Jenny Slate's New BookLifeformExplores the 'Duality' of Motherhood: 'I'm Grateful It Exists' (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Jenny Slate and her new book, ‘Lifeform’.Photo:Chloé Horseman

Chloé Horseman

Jenny Slate’s new book is almost here, and it’s a meditation on motherhood like you’ve never read one before.

Slate, 42, revealed in February 2021 that she gave birth to her daughter,Ida Lupine Shattuck, whom she shares with husbandBen Shattuck. For theIt Ends With Usactress, writing a book that’s in large part about motherhood while still in the early years of it herself felt like “this sort of duality after having my daughter, and in a sort of prolonged postpartum space.”

Jenny Slate’s new book, “Lifeform'.Chloé Horseman

“In looking back on that space, I’ll be like, ‘Wow! I really thought I knew what was going on,’' " Slate tells PEOPLE. “But looking back, it feels kind of like remembering a dream. 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.”

“I’m always sort of just trying to figure out what is the truth of what’s going on and what is the way to describe my most personal truth,” she explains. “What is the way to describe my most personal truth so that the most amount of people can understand it and connect to it? Like, how do you take a pinpoint of something so personal and make it accessible for a greater community. That seems to be very important to me, over and over again.”

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“I tend to keep my work pretty personally geared, which isn’t to say that if I am to receive a critique that feels like a misunderstanding, or I hear someone in the supermarket, saying I’m not funny or something, I’m a normal person. Of course, that’s gonna hurt my feelings,” she explains. “I’m not like, above it. But I have worked really hard to be self-contained in terms, in terms of how I see my work and my own production.”

Slate adds that she feels “an immense sense of victory in finishing the book,” especially since it was hard going for much of the process. “I knew that I wanted to try to write this book, but I honestly just couldn’t,” she says of two years she spent feeling “pretty inept” at the writing process.

“But I did leave myself sort of little hints if I did have an idea … I would just like, write little notes down, either in notebooks or just good old-fashioned notes in the notes app on my phone, or I would send myself a small email with like, a line,” she says. “And for two years, I was just leaving myself just little shreds of stuff because that was the only option I felt that I had.”

Many writers, or creators of any kind, will feel a kinship in that situation — especially if they’re parents, too. The mom of a now-toddler says, “I think sometimes if you feel — it doesn’t have to be exhaustion, it could be you feel depressed, that feeling sort of numb, and not being able to be stimulated — but I did get this sort of upswing of like, ‘Wow! I think I can do it.’ And I started to follow these small thoughts that I had left for myself over the past.”

Those little breadcrumbs became process, which then became a book. “I’m grateful that it exists because I am so aware that it was on  a sort of scary balance beam,” Slate says. “It could have toppled one way or another like either into existence or just into oblivion.”

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source: people.com