Lifeform

By: Jenny Slate

Narrated by: George Saunders, Jenny Slate, Vanessa Bayer, Will Forte

'Magical' Mindy Kaling

'Delicious' Amy Sedaris

'This book is something new and wonderful. It made me remember I was alive' George Saunders

From actor, comedian, co-creator of Marcel the Shell, and New York Times bestselling author of Little Weirds Jenny Slate, a wild, soulful, hilarious collection of genre-bending essays depicting the journey into motherhood as you've never seen it before.

What happened was this: Jenny Slate was a human mammal who sniffed the air every morning hoping to find another person to love who would love her, and in that period there was a deep dark loneliness that she had to face and befriend, and then we are pleased to report that she did fall in love, and in that period she was like chimes, or a flock of clean breaths, and her spine lying flat was the many-colored planks on the xylophone, but also she was rabid with fear of losing this love, because of past injury. And then what happened was that she became a wild-pregnant-mammal-thing and then she exploded herself by having a whole baby blast through her vagina during a global plague and then she was expected to carry on like everything was normal-but was this normal, and had she or anything ever been normal?

Herein lies an account of this journey, told in five phases-Single, True Love, Pregnancy, Baby, and Ongoing-through luminous, laugh-out-loud funny, unclassifiable essays that take the form of letters to a doctor, dreams of a stork, fantasy therapy sessions, gossip between racoons, excerpts from an imaginary olden timey play, obituaries, theories about post-partum hair loss, graduation speeches, and more.

©2025 Jenny Slate (P)2025 Hachette Audio UK

Critic reviews

'Writer and actress Slate's 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. . . . Some extra-out-there pieces cement this as another wonderfully weird, incomparable, and utterly enjoyable book that readers will be glad simply exists' (Booklist, Starred Review)