Jenny Slate has had a weird year, I think. While it was probably strange for her to date Captain America for about a year, the post-breakup stuff has been even odder. Like, she’s giving confessional interviews and oversharing about blind dates. She looked absolutely pained when she was forced to stand next to Chris Evans while they were promoting their movie, post-split. She seems to be out-of-sorts and trying to figure out her next step in every sense. And she’s currently promoting Landline, which is like a throw-back ‘90s movie about relationships. Which is how she did this long interview with Marie Claire’s September issue – you can read the full piece here at marieclaire.com. Some highlights:
On L.A.’s obsession with perfection, particularly through plastic surgery: “It’s saying, ‘I’ve given up. I’m too afraid that imperfection is going to make me feel excluded from the community, so I’m buying in rather than opting out.’…It plays into a deep fear put in place by the patriarchy. We live in a system in which our president can be the most heightened misogynist and chauvinist, who is always making it his business to comment on women’s appearances. It’s repulsive. But it also creates a culture of fear in which we think, Even if I don’t want it to, my physicality is going to be called out, and I’m going to be vulnerable.”
On her candid interview with New York magazine about her relationship with Chris Evans, which went viral: “It seems so naïve: You’re just talking to a nice person, and you have a really honest, beautiful conversation, and she writes about it in an honest, beautiful way. But then, it goes through all these other outlets and gets distilled. And then it can be made to seem like you were being cheap.…I didn’t mean to do that. Especially not with an experience that was so precious to me. So precious.”
Whether she’s good at breakups/divorces/professional splits: “A divorce moves at the speed of complete deadening silence, or that’s how it feels. When we got divorced, I felt like I was in outer space. But I think we at least had the foresight, even amidst all that pain, to say, ‘If we don’t do this now, we will never be able to be together at all in any way. We will never be able to work together or be friends.’ You know, just because something didn’t work out in its original form doesn’t mean you have to denigrate it and say it was worth nothing.”
On grappling with the high-speed, voracious nature of celebrity culture: “There’s so much more teeth out there, so many invisible claws out on the internet. It’s one thing to be, like, Cloris Leachman in 1979, saying, ‘I f–ked Gene Hackman,’ or whatever. It’s going to be in one article, and if people want to find it, they’re going to have to go to the library and use the microfiche. But I enjoy putting myself out there much more than I fear the consequences. I do have to learn to make sure that I’m taking that risk alone, and not dragging anyone else into it.”
On her natural instinct to overshare: “You know, I was in the bathroom thinking, ‘I did it again.’ Overspoke. I feel so compelled to give a detailed answer to everything. People tell me over and over, ‘Jenny, you don’t have to say everything.’ But I straight-up forget, and I’m not sure how to change without completely silencing myself.”
On the importance of therapy: “You know what’s weird about reality shows? Everything. A lot of the time, the ladies say to each other as an insult that they should go to therapy. Like, ‘You really need help, honey. I wish you well. You need to go to therapy.’ But every person needs to have someone to talk to. Therapy is beautiful.”
At first I was like “she needs to own the fact that she overshares” but… she is owning it. Of course, she’s making it sound like she’s a victim of her own oversharing, and that she’s too cool/clever/old-school/hipster to understand that duh, when you give an interview where you talk on and on and on about your breakup, of course people are going to say “whoa, that’s a little bit much.” Her interview with New York Magazine was a serious and epic overshare, the likes of which we rarely see from someone not on a reality show. But I can’t really slam her: I’m sort of the same way. Only in my day it was just called “being a gossip.”
Photos courtesy of Katie McCurdy/MarieClaire.com.
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