Jenny Slate explains how she wrote a book with her father

It’s not often that a celebrity publishes a book without a grand marketing plan – but actress and comedian Jenny Slate (Obvious Child, Parks and Recreation) isn’t your average celebrity. Slate, along with her father, poet Ron Slate, quietly wrote and published a charming, funny book called About the House with the Concord Free Press in November.

Speaking to EW by phone from her hometown of Boston, Slate opens up about being nervous to work with her dad, and what it was like to write her first book for adults (she’s previously written two Marcel the Shell books for children).

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: This is, in a way, a biography of the house you grew up in. What made you want to write it?
JENNY SLATE: My dad came to me with the idea. My sisters and I have all moved out, and my parents might move soon. I think he thought it might be nice to write a book that was kind of an album of our memories. I was really nervous about it because I’ve written two children’s books before, but I don’t write nonfiction. And even though I do standup, that’s a totally different process than sitting down to write. I have a lot of problems when it comes to paying attention. I wondered if I could actually complete the task.

What was it like to work with your dad?
I’m a big procrastinator, and I was really afraid that my dad would be irritated by that. But it turns out that he also takes his time, and it ended up being a lot of phone calls where one of us would say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll have that for you tonight,” and it would be five days later that we would have that conversation again, and then three days after that, something would arrive in your inbox.

What was your process like?
We started by doing what we do naturally, which is to talk to each other. We discussed what about the actual house we wanted to talk about and write about, and what affected us. Then we sat on the beach one day and made a list of the rooms in our house, and these things that happened in the gardens and on the lawn or in the woods around the house, and just shaped it that way. “What do you have to say about these things? What are the memories? What does this place mean to you?”

That’s a lot more collaborative than I expected, given that you each wrote separate sections.
Yeah, we read each other’s drafts. And we couldn’t decide, should it be a kind of call-and-response book? Or should we be writing these things separately? We decided to lay the book out kind of the way that a relationship is in life: Each person has their perspective, each person has their memories. And a lot of my pieces start with, “I’m not sure if this is exactly what happened, but it’s how I remember it, which is important.” And some of them my dad responds to, and some of them he just lets be. I tend to panic when there’s too much structure, so I think if there’s anything in the book that I like, it’s that I wrote it from a really clear, and very emotional place.

What’s also cool about the book is you’re describing your own house, but it makes readers think about their childhood house and their experience growing up.
What I try to do in a lot of my work, if it’s my standup or this book or even my film work, is to not isolate myself from the audience. To not put myself above them, but say, “I do art because I’m trying to be here with you, and I’m trying to love you, and I’m trying to receive love.” And that, to me, is very, very important – especially now.

The book is published by the Concord Free Press, and like all their books, it’s free at bookstores and online. Concord just asks readers to make a donation to charity and to pass the book along when they’re done. Why did you decide to work with them?
I liked the idea that instead of being paid to write, that I should only be given the chance to write, and then if people want to read the book, the way that they have access to it is by giving something to the world around them. That seems like a fair trade to me.

Did you learn anything new about yourself while you were writing?
That I’m still the fourth-grade version of myself when it comes to doing work. [Laughs] I find it really hard to sit still for more than five minutes at a time. I think the most important thing that I learned, though, is that you will die while you are alive if you don’t educate yourself on a daily basis.

A version of this story appears in the December 2, 2016 issue of Entertainment Weekly. Pick it up on stands now or subscribe online at ew.com/allaccess.