Lifeform

From actor, comedian, co-creator of Marcel the Shell, and New York Times bestselling author of Little Weirds, Jenny Slate presents a wild, soulful, hilarious collection of genre-bending essays in Lifeform, 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. During that period, she faced a deep, dark loneliness that she had to befriend. We are pleased to report that she did fall in love. In that period, she was like chimes, or a flock of clean breaths, and her spine lying flat was the many-colored planks on a xylophone. However, she was also rabid with fear of losing this love due to past injury.

Then, she became a wild-pregnant-mammal-thing and exploded herself by having a whole baby blast through her vagina during a global plague. She was expected to carry on as if 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. They take the form of letters to a doctor, dreams of a stork, fantasy therapy sessions, gossip between racoons, excerpts from an imaginary old-timey play, obituaries, theories about post-partum hair loss, graduation speeches, and more. No one writes like Jenny Slate.