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, and in that period, there was a deep dark loneliness that she had to face and befriend. We are pleased to report that she did fall in love, and in that period, she felt like chimes, or a flock of clean breaths, with her spine lying flat as the many-coloured 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. After this, 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 raccoons, excerpts from an imaginary olden timey play, obituaries, theories about postpartum hair loss, graduation speeches, and more. No one writes like Jenny Slate.