Lifeform

Review by Booklist Review

Writer and actress Slate's (Little Weirds, 2019) second collection of imaginative, funny, affecting, and hard-to-classify pieces delves deeply into her feelings, dreams, and visions about pregnancy and becoming a mother. She wakes from one such dream "laughing at how bizarre this experience is of making a lifeform while being a lifeform," and this thought, with its combination of humor and heft, could sum up Slate's whole project. Many pieces have nothing to do with babies. In one, Slate rewatches the original Ghostbusters, a movie she loves, and, unsettled by what she now recognizes as toxic masculinity and misogyny, rewrites a hero's ending for Sigourney Weaver's character. In "The Raccoon," a critter whom Slate names Justin helps himself to her trash before the author's partner gently redirects him. Justin's raccoon friends voice a later piece, observing this whole situation. After an earthquake, the baby arrives. She is magnificent, but the book remains her mother's story, following Slate's attempts to piece herself back together, be a mother and a person, too, recognize what is better and what is maybe worse than before, and return to the work of writing. Some extra-out-there pieces cement this as another wonderfully weird, incomparable, and utterly enjoyable book that readers will be glad simply exists.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Little Weirds was an instant best-seller and made Slate a literary star too. Fans are more than ready.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The quirky humor of comedian Slate (Little Weirds) lights up these odd yet endearing essays, which trace her path to becoming a mother in the years after divorcing her first husband. Reflecting on the early days of dating her second husband, she recounts worrying whenever they were apart that he would lose interest in her, a feeling she gradually overcame through the strength of their connection. Two entries offer psychedelic accounts of her recurring dreams about a stork with "straw-like legs... strobing with filaments, threads of metallic light"; she interprets the creature's often gruesome deaths as symbolizing her anxieties about becoming a mother. Other selections send-up postpartum life, as when Slate writes in a faux letter to her doctor that her breasts were "dripping like mutant grapes from outer space." Another entry is styled as an obituary marking the death of Slate's former self, featuring the headline, "Woman dies of going the extra mile." Though Slate's eccentric comedy is a constant, she's not afraid to get heartfelt, as in the moving "Swan," where she meditates on losing her grandmother to dementia while raising her baby: "There is no way for us to have our loves without breathtaking pain, not because we love brutally but because we lose each other at different times." Funny, lyrical, and sometimes strange, these essays pulse with life. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME. (Oct.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An actor and comedian tells the story of her journey from being an unpaired "animal" to a "new mammal mother" in love. After Slate completed her first book, "the issue of finding a partner…never rested and never allowed rest for [her] either." Senses heightened, she had stepped into her most animal self and was on a quest to "fulfill [her] mammal instincts." Loneliness and emotional vulnerability made her seek connection with neighborhood dogs and insights from books that promised to bring soulmates. When love did finally find her, the anxiety that he would reject her for being herself and "drinking tequila on a Saturday afternoon…then [having] a bath with my friend" was intense. After the pair became a couple and Slate became pregnant with the baby she called "the lifeform," her neuroses--which the author mocks through an imaginary session with a psychologist--went into overdrive. Yet even as she wrestled with her fears, Slate also discovered that the body that was so often a "bay of doubt" was also becoming a "harbor of well-being" for the life-form to which she was attached. Then, during a time of "plague and disruption," the author "exploded [her] vagina" to give birth, becoming not only a mother, but a "mammal with a soul that [was] born anew every day." Though still haunted by a "purple-dark hole marking me in the afternoons," Slate had become secure enough in the "nest" she had built for herself to see the hole more as a "bluish egg-thing" portending possibility. At times whimsical in its flights of fancy and always surprising in the moments of lyrical grace it offers, Slate's book celebrates the transformative power of surrendering to love and life. Delightfully offbeat and unexpectedly moving. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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