That’s Nature for You

Annie Berke reviews Jenny Slate’s new motherhood meditation, “Lifeform.”

By Annie BerkeJanuary 23, 2025

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IN ONE OF the characteristically zany essays from her second book, Lifeform (2024), Jenny Slate recounts waking from a dream, “laughing at how bizarre this experience is of making a lifeform while being a lifeform.” She goes on: “I woke myself up laughing, and the laughter was like a string of bells being pulled from inside of me.” That image—a string of bells—turns out as good as any to describe the book itself.

Slate’s first book, Little Weirds (2019), is a mural of her emotional life: a collection of lists and dreams and self-destructive fantasies. (And, as my poet friend argues, a backdoor poetry collection.) “I was born ready to care for a pet and be a pet too,” she writes at one point, later vowing to be “sort of an ‘aunt to the world’ and begin to collect sex toys made by other feminists.” Slate talks a lot about men, guys, whatever, and her desire to be properly loved by one of these oblivious dudes.

Lifeform has a similar cellular structure, but one that evolves as Slate moves into the next stage of her life cycle. Focused on pregnancy, parenthood, and domestic life, Slate’s new work belongs alongside a contemporary movement exploring maternity-themed prose experiments. These books purposely conflate child-rearing with writing (it’s all work, the argument goes) and employ an elliptical, purposely fragmented form to do this. Rachel Cusk’s 2001 memoir-in-essays A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother sets the terms for the writers to follow—those of being a mother who writes, or a writer who mothers. In addition to that eternal balancing act, there remains the question of Cusk’s legibility to others and to herself. “In motherhood,” she writes, “a woman exchanges her public significance for a range of private meanings.”

These private meanings are translated back into public discourse, with recent short-form and hybrid volumes including Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors (2016) and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2018). (In the latter, Heti goes about choosing—or not choosing—parenthood through a series of coin flips.) Olga Ravn’s My Work, translated in 2023 by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, weaves together poetry and autobiographical prose to explore these affective areas. Ravn even reinvents herself as “Anna,” a pantomimed reclamation of privacy in an otherwise raw and revealing memoir.

Slate’s new book belongs with this crop of works that aim to communicate the experience of motherhood by combining the fictional and the autobiographical, the imagined and the real. These are strung-together accounts of all four strung-out trimesters (the fourth being the haze of the newborn stage, in which the mother’s bodily autonomy is restored in theory, but rarely in practice). These artfully disjointed works reflect the condition of early parenthood, in which obsessive attention lives alongside perpetual distraction. Motherhood and writing are complementary, if competing, formal projects, the drip, drip, drip of concentrated effort supplanted by flashes, floods, or lactational letdowns, of prose and imagery.

Nature becomes the lens through which these writers can articulate the absorptive, embodied experience of gestating and sustaining human life. “Bottle-feeding,” Ravn writes, “is like gazing at the sea, whereas in breastfeeding I become one with all water in the world. […] I’m lost and displaced, part of timeless nature.” Similarly, a pregnant Slate gazes into a marsh and thinks: “The water knew that I knew about having a lot of living and changing going on within me. The water said, ‘She is a lot like me.’”

These metaphors are essentializing, reminiscent of second-wave feminist thinking, no doubt, and how books like Slate’s—like Ravn’s and Heti’s—will figure in an age of compulsory pregnancy and “natural” gender roles, imposed from above, remains to be seen. But mother-writing as nature writing makes urgent sense as an attempt to make sense of a body behaving as wildly and unpredictably as the moon and the tides. Initially, Galchen resists writing about this motherhood in particular but describes her brain as “a cabal of neuronal circuits [that] organized against me and went about coordinating their own thoughts.” One of the most talked-about books on this subject is Lucy Jones’s Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood (2023), which combines science writing and sociological inquiry to “show that natural change is not always beautiful, and that our ideas of the ‘natural’ are largely invented.” As Jones asserts, “I was different. I am different. On a cellular level. I would never be singular again.”

