Jenny Slate's 'Little Weirds': A Review

Now, I won't lie to you: A lot of this review (or whatever you want to call it) will feel a little biased. I am a lot of things in this life. One of which is a lover of everything Jenny Slate has ever and, quite frankly, may ever do again for the rest of her life.

I saw her in Obvious Child back in 2014 and went: Welp, this girl gets it.

And it is different for everyone. Everyone’s got a different person who gets their it. Maybe it’s Tool for you. Or James Baldwin. Or Steven Spielberg. There’s always that someone who seems to create some piece of art, or simply speaks in a way that reaches right out to you and makes you wonder how someone could so solidly read your mind and speak it back to you, verbatim.

And that’s how every page of Jenny Slate’s Little Weirds felt to me.

Every time I picked it up, I couldn’t help but think that the whole thing read like a diary. It read like something precious and private that, at some point, had only ever been for Jenny. There were moments where I wanted to look away. Things, coming to light, that sure, I’d maybe thought, but had always held onto, because no one could know. Nobody could know that sometimes I felt so profoundly, so definitively sad, that I wondered if people would say: “She’d be so great, if she weren’t so sad all the time—bit of a buzzkill,” every time I left a room.

On every page, there was a line, or a feeling that resonated with me so deeply that not only had it felt like she had read my mind, it felt like she’d read my damn DNA. Something so naturally raw and unspoken that I hadn’t even thought to think about it yet. Something about love. Something about family. Something about mental illness.

Anxiety has always been my nemesis. It’s always been an instinct that I’ve tried to explain away through my own writing. Like, if I could just articulate it, it would manifest into this big, ugly thing that, even though it still scared me, was tangible and could be scared too, if I knew how to chase it away.

I could pull it from dark doorways. Or, deep, dark staircases. I could pull it from window frames, or the backgrounds of old pictures. If I could bring it into the light, name it, I could make it look me in the face and say: Hey, big, ugly thing, I know exactly what you are, and I know exactly where to tear you apart.

Jenny Slate grew up in a haunted house.

(You can believe in ghosts, or, you can not. Where we stray or come together in this opinion doesn’t matter. Because I’ve never seen a ghost, but sometimes, it feels like I grew up with them. Don’t ask me what that means, just know that it feels true.)

This is a defining fact that follows her the same way that my anxiety has always followed me.

This is a defining fact that sits behind every word of Little Weirds. It hangs on. Draping itself over the dots of each ‘i’ until the words feel so heavy that they could pull you beneath the floorboards of a one-hundred-year-old colonial house in the middle of Massachusetts. Until you remember that these words in front of you didn’t come from somewhere inside of you. They came from someone else. Someone else who feels tired and heavy and buried in blankets.

And that someone is joyful. That someone is kind. But above all else, that someone is simply someone. A hand on yours that doesn’t have to say it, but you know anyway: There is strength and light in this togetherness. There is a way back up through these insatiable floorboards. You’ll find it, but I will be here.

There’s something so powerfully moving about simplicity. And that’s where Little Weirds lives. It simply asks you to sit and listen. It asks you to do so until you’re ready to move on and it lets you go, like a mature, emotionally-intelligent lover. It simply asks you to look in on yourself until you can’t anymore and encourages you to keep pushing. Every day, keep pushing further, until the depths of everything you’ve always wished you could change about yourself, don’t seem so daunting, don’t seem so bad. They just seem like… you. The way it is. The status quo.

It simply asks you: Do you want to reinvent yourself? And: How can I help?