Jenny Slate on the Other Side of Postpartum Depression, and Letting Go of Shame

“Have you any experience with patients who suddenly understood something,” writes Jenny Slate in her new essay collection, Lifeform (Little, Brown), “and then even though they had other things to do, they could not stop fixating on that new understanding?”

“You can be asleep in a stone for so long, and so much can happen without your consent, and so much can happen because you are awake in the stone but afraid to even make a peep,” she continues. “But once you are out, once you get busted out, you can work freely and make up for lost time.”

Slate has a flair for the fantastical and is deeply attuned to the ecosystems of relationships: Her 2022 film Marcel the Shell With Shoes On tells the story of a one-inch-tall shell looking to reunite with his family. Her debut essay collection, Little Weirds (2019), ripples with wonder for the natural world and describes love found and lost.

Since then, 42-year-old Slate has married writer and curator Ben Shattuck and become a parent, experiences she began exploring in her most recent special, Seasoned Professional. “Everything is becoming richer and wider,” she says over Zoom from her home in Massachusetts. “I have so much more ability across the board not just as a performer but as a living, emotional person.”

In Lifeform, Slate is busting from the stone. Written in five phases, from single life through pregnancy and parenthood, the collection blends Slate’s trademark magic with incisive reflections on love, family, and legacy, all coming together to create some of her most soul-searching work yet.

Here, we speak about finding love, parenting, and aging in the entertainment industry.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Vanity Fair: How are you feeling about Lifeform going into the world soon?

‘Lifeform’ by Jenny Slate

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Jenny Slate: It’s the equivalent of a very, very useful exhale. It feels like the process will be complete when it officially belongs to the world. I feel excited to say, “This is how I think currently. This is the way I want to work.” It feels like a great privilege to give people a bit of an update.

One of the ideas that arises in the book is the fear of being locked out of the world of creativity and performance. How do Lifeform and your writing sit in relation to those feelings?

The entertainment industry is not known for having an abundance of work for female performers who are over 40. You hear people saying there are no good parts, and that has generally scared me forever. I think many people will say that from a young age they feel frightened by the aging process because people are so freaked out and grossed out by it in our culture. Not only did I have some of those fears, but also that things would get narrower for me. Then all of a sudden, I become 40 and a parent at the same time. I was like, “That doesn’t even make any sense for me. Everything’s starting to open up.” Like I said in the book, I’m just starting to fledge. So, what is the problem?

I think the first thing is for me to admit a fear is there—this is what the fear looks like, and this is how it feels when it is actively threatening me—and realize that the threat of being shut out was not just the threat you feel as an actor but that it was something that I was generally really concerned with. I needed to figure out what side of me was still perpetuating that and what was the aggressor within.

The threats from outside are there, but I don’t adhere by them. I don’t feel I am someone who’s experiencing a narrowing as I get older. I feel the total opposite. There are so many more tones, there’s so much more depth. I wanted to work in my writing to find out, what’s the thing that closes you off from yourself? What’s the thing that stops me from feeling free?

Given this narrowing of possibility as you age, it feels important for other people to have an experience like yours to read about.

Yeah, I think that feeling of “Oh, no, it’s getting narrower and narrower” was kind of on autopilot, and it was so scary that I felt like, “Well, it must be true.” But I think if you’re interested in disproving that and you don’t want that to be happening to you—that sense of either being oversimplified, or options being narrowed, or of timeline being foreshortened, as if you pass a certain age and you don’t have any more use—it’s important to be like, “I reject this,” in a big, loud voice.

But for me, what are the creative acts that make little air holes, tiny, tiny, tiny escape hatches? How do you write those into your self-descriptions? Where do you see that and what is that form? It certainly has ups and downs. There are dead ends. There are repetitive, terrible chants that come up in a person, like bad mantras. It’s so important to me to be able to repurpose the way that emotions are defined, repurpose things like anger into something really wild, something that you can’t control, and let it run. I hope that the older I get that I will do the equivalent of what is in the second to last piece in the book, which talks about someone who gained so much understanding of themselves that they bounce like a ball into the setting sun and just go into the cosmos. That is not a narrowing of the self in any way. It’s a full, full expansion of the entire spectrum of the rainbow.

In the book, you explored fears of losing someone, of falling in love. What drives your curiosity around how we relate to other people?

