Little Weirds
2019
- nyt:hardcover-nonfiction=2019-11-24
- television actors and actresses
- comedians, biography
- comedians, united states
- authors, biography
- humor, form, essays
- biography
- comedians
- american authors
- women
The story
*Hello and welcome to my book. Inside you will find:* *× The smell of honeysuckle × Heartbreak × A French-kissing rabbit × A haunted house × Death × A vagina singing sad old songs × Young geraniums in an ancient castle × Birth × A dog who appears in dreams as a spiritual guide × Divorce × Electromagnetic energy fields × Emotional horniness × The ghost of a sea captain × And more* *I hope you enjoy these little weirds.* *Love, Jenny Slate* ---------- Step into Jenny Slate's wild imagination in this "magical" (Mindy Kaling), "delicious" (Amy Sedaris), and "poignant" (John Mulaney) New York Times bestseller about love, heartbreak, and being alive -- "this book is something new and wonderful" (George Saunders). You may "know" Jenny Slate from her Netflix special, Stage Fright , as the creator of Marcel the Shell, or as the star of "Obvious Child." But you don't really know Jenny Slate until you get bonked on the head by her absolutely singular writing style. To see the world through Jenny's eyes is to see it as though for the first time, shimmering with strangeness and possibility. As she will remind you, we live on an ancient ball that rotates around a bigger ball made up of lights and gasses that are science gasses, not farts (don't be immature). Heartbreak, confusion, and misogyny stalk this blue-green sphere, yes, but it is also a place of wild delight and unconstrained vitality, a place where we can start living as soon as we are born, and we can be born at any time. In her dazzling, impossible-to-categorize debut, Jenny channels the pain and beauty of life in writing so fresh, so new, and so burstingly alive, we catch her vision like a fever and bring it back out into the bright day with us, where everything has changed. One of Vanity Fair' s Great Quarantine Reads.
What it’s like
Short, slanted vignettes and free-associative essays unspool across the page in Jenny Slate's voice: playful, unguarded, and sideways, with odd capitalization, lists, and tangents that bloom from a single image into something tender. The texture is intimate and a little giddy, like a friend thinking out loud at a kitchen table after midnight, shifting between honeysuckle-scented summer memories, the fizz of new love, and the bruised quiet of heartbreak. Its sensory world is handled with a painter's attention to small things (a rabbit, a haunted house, geraniums in a castle courtyard) rendered as if seen for the first time. The mood runs from wide-eyed wonder to melancholy, and the pacing is deliberately uneven: you can dip in for one piece on a slow Sunday or read straight through in an unhurried afternoon. Emotionally it is warm and candid about divorce, grief, and the body, with sexual frankness that is playful rather than explicit, and no real violence, though some sadness and a glancing note of misogyny. It suits readers who want a comfort read that is funny, strange, and open-hearted, especially those who enjoy personal essays that refuse to behave.
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