sheer fact of watching other people be normal and move on. An attempt to write an online dating profile that begins: “I am a plant and I have a fragile green stem and my flower is still in the pod on the top of the stalk, unopened, when the dawn strolls in over the horizon.”
The "weirds" may be little, but the themes and the feelings are huge. Because above all, Little Weirds is a book about the hazards of love. Loving love, the feeling of it, being burned by it. Hating your past loves, not because of what was lost, but because it took something of your ability to love easily and smoothly ever again; from the highs — “Love seemed big too, like an elephant that you can have if you are good” — to the lows — “I am heartbroken over no one, over having nobody to wish for, nobody to hope for.”
It’s also about the indignities of being a woman. Of being a woman who’s been through some sh&t: “As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and most precious,” Slate writes, “I feel less afraid that someone else will erase me by denying me love.” This self-actualization and self-protection is ushered in by tapping the deep beauty and feeling in nature, in the world around us. By learning, after all, that to take pleasure in the small things, like a nice jar of jam, the orange tree in the backyard, the incredible this-ness of being alive, is all that we really have.
Through it all, Slate’s voice never loses its capacity for strangeness, for finding it in the littlest, weirdest corners of its own psyche. It’s this mix of sweet and sadness, real stakes and dreamy prose, that gives this book its soft, sharp, and altogether overwhelming power. Like René Magritte crossed with Lana Del Rey, with strong notes of Patricia Lockwood. Like a carnival ride caught in a tornado, candy-colored shards of metal sparkling in the sky.
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