I think I’ve always been afraid of being shut out of love. That seems to be a through line: not having the chance, not meeting the person. By laying out how it felt and what it looked like, I noticed there’s nothing here that’s unidentifiable. Everything looks like pretty normal human earth stuff. There’s nothing in my experience that’s the equivalent of a malignancy.

I just felt so much shame about the ways in which I seem to characteristically push people away, ruin my own relationships, get eaten alive by fear, be terrorized by my own fear, be thrashed around by trust issues. These are not so gross and horrible and one-of-a-kind that I have to make them a secret. If I say them exactly as they are, I can make them digestible. That’s always what I’m trying to do in my art, my stand-up, or my performances.

The “single” phase was kind of hard to go back into because I was deeply relieved that that phase was over. It’s not something that I’ve conquered; it’s just something that I was lucky enough to come through.

I have to say, I really felt the way you write into the fear.

I’m so glad. You know, it’s kind of like you’re looking at pictures of yourself from a period in your life and you’re like, “Oh my God, should I just throw these away? I hate looking at them,” and there’s something in you that’s like, keep it, because maybe you don’t like looking at the picture of you when you were depressed, or when you had a weird style, or were with someone you don’t have good feelings about, but that’s actually a really necessary part of your archive. It’s a part that you came through and lived through. It didn’t maim you, but it gave you great information. I was saying to someone, “I don’t know, maybe I should just take out the single section. Who cares?” and the person said, “I really need this to be there. I don’t want this to be a book about someone who’s just in love, and they’re getting pregnant. I need to see someone moving through a time that I’m in.” It made me realize it’s not that I’m not interested in this; it’s that I still relate to how hard it was.

It really complements the examination of self that is part of the parent journey: Who am I before I began that journey?

I didn’t want to write a book that was pre-baby, post-baby, and one is somehow better than the other. We have continuing fears. They change form, but I think there are characteristic concerns throughout our lives. Sometimes they’re amplified, and sometimes they’re blended into a world that has a resting place for the fear. I wanted to show that, for example, a moment of postpartum depression is still very characteristic of me. The fears are always around: What if other people say I can’t be here anymore? What if other people say you’re too extreme in your feelings and there’s no spot for you or someone like you, and you’re disturbing?

Toward the end of the book, there are these two pieces about this being that I like to call the “purple-dark hole” in my afternoon. My postpartum depression arrives at the exact same time that normal depression used to arrive in my late 20s, early 30s. It’s like a bird with the same migratory feeling rhythms. The postpartum moments are characteristic; they look like other depression. They’re just placed within a new context, and sometimes the stakes are so much higher. It’s hard enough to be in a state of depletion when you’re by yourself. When you’re within a family, and you’re the mom—and you don’t want to model repression, and you know that even really young people pick up on stuff—you’re not just having to deal with, “Oh, man, I feel a certain way,” but you need to drum up enough energy, if you can, to figure out how to be honest about what’s going on so that you can help a child become comfortable with the fact that there’s variation in human emotional life, and that it’s impossible to not encounter shadow. It’s normal, and we have to do it, and we don’t have to have a fractured, weird family life. We can all be here. It’s just really hard.

Both of your books are full of metaphor and magical possibility. Did that way of looking at the world transform through writing about pregnancy and motherhood?

Certain words seemed to keep poking at me, asking me to use them in my pregnancy: the tides and things that really aren’t that surprising in a person who is literally filling up with amniotic fluid. I’d never read much pregnancy writing, but I never really understood that it could just be, still, me. I really need to work with metaphor because a lot of times there are feelings that I have and I’m not quite sure how to describe them and still use a human female body. That’s what other work of mine, like Marcel the Shell, tends to be about. I really need to place this in a different context so that there aren’t limits placed on it because of the connotation that a certain human form might bring.

Pregnancy is certainly all about the science of the body, but that can feel like a fantastical account of what happens. It’s so magical. It’s like it’s asking to be spoken about in a lyrical, spellbinding way. When I use metaphor, I try to be responsible, descriptive, and as honest as I can be in terms of what my experience feels like, but it’s almost like I’m putting my entire experience on the back of a magical bird and saying, “Take it from here.” I don’t have to worry about it anymore. I can let the mystery be. If I dress it up with enough mysterious fuel and feathers, it’ll just take off and I can remember that I’m me and not have to deal with the specifics of my experience anymore. I can be with a greater sense of mystery and unknown, and that makes me feel really alive.

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