Jenny Slate Hates Being Oversimplified

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/magazine/jenny-slate-hates-being-oversimplified.html

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I was worried you were never going to call. I was just on the phone talking to a dear friend of mine, saying that I feel that I’m working on my forgetfulness and it’s getting better, and then, right in the middle of that conversation, I got a text message from my publicist asking me if I called you yet.

It’s O.K. How are you processing your forgetfulness? I get confused about trying to preserve my ‘‘freshness,’’ my inner child and wanting to honor my free spirit. I have a personal confusion where you’re either a free spirit or you are uptight and controlled by iCal. One of the things that stops me from being a full adult is that I don’t take the extra step to do things like make a schedule or honor my own personal time. I’m just starting to realize that this is something I need to change.

Do you think it’s a kind of self-sabotage? Yes. I needed it for a while because it was easier for me to think of myself as an underdog or not completely in control. I have the appetite to live more directly now.

People confuse you with many of the characters you seem to play, often young, insouciant single women in the big city. But you are clearly very driven. There’s a discipline to getting to that place where you can be free. You can be a weirdo! But you have to be aware of structure and having a diligence as an artist to make something free and new.

You’re often grouped with actresses like Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer of ‘‘Broad City,’’ and Lena Dunham. Does that feel accurate? It’s lovely to be put into a group with these women. I also don’t think that we’re very similar other than that we’re women and we all have vaginas and we don’t seem to be very scared of that. It’s annoying to be oversimplified.

I think that there’s a time when we, as women, have to say: ‘‘It’s not an accident I’m succeeding. I did this on purpose.’’ In my weaker times, I tend to act like it’s either magic that made me be the person that I am or that it’s just sort of a haphazard chain of events and, the fact is, that I’ve loved myself on purpose during times when it was really difficult to do that.

You’re in ‘‘Landline,’’ a comedy about infidelity that takes place in the ’90s. I can’t help thinking that cellphones and social media have made it easier to cheat. Now there are websites, so you don’t have to think about it too hard. The Ashley Madison of it all is totally psychotic. I think the cellphone creates a sense of entitlement. A bond you share with someone is not something that goes on autopilot. The stress of potentially breaking that bond is always underlying in one way or another, and that’s usually what makes the bond holy, that feeling of ‘‘I worked so hard to preserve this.’’ There’s also a very fine line between a bond feeling like a connection on purpose and a trap forever without a lot of choice. It can make people act in indirect and stealthy and hurtful ways.

You’ve noted how absurd it is that people keep asking you about accidentally swearing on ‘‘Saturday Night Live’’ in 2009 when you were a cast member, even though, as you put it, ‘‘people say horrible things on Fox News all the time.’’ What do you think we can learn from what our society considers obscene? What’s on Fox News or coming from the Trump administration are outright lies that we either have to casually accept or accept with a side-eye snarky attitude, and that can create the feeling that you’re being bullied and no one’s doing anything about it. There is a group of men that is creating health care legislation that is going to take care away from the people who need it most: That’s behavior that’s coming from people who feel small, who are in pain and who are obsessed with power. My behavior, almost a decade ago, was the behavior of a young, fun woman who got carried away in the middle of the night. But yeah, I understand that you are not allowed to say [expletive] on network TV.