Jenny Slate and I were having technical difficulties. First, her flight was delayed, and then our Facetime call kept dropping (a total of three times, the last as she was waving goodbye). Before we were finally cut off, she gave me a tour of the house she shares with her boyfriend, who’s since become her fiancé. It’s an old house in Massachusetts that once belonged to his great-grandmother. “It used to be an old dance hall and now we live here. It’s really heavenly,” she told me.

In 2009, Slate, who started out in stand-up with her comedy partner Gabe Liedman, joined the cast of Saturday Night Live for one season. Since then, she’s become known for her work as an actor and voice-over artist in shows like Bob’s Burgers, Parks and Recreation, Kroll Show, and Big Mouth. It wasn’t until Marcel the Shell, however, that Slate discovered what she now refers to as a “small but mighty voice.” In the stop-motion short, Marcel, an anthropomorphic shell, commands your attention: even if he is small enough to be overpowered by his surroundings, you hang on to everything he says. To date, the initial installment, which was directed and conceived by Dean Fleischer-Camp, boasts over thirty million views. It has spawned two sequels and was also adapted into a children’s book in 2011.

Her breakout performance as a film actor came in Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child (2014). In the film, Slate demonstrated just where she could take a performance: her playful humor was equally matched with a deep-rooted pain that arrived in small, powerful bursts. Her lesser-known YouTube series, Catherine (2013), about an oddball paper-pusher and her weird workplace, cut the levity entirely and put Slate’s sinister, unsettling side on full display. And her current Netflix comedy special, Stage Fright, which premiered in the fall of 2019, exposes the many selves she’s hidden away or compartmentalized. Stage Fright features documentary insertions starring Slate’s parents, sisters, and grandmothers that do more than simply frame her comedy routine: at one point, Slate tearfully reveals that her anxiety and stage fright are so overwhelming that she fears she will “deny herself the moment to have fun.”

In Slate’s new book, Little Weirds, she explores the source of that fear. Although this isn’t her first book—she cowrote About the House, a collection of stories regarding her haunted childhood home in Milton, Massachusetts, with her father, the poet Ron Slate—this is the first she has written with herself in mind. Little Weirds ...