‘Little Weirds’ Shows Us the Beauty of the Strange

Book titles generally do a good job of encapsulating their contents, but few are as on the nose as “Little Weirds,” Jenny Slate’s memoir (of sorts). The book is composed of many chapters for such a slim volume, most of which live up to the weirdness Slate promises. Slate’s voice, unfiltered and unpolished, meanders through the strange thoughts that everyone’s brain produces. Even in the most irreverent moments, Slate’s writing gives the reader a clear understanding of how she thinks and who she is — precisely what the book sets out to do.

Slate writes like she performs her stand-up comedy — for which she is better known — full of starts and stops and circles until she finally addresses it head-on. It’s refreshing, however, to get such a voice so clearly in each of her short vignettes. In these moments, the frenetic energy of Missy, her character on “Big Mouth” shines through.

Slate focuses a great deal on the house she grew up in, referring to it over and over again. She even revives the New England Mobile Book Fair, a once-thriving, now dilapidated bookstore that puts any Barnes & Noble to shame in terms of size and variety of books sold. (Thanks to Amazon, it has considerably shrunk in size, but loyal fans still flock to it to find something they might not otherwise see in a national chain store.) Though “Little Weirds” often veers off into the abstract, it remains grounded in the places that have touched Slate, such as her home, Norway, and the plant shop.

Arguably the best chapters are those that have a concrete narrative. One of these is entitled “A Prayer,” and the entire chapter is one line: “As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid that someone else will erase me by denying me love.” The best kind of writing is the kind that both makes readers pause and think, succinctly identifying a particular thought or feeling. Slate has done that with this one sentence.

The book is a metaphorical wandering through the expansive meadow that is one’s brain, but Slate nevertheless manages to have razor-sharp insight that can be taken beyond the confines of the book. Many of us have forgotten what it’s like to have an intimate connection to nature, but Slate reminds us that “information about art and nature feels like the best stuff to have, and if you have it, it is powerful and excellent to pass it on. That is an act of power, showing what you know, giving it to another person.”

Without telling her audience to take care of themselves, she basically tells them to do so (take note, Harvard students!). Near the end of the book, she writes, “it occurs to me that if anyone ever bullies me again I will warn them one time but probably start to stop loving them, and that if they do it again I will have my final, that a person who does that to me does not love me.”

The most poignant chapter was “To Norway,” in which she — not surprisingly — goes to Norway and does what she does best: observe others. One of her subjects is a woman who nonchalantly orders a hot dog, something that Slate thinks would comparatively be weird for an American woman to do. The chapter contains a beautiful description of her breakfast: a simple list of what she ate, but with an air of appreciation suggesting that she viewed the meal as more than just a meal. Slate exemplifies the beauty of observation.

Her musings on Hammurabi as the first patriarch inspire a pause too. Slate doesn’t necessarily say it, but rather floats the possibility of what it would be like if to undo 2,000 years of convention. Actually, the entire book does that: Is it possible to embrace the little rabbit holes of the human brain, and truly explore what’s there?
—Staff writer Cassandra Luca can be reached at cassandra.luca@thecrimson.com, or on Twitter @cassandraluca_