Slate is as quick to label herself “mammalian” as her contemporaries, but the motherhood memoir is not the only body of work into which Slate is intervening. It might not even be the most important one. Lifeform is an artifact in which Jenny Slate looks at herself as “Jenny Slate,” a private person and a public avatar of millennial motherhood.

That Jenny Slate is an unlikely, or unready, mother; this Jenny Slate was born to it.

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In NBC’s Parks and Recreation (2009–15), Slate plays Mona-Lisa Saperstein, the greedy, whiny, superficial hookup partner of entrepreneur Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari), one-time employee of Pawnee’s Parks and Rec department. When, in the show’s season five finale, a positive pregnancy test is discovered in the trash from one of the gang’s recent get-togethers, Mona-Lisa is one of the possible culprits. Tom panics, but ultimately, he is released from any parental obligation when he discovers it is not her result: “Do you know how many different pills I take, birth control or otherwise?” Mona-Lisa cracks. “There is no way that I could be pregnant with a human baby.”

Until recently, there was no way that Jenny Slate—not the person, but the persona—could be mother material. In shows like Parks and Kroll Show (2013–15), she cornered the market for spoiled, shrill party girls; for a time, she voiced a nervous preteen in Big Mouth (2017– ) and still plays the strident Tammy in the animated series Bob’s Burgers (2011– ). In not one but two independent films (2017’s Landline and 2019’s The Sunlit Night), Slate’s character returns to her childhood home and contorts herself into her old bed, looking lost; in the latter film, she plays an artist who tramps around the fjords of Norway in a smock resembling a toddler’s romper.

Even when Slate played a grown-up, her proximity to adulthood was mediated by the trappings of youth, not childish so much as childlike. Only because I am a parent do I know that she is the voice of Nanny in the 2018 Muppet Babies reboot; only through my being a celebrity gossip-hound did I learn that she plays an elementary school teacher (and Chris Evans’s love interest) in the 2017 film Gifted. Her grown-up responsibilities are softened by a flowing skirt, resembling some silly striped child. She is neither a respectful adult, nor an obvious—wait, I’m getting there.

Arguably, Slate’s break-out role came with the 2014 Obvious Child, an abortion-themed romantic comedy directed by Gillian Robespierre. Slate plays Donna Stern, a stand-up comic who loses her job and cheating boyfriend in rapid succession, only to get accidentally pregnant by her rebound one-night stand, Max (Jake Lacy). When her mother (Polly Draper) complains, “You’re almost 30 years old. You still don’t know how to do your taxes,” Donna responds, “I’m a couple years away from 30, and nobody knows how to do their taxes.” By her own half-joking confession, she has peed in every pool she ever swam in; apart from her hearty appreciation of poop jokes, she is ill-equipped to have a kid, so she makes an appointment to terminate the pregnancy.

Obvious Child is a bighearted film about a woman who accepts love and care from other people, which, contrary to the title, doesn’t make her a baby at all. It feels both poignant and radical to watch this in a post-Dobbs world. In comparison to, say, the finale of Girls (a series Slate also appeared on), where the protagonist only demonstrates her growth by becoming a mother and successfully breastfeeding, Donna grows from being tended to by her parents, her wise and supportive friends, and Max, who “can’t wait to be a grandpa” and who warms Donna’s butter before she spreads it on her bread. Even the stand-up audience she tells about her abortion is “generous” in how they receive her disclosure. The milk of human kindness courses through and around Donna. She’s just not ready to be a mother … yet.

But life is long! “I am not an old soul at all,” Slate writes in Lifeform. “I think I may hold in me a new soul, very new, high-voiced, blinking into the light and trigger-happy, living in a ‘first’ over and over again.” This sounds nothing like Donna Stern, but it does jibe with a role that Slate originated alongside her collaborator and ex-husband, Dean Fleischer Camp: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. Starting in 2010 with the four-minute film “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On,” the concept spawned two additional shorts, two books, and, in 2021, a feature-length film.

