Actress Jenny Slate grew up in an old colonial-style house in Milton, Massachusetts — a small suburb outside of Boston. It's a house her parents still inhabit, and a house Jenny returns to often.
In the new book, “About The House,” Jenny and her father Ron, who is a poet and essayist, recount some of their favorite memories and revelations from their lives in that house. There are tales of ghosts, a determined groundhog, and even an escaped convict showing up at their back door. But the stories in the book are largely about the small moments and memories in a home that make up a life.
The book was published by Concord Free Press, which has a unique publishing model: they put out books for free, only asking that in return you donate something to a charity, organization or individual of your choice. You can request a book directly from their website.
Jenny and Ron recently joined us to talk about the book and the importance of their family home.
Interview Highlights:
On why they decided to write the book:
Ron: It was difficult for both of us to write and we both procrastinated. But the thing is, when you write something, you want to discover something. It's not enough just to say, These are my memories of the house or This is a description of my bedroom. The [question] was, how were we going to approach it? We didn't talk about that too much. I sort of waited for Jenny to write something so I could write something in response. And that was long coming, and then finally we started to amass some material.
Jenny: I became child, teenager and then young adult living in this house, and as a little girl was always really obsessed with what I would be like as a woman, especially because I admired my mother and my grandmothers so much. I just wanted to know what my way would be. That was the first thing that was in my head when I started thinking about how I was in these rooms that are all filled with objects from my great grandmothers. I was going through a transition in my life, getting divorced and losing my home, so that made our house where I grew up the only home that I had left. There's a lot of sadness for me in the book as well.
On the house possessing healing power:
Jenny: The reason why the house is sort of a witchy healer for me is that, like for many people, when I go back home I really regress. I leave more messes than I leave in my own home. I hope that somebody else will be there for me. I rely a little less on myself. I think that's important for me because, a lot of times when your heart gets broken, your belief system gets shattered. What you built a love on, or a connection with someone else, all the rules with that — they seem to float away like in outer space. It feels to me that seeing the way my parents love me, they're the first people who met me and they've decided to love me specifically. Receiving that love again allows me to see myself clearly and I can reboot from that. When I struggle the most in life is when I cannot see myself, and therefore I can't figure out how to love myself. There's a lot of questioning going on in our family all the time. We're very open and I need that. I retreat there.
On balancing an executive job and a writing job:
Ron: People say that the sources of writing are mysterious, but that the sources of not writing are pathological when in fact, the sources of not writing are just as mysterious. So I don't know why I stopped writing, but I don't think it was because I had a corporate job. I enjoyed my job. I got to travel a lot, I met a lot of people and I watched the rise of technology because I worked for technology companies in the '80s and the '90s. I do think about the pretense a lot. As it relates to my family, I feel like our family is one big improv act where I play the role of father and Jenny plays a certain role and we just make it up as we go along. I do think that has a lot to do with why Jenny became an actress.
Little things that were potentially horrific are casually referenced:
Jenny: The only thing that is serious to me is the issue of the ghost. I'm so scared of it. When I go home I hold in my pee all night long and wake up sweaty and just terrified because I'm so afraid that I'm going to see the ghost. That feels real and has a lot of weight to me, which is such a bizarre thing to say when my mom tells me that I almost got kidnapped. But there's also something in our family, and something that I've always struggled with, that there's this notion that the outside world is really predatory. Our house is set back from the main road and it was like, if a car comes up the driveway, run into the house immediately! I really struggled against that mindset while also trying to keep myself safe, so I just have to live with that combo.
On seeing the ghost up the stairs:
Ron: I did. And I'm not the only person who has seen ghosts. My wife and my youngest daughter Stacy saw a little girl-type ghost.
Jenny: They saw it together, too, which is really real ... Do we sound crazy?
On finding a batch of letters:
Ron: This goes back to the late '70s. There was a carpet on the stairs going up to our third floor. When we ripped the carpet up, I found a parcel of letters that had been written to a woman who lived in the house. One night, I had been up in my study on the third floor and I came down and got into bed and Nancy, my wife, said, "Were you smoking your pipe? I still smell a lot of smoke." And I said, "I wasn't smoking my pipe." I went out just to smell the air and I saw a shape moving up the stairs to the third floor. I was alarmed by this, and it so happened that there was a ghostbuster-type guy who worked in the building where I was working. And this ghostbuster guy told me what to do. He told me how to get rid of the ghost. He basically said, You've got to burn those letters. So we built a big fire and threw them in.
On the timing of the book's release:
Jenny: It feels good to me. The reason I think that it feels good is that you cannot argue with what we're doing. To get this book, I guess you have to like to read. So some people don't, and that's fine. They don't need to read it. But we're not saying, If you read this, you must donate to this or that or that. You can read this and put your money wherever you like. But the reason why it is important to me is that I look around my world now and I just see a lot of rhetoric that is hyper-emotional, but not incredibly useful. And I love hyper-emotional stuff. I am hyper-emotional. I am the most sensitive person that I have ever met. I also believe in the power of my mind to sort through those things and weed out the bad thoughts. I do think that this book just asks a simple thing, which is to take in new information, join the world again and then look around and see what you think could use a little help. There's no political aim, there's no even specific activism that we want to happen, except for people [to] add to their world rather than tearing down what they think shouldn't be there.