LITTLE WEIRDS: BOOK REVIEW
I had a hard time with this book. During break, I had been searching for a book to get lost in—an opportunity to leave this world and stop analyzing each day’s dose of fucked-up-ness. An independent bookstore had just opened up in my hometown and, loyal English major that I am, I went in search of a warm literary blanket. Stacked among the newly released and bestselling books was Jenny Slate’s Little Weirds. Like I imagine the author herself to be, it was a hard one to miss. The author’s name and book title are uncharacteristically printed in an equal font size. Even more unexpectedly, it was enclosed by a deep, earth wreath/crown/cornucopia of flowers, hotdogs, dinosaurs, cameras, popsicles, vines, bras and beer. Before reading a word, I felt that Jenny Slate had reached out her hand and invited me to take shelter in her strange oasis of complicated beauty while picking up the book.
I took her with me everywhere in the honest belief that each day I would begin this book. Each day, I did not. As the semester approached, the odds dimmed. I didn’t care; she wasn’t going anywhere, and Little Weirds never made it to the shelf of lost books, who simper each time I place another alongside the temporary/semi-permanent rejects. No, I kept Jenny on the nightstand, by my computer, next to my assignments, underneath my phone, in my grocery bag, in my big-ass coat pocket, on the family coffee table, and in the passenger-side seat of my car. I wanted everyone to see me with this book I knew nothing about. I wanted to know it was mine and show everyone I held it.
Beginning my final semester of college, my need for the rabbit-hole I anticipated I’d find only grew, and on a snowy Sunday morning, we finally met. All due credit to Little Weirds’ cover artist: every promise made by the strange garden adorning its facade was kept—not to mention George Saunders’ glowing review with his name printed in fuchsia. Little Weirds is a construction project begun by a woman in heartbreak. Slate, who I won’t stop referring to as Jenny, (only a few moments of her Netflix comedy special will prove her surname disserves her vibrancy) crafts in these fifty short sections something like magic. Though memoir-ish in its auto-biography, she casts a deeply personal imaginative fiction over every instance of reality. Jenny walks us through her childhood, her family, and her adult life while perhaps recovering and certainly falling in love with her own imagination. Concluding with a description of the real-life house she has made for herself, the reader’s visit to this home began long ago in another dimension. For the length of the book, Jenny builds a utopia for the wild creatures such as herself, whose natures are endangered by the less vibrant and the patriarchal.
The images in this book are weird. No shit, says the title. But their weirdness is almost imperceptible, for you will likely be too mesmerized by the gore and the beauty, the sexy and the grotesque, the bunny silhouettes and the slimy human organs. Jenny takes us somewhere most private, where some part of her dies. In her own words: “Valentine’s Day; Listening; The Sad Songs of My Vagina; Bonked; Bronze Tree.” Don’t be deceived by these descriptions; they are testaments to her singular talent of forcing horror and divine fantasy to coexist. I felt her heartbreak sharp in my own open incisions and then with a hit of laughing gas and finally euphoria.
As a testament to and revival of the adult imagination, the natural world is repurposed with her fierce and empathic care. She revisits the roots of the earth and extracts from the fossilized man evidence of the inventiveness of patriarchal ‘naturalism.’ Blowing the whole earth, whole spirit brilliantly wide open, Jenny lets us live in the safety of the unharmed, unperturbed, selfless haven she learns once existed in the Fertile Crescent, the “cradle of civilization,” the place the feminist biographer points to for evidence of the myth that god made the world and the world was a patriarchy.
I would read Little Weirds all over just to encounter these lines again:
“There has been a misunderstanding about wildness. Bring it in, bring it in, bring wildness in, and care for it. Place a shell in your shower. Get a whole plant in there. Put a geranium in your kitchen. Stand in your space and howl out. Bring it in or go out and see it. Wildness is the mother, the first thing, not a lurking predator. Wildness is holy. I am a geranium that is hardy and wild, but I want to sleep in a neat little pot. I belong in a castle that was built with the determination and ingenuity of a person who was deeply in love.”
Anyone who reads this fiercely previous book will have the privilege of witnessing a woman metamorphose, outwardly and inwardly, into a creature proud of her brilliance, unwilling to tame the wildness and the wilderness within her for fear of another deciding, this cannot grow here.
And if your experience is anything like mine, you will begin to believe such beautiful mortal metamorphosis is possible.