“Have you had any experience with patients who suddenly understood something,” writes Jenny Slate in her new collection of essays, Life form (Little, Brown), “and even though they had other things to do, they couldn’t stop fixating on that new insight?”

“You can sleep in a rock for so long, and so much can happen without your permission, and so much can happen because you’re awake in the rock, but you’re afraid to even make a peep,” she continues. “But once you’re free, once you’re knocked out, you can work freely and make up for lost time.”

Slate has a sense of the fantastic and is deeply attuned to the ecosystems of relationships: her 2022 film Marcel the Shell wearing shoes tells the story of a one-inch-tall shell who wants to reunite with his family. Her debut essay collection, Little weirdos (2019), bursting with wonder at the natural world and describing love found and lost.

Since then, Slate, 42, has married writer and curator Ben Shattuck and become a mother, experiences she began to explore in her most recent special, Seasoned professional. “Everything is getting richer and broader,” she says over Zoom from her home in Massachusetts. “I have so much more potential across the board, not just as an artist, but as a living, emotional person.”

In Life form, Slate bursts from the stone. Written across five stages, from single life to pregnancy and parenthood, the collection combines Slate’s signature magic with sharp reflections on love, family and legacy, all coming together to create some of her most profound work to date. create.

Here we talk about finding love, parenthood, and growing older in the entertainment industry.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Vanity Scholarship: How do you feel? Life form into the world soon?

Jenny Slate: It’s the equivalent of a very, very helpful exhalation. It feels like the process will be complete when it officially belongs to the world. I feel excited to say, “Here’s how I feel about it right now. This is the way I want to work.” It feels like a great privilege to keep people informed.

One of the ideas expressed in the book is the fear of being left out of the world of creativity and achievement. How to do Life form and your writing relates to those feelings?

The entertainment industry isn’t known for having an abundance of work for female performers over 40. You hear people say there aren’t any good roles, and that generally has scared me forever. I think many people will say that they feel afraid of the aging process from a young age because people in our culture are so shocked and annoyed by it. Not only did I have some of those fears, but also that things were going to get smaller for me. Then suddenly I turn 40 and become a parent at the same time. I was like, ‘That doesn’t even make sense to me. Everything is starting to open up.” Like I said in the book, I’m just starting to run. What’s the problem?