Little Weirds
CBC Books | | Posted: November 25, 2019 8:54 PM | Last Updated: December 6, 2019
Jenny Slate
You may "know" Jenny Slate from her new Netflix special, Stage Fright, or as the creator of Marcel the Shell, or as the star of Obvious Child. But you don't really know Jenny Slate until you get bonked on the head by her absolutely singular writing style. To see the world through Jenny's eyes is to see it as though for the first time, shimmering with strangeness and possibility. As she will remind you, we live on an ancient ball that rotates around a bigger ball made up of lights and gasses that are science gasses, not farts (don't be immature). Heartbreak, confusion and misogyny stalk this blue-green sphere, yes, but it is also a place of wild delight and unconstrained vitality, a place where we can start living as soon as we are born, and we can be born at any time. In her dazzling, impossible-to-categorize debut, Jenny channels the pain and beauty of life in writing so fresh, so new, and so burstingly alive, we catch her vision like a fever and bring it back out into the bright day with us, and everything has changed. (From Hachette Book Group)
From the book
One of my fantasy dimensions is: Strangers on the street see me and think I might be French. You are a stranger. You see me, and you think that there I am, a French Woman. And then you look at me and allow a deeper kind of feeling-sight to occur, and you see past the woman and you sense that I am actually a homemade Parisian Croissant, and I was born in a kitchen in a house with cool stone floors and deep windowsills that hold the light in the shape of a big box, windowsills that are so deep that they could be a desk. I was born as a breakfast pastry in the fancy part of France and hours after I was born I was still warm from the heat of the oven. I knew that my warmth and lovely shape were the result of thoughtful and gentle work. Oh please feel it: I am the croissant that felt its own heat and curves and wished to become a woman, and I am that woman from the wish. Let me be your morning treat with your coffee. Disregard the fear that I am too rich to be an ordinary meal. Allow my antique decadence into your morning into your mouth. Pair me with jam. Treasure me for my layers and layers of fragility and richness. Name me after a shape that the moon makes. Have me in a hotel while you are on vacation. Look at me and say, "Oh, I really shouldn't," just because you want to have me so very much.
From Little Weirds by Jenny Slate ©2019. Published by Hachette Book Group.