The concept is simple enough: Marcel, a tiny spiral shell, wears even tinier shoes and a sparkle of wonder in his googly eyes. He lives with Nana Connie (Isabella Rossellini) in the crevices of a tidy, well-lit human being’s home. The community of shells that once lived there with them were accidentally relocated when the couple living in the house broke up. Lonely as he is, Marcel still manages to find and create beauty every day: he rigs up a pet dog for himself that is really a piece of lint on a string; birthday candles illuminate the interior of the drawer where he dines with his grandmother at a tiny table; he plays at straightening the “hardy hairs” that congregate around the bathtub drain.

Being so small, Marcel sees the world differently. Like a child, he is playful, curious, and observant, but, like an “old soul,” he has been altered by loss. When the documentarian (Fleischer Camp) takes Marcel outside to film in the shaded backyard, the camera lingers on the light shining between the tops of the trees, an upward shot that captures Marcel’s point of view. He has just learned about “getting levels” for the background sound of a film. “Is this the wild tone right now?” Slate quietly, nasally intones as Marcel.

Here is what I know: Marcel, both childlike and ageless, with Slate’s own self-described “young heart” and “antique soul,” is the author’s closest on-screen analogue. Marcel peeks out from behind taller prose, as when, in Little Weirds, Slate writes, “I got in trouble for not paying attention to things that seemed boring to me but now are gorgeous to me, like clocks and compasses and calendars. […] I started to find spaces where I could bring wildness inside.”

This, then, is what I don’t know: am I supposed to nurture Marcel the Shell, raising the next generation of whispery mollusks, or am I meant to reinvent myself in the image of Marcel to become a good—nay, a natural—mother?

Slate isn’t sure either. “I feel, in many ways, younger than ever, faced with a lot of newness because of the baby, and the newness makes me feel young because I am learning something for the first time, which is something that the young often do,” Slate explains. “But I am also the most tired in my body that I have ever been, and a part of me that was there before has certainly just ‘stopped,’ and I mourn that which has been disappeared from my identity.” She concludes, definitively: “It is simultaneous, my youngness and my oldness.”

That’s nature for you, ancient and ever-renewing. This “youngness and oldness,” as Slate puts it, is also the particular challenge from which millennial parents begin, as they put aside their dry-clean-only outerwear and their master’s in cultural studies, get down on all fours, and relearn to play.

According to experts, the good mother’s inner child is welcome to make tasteful, highly curated cameos, but, in the words of Mo Willems, she must never, never let the pigeon drive the bus.

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The new, trendy response to “Can women have it all?” is “Yes, but not at the same time.” I first heard it from my neighbor, but I’ve seen it credited to Madeleine Albright, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and if it isn’t a Taylor Swift lyric yet, just wait. I have written previously about having it all by doing it all at the same time, and to that end, writing about motherhood is the way to be in two places at once. Except, of course, multitasking is everyone’s problematic fave, and you can’t really be in two places at the same time. Accordingly, the prose in these mommy memoirs vibrates with guilt and shame, even when diving into the joy and contentment of pregnancy and parenthood.

Writing is easy; parenting is hard. As Slate writes: “I have become so intense and able to handle so much that if I ever got to do my job in the real way that I desire to do it, I believe that I might be better than ever.” That is her project with Lifeform, which is not only a book but also now a book tour that dovetails with her recent stand-up special on Amazon, Seasoned Professional. In the special, she talks about falling in love with her now-husband, writer Ben Shattuck, and closes the show with an imagined confrontation, in the key of high melodrama, with her beloved therapist’s adult daughter.

Slate warns that she has a baby but will never joke about her, and she keeps her word on this. She maintains a great deal of privacy around her baby, both in the show and even, somehow, in Lifeform. It makes for a lighter, more affirming read than, say, Ravn’s, which occasionally veers into despair and lays bare the breaks in its author-protagonist’s marriage as a result of her all-consuming motherhood.

