Just imagine: your life has fallen to pieces, you have pummelling heartbreak, loss of confidence, astounding loneliness, disempowerment and exhaustion. Add to that the ‘sickening experience of watching a racist, homophobic, misogynist bully sit right down in the Oval Office’, and you have Jenny Slate’s state of mind when she started writing the dozens of pieces in this book.

The US writer and comedian saw the book as a way of putting herself back together so she could dwell happily in a shared outer world. It was also her act of pressing onward through an inner world that was dark and dismantled.

All these thoughts are contained in her introduction/ explanation/guidelines, so it is no surprise that her essays, some as short as just one paragraph, are deeply personal and reflect her way of looking at the world and herself.

Some of the most entertaining are letters to herself about dreams or the super-ego (the former from the Committee for Evening Experiences and the latter sent by her Office of Internal Affairs).

Her old dog, her 100-year-old house and even her travels from the US to Norway all provide subject matter for her musings, philosophical and entertaining, quirky yet deeply serious. A recurring title for her chapters is: I Died. She then qualifies that phrase by writing about Valentine’s Day, or sardines, or listening, or even writing as an old woman who died after a long and loving marriage, with her ashes buried beside those of her late husband, together under a bronze tree they had commissioned as grave art. That piece of writing is poignant, glorious in its shared love, and totally fearless.

This is a book to dip into at random, following Slate’s progress to the top of a metaphorical wave of gladness or descent into a trough of sadness. It is always entertaining and, as she herself wrote in her introduction, ‘a peppy procession of all my little weirds’.

Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville