Jenny Slate’s new book, Lifeform, deals with the “duality” of motherhood — and like most mothers, she had to juggle working while raising a child.
Slate, 42, who shares daughter Ida Lupine Shattuck with her husband Ben Shattuck, spoke to PEOPLE about what it was like writing her book while also learning the parenting ropes, in what she calls “a sort of prolonged postpartum space.”
Lifeform, out Oct. 22, is a collection of genre-crossing essays that deals with the messy, surreal, often deeply strange business of being human, especially a human who falls in love and then creates another human with them.
Little, Brown and Company
“It’s a bigger feat than I even understood it would be to write a book,” Slate says. She’s also the author of 2019 bestseller Little Weirds, but writing this one felt “like climbing a mountain.”
“I’m proud of the way I’ve grown as a person, but I’m also just really grateful that I managed to get it down into this archive,” she says. “And I’m glad that I had given myself the assignment, because I’m not sure that I would have noted it all down if I hadn’t signed on to write this book.”
Part of the writing process this time around was learning to juggle family, creative work and the way her own brain works, Slate says.
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And after she “really leaned into accepting the help that was offered,” Slate credits her mother-in-law, Dedee, for taking care of her daughter Ida for a few hours each day, as well as her nanny Jen.
“My mother-in-law came to our house every morning at 6:30 and I would hand off Ida, our daughter, to Deedee who I’m so thankful for,” says Slate, who notes that she’s a “big morning writer.”
“And I would sit in my bed, and I would just follow the thought, follow the thought. And then, when our nanny Jen would come, I would feel happy like, ‘Okay, my daughter is taken care of,’ and basically, like every 25 to 30 minutes, I would kind of pop out of my bedroom and like, look at Ida and talk to her and my mom.”
Like many working parents, Slate had to find a rhythm that fit with her home life, her child and the way she could get anything done in the time she had.
“I really like hearing my daughter in the house. And I’m not somebody that needs like total silence,” she adds. “And I also don’t really like being alone. So rather than being down on myself for those things, I just tried to create a work environment that included all of the things. And there is a book in existence because of that.”
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“I have like very typical ADHD,” the author adds. “So it’s kinda hard for me to sit down for more than a half an hour at a time, but everything was done in bursts, and I just tried to accept that. That was how I worked, and eventually it went from like scraps to, like, I am working in a 5-hour block, but I’m taking a break every half an hour to go check in until it was done.”
Jenny Slate Instagram
Now that this book is done, Slate is leaning into her nesting phase.
“I have a major kind of like nesting house mouse mode,” she says. “I’m making stews. I’m going to the farm stand and buying weird squashes, and just like figuring out what to do with the fall produce. And while it does seem, I think, like I do a lot, I really define myself as a non-workaholic. Like, I genuinely am someone that loves to to take big breaks, to like, fold all my sheets.”
That nesting phase is also a form of creativity for the toddler mom.
“I think I do believe very much that creative energy sometimes does go directly into a book or a dance, or whatever your medium is,” she explains. “But it can also go into that area of your life that is about creating your place to like rest and grow in. And I’m just like, really tuned into that. So right now, it’s just nesting time for me.”
Lifeform by Jenny Slate is out now and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
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