As a wife and mother, Slate is the least depressed she has ever been, and her fantasies of self-destruction, laid out in Little Weirds, have been put to bed. She keeps a kind of distance from the specifics of her life, probably because she’s a celebrity in addition to being a writer, and thus won’t be offering up the kinds of details that might ping the paparazzi. Instead, in Lifeform, Slate examines the mystery of her own disappearance, a trick that allows her to hide in plain sight. She writes to her doctor in various installments throughout the book, asking “what the tests show” because, as she tries to shop online, she admits, “I don’t even know what body coverings to buy and for what kind of body, even.” Later, she says, “I am fundamentally decimated already, and it feels to me like this specific work of being taken from myself, piece by piece, should be done.”

These feelings of self-estrangement are common to new mothers, and, I imagine, not particularly modern ones. (I picture Cleopatra, after having her first kid, pestering Julius Caesar: “Look, I’m just asking, if I’m still, like, fun!”) But how these emotions manifest is inflected by our unique historical circumstances. So, rather than provide autobiographical specifics, Slate draws up elaborate reveries and images from a deep pop-culture lexicon. These include a revenge play, written in dialogue, about a girl named Lettie Schumacher; an imagined alternate ending to Ghostbusters (1984), in which Sigourney Weaver’s character triumphs over toxic masculinity; and a confession from Slate that she likes to pretend, when she’s eating yogurt, that she is enjoying a sweet custard gifted by a community of culinarily gifted elves.

We know that Slate has consumed a lot of media in her journey to become media herself. We also know that she is part of a real and human family, as the character of her grandmother figures heavily into the book’s conclusion, and as the presence of her ancestors haunt her “birth story,” as moms now like to call it. Otherwise, her identifying details are obscured, replaced by familiar emotional and, frankly, hormonal fields of experience: anger, rage even, sorrow, dreaminess, delight.

It’s natural! as they say. It’s all so natural! To that end, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice (2024) is less interested in this fiction of the natural, seemingly a counterpoint to Jones’s Matrescence. (The Cut published dueling excerpts a day apart.) On the surface, it seems that Berg and Wiseman are saying that motherhood doesn’t change you, while Jones insists that it does. But that oversimplifies both of their arguments, and all three authors are invested in what mothers find when they draw on their inner reserves, physically and psychically, to make and raise new life. And why does it never, never feel like enough?

“I have no unique talent for the seesaw or pushing a child on a swing,” Berg divulges, “[despite having] considered myself to be rather whimsical, silly, playful.” It is that notion of whimsy—a soothing middle ground where the weird meets the normative—that returns us back to Slate’s orbit, to a writer seeing herself as a body of water but also as an old-timey parasol resting on the shore. This is as close as I can get to explaining Slate’s own brand, as she herself describes it:

I decided to mail my underpants and bras to myself in the future, and I put them in a sack to put in a box and put in the mail. One of my best qualities is whimsy combined with being sensible and acting on that sensibility right away, but on behalf of the whimsy, to help it work. Whimsy cannot whirl itself through cluttered and junked-up spaces. Whimsy is not the same as kookiness and it is the opposite of laziness.

This is the Slate of Little Weirds, of Obvious Child and Marcel the Shell, without question “all grown up.” In becoming a mother, she has discovered a kind of seriousness of purpose by not taking everything so seriously. Whimsy is the millennial mom’s ideal form, but for some of us—kooky mothers, lazy mothers, I stand with you—it wears like a vintage blouse with an itchy Peter Pan collar.

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Post-Script: November 6, 2024

“Sometimes I feel that I am under surveillance for just even having a life cycle and life-form.” This line from Lifeform stands out for its uncharacteristic capital-P politics. Much as I enjoy reading about motherhood, even writing about it on occasion, I understand Galchen’s initial resistance. The final product can feel like navel-gazing, of which I’m keenly aware, as I finish this draft at 38 weeks pregnant; I do, in fact, spend an inordinate amount of time looking at my actual innie-turned-outie belly button and describing it to anyone who will listen.

It will take two weeks, or thereabouts, for my daughter’s umbilical cord to fall away. What’s left is a belly button that is wide and round, like a screaming mouth. (I ask the pediatrician if it’s a hernia, and she answers, “Not yet.”) It has since shrunk down, healed, becoming a small, functional baby bee bo. Gone is the evidence that she lived inside my body. Now she lives here with us.