L'LOOKBACK: Jenny Slate Reveals Her Eccentric Personal Archive
Comedian, actor, writer, and seashell enthusiast Jenny Slate opens up her archive to L’OFFICIEL and discusses her new book, Lifeform.
Jenny Slate essentially lives in an archive. Her cozy, rural Massachusetts home—which includes a writing cabin—is the same house her husband, Ben, grew up in until he was about 8 years old. Now, Slate is creating new memories (and a new generation) with Ben and their daughter, Ida, age 3. Slate easily connects with objects and can find joy and immense depth in anything, from a wall to a seashell. Slate’s new book, Lifeform, published by Little, Brown and Company and out October 22, is an unconventional, soulful, genre-bending memoir that documents her psyche throughout motherhood. “I was interested in some sort of containment of a state of feeling, an emotional situation or an emotional scenario or an emotional weather system or something like that,” she says. Slate tries to write every day: a little bit about what she did the day before, etc., so she has a notebook full of ideas in her writing cabin. She also, as it is the 21st century, jots down ideas in her iPhone Notes App, another archive in itself.
Slate takes pleasure in doing laundry. “I guess I like the process of things that are dirty becoming functional and usable and clean,” she says. Thus, the “soothing” geometric wallpaper that adorns her laundry room is an essential part of her life. She wanted something that felt at once out of the 1970s and 1930s. Add seashells to the laundry list of little things Slate obsesses over—she did, after all, voice Marcel in 2021’s Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. Slate keeps a collection of seashells (“the most perfect structural accomplishments ever”) from a beach in Lofoten, Norway, where she met Ben. When she gathered them, it was out of love for the shells themselves, the moment in time, and the company she kept on the trip. Only in the years past have the shells gained new meaning. “It’s a really good metaphor for what it felt like to meet my husband. It feels natural that we would meet and that we would make the shape of this life together.”
A houseplant that is “probably from a supermarket” also has meaning for Slate. The intention (a permanent gift for her family’s home) and the giver (her grandmother, who has since passed) make it an essential part of the Slate archive. As of late, Slate—who reads with her daughter for about an hour every day—is obsessed with the Japanese author Akiko Miyakoshi. His book, Little Shrew, an illustrated collection of children’s stories about an orderly little shrew who appreciates routine in his life, has already earned itself a permanent spot in the Slate library, and thus, the Slate archive. “We read it as a way to calm ourselves down and to feel good about our own small lives,” she says.
