Listening to Jenny Slate’s “Lifeform” is like watching a decathlete set multiple records on stubbly terrain. She can go from honey-voiced ingénue to frat bro in a nanosecond. One minute, she is Plathily moue-ing on about feeling like “a big empty bell clanging around looking for what I was supposed to be attached to”; the next, she’s making a finger mustache of her voice by impersonating a doctor telling her: “Your instinct to gather your hairs into nests is a wonderful indication that this process is going as it should!”
Slate, known for her crackling standup and for voicing Marcel the Shell, a lovably diminutive, single-eyed seashell, here turns her high-wattage attention to the messiness of falling in love, giving birth during a pandemic and adjusting to the “situation” of motherhood — all of it delivered in her singular, zigzagging voice.
It’s not the first time she’s toured these themes. In her recent comedy special, “Seasoned Professional,” Slate memorably likened her postpartum breasts to “porny gazongas, like, double D, milky, psycho naturals.” In “Lifeform,” her milk-engorged boobs are compared to “mutant grapes from outer space.” On the Sliding Scoville Scale of Sick Burns, the description ranks a millimeter below one about wearing a “‘pad’ that was really a diaper that was cradling my own blood in a trough in my disposable underwear.”
Slate’s highly imagistic sentences are weird-seeking missiles; the book’s epigraph comes from Leonora Carrington’s “The Hearing Trumpet,” which exerts an almost gravitational influence over Slate’s work. But not all sections land — or combust with proper force. Excerpts from a play with cartoonified characters are too lifeless to be defibrillated even with the help of additional voice actors. A takedown of an obscenely large gift basket from “a Hollywood gifting company” reeks more of unacknowledged privilege than of herbal shampoo varietals. These passages, which scan more as self-indulgent interludes than proper chapters, lack the punch of Slate’s more personal anecdotes and can leave the listener adrift.
Yet Slate’s tricksy vocalization of her “stirring-thinking” largely redeems the book’s few misses. She does a hilarious rendition of a diabolical “sadist-deity” devising new ways to torture her: “Oh, oh! Send down the thing where she is so exhausted that the exhaustion is felt as a new type of filth.” There’s also a wonderful ode to “Going Crone,” her term for the specific taxation levied on mothers — “I feel that I am under surveillance for just even having a life cycle and life-form” — before turning into a deflated soufflé with the thought that “I would actually love to quietly give up.”
Her voice catches the fluttering, come-and-go anxiety of new motherhood, especially in the staccato, nervy readings of her letters to the doctor. These epistles, scattered like so many dandelion seeds throughout, come closest to encapsulating the full range of frequencies of Slate’s standup persona and make the audiobook feel like an extended voice memo from a deliriously funny friend.
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