Bonnie Wertheim

“I was trying to say goodbye to my ex-husband, who is an important person in my life and a friend,” Slate, an actress and comedian, said of the story, “I Died: Bronze Tree.” After her divorce from director Dean Fleischer-Camp in 2016, she heard that sometimes, as a healing exercise, trauma survivors reimagine painful experiences. “I decided to write for myself what my life would be if I had a relationship that lasted till the end,” she said.

Maybe this isn’t what you were expecting from Slate, who is known for voicing animated characters in television shows like “Big Mouth” and “Bob’s Burgers,” as well as the internet’s favorite anthropomorphic shell, Marcel. Nor is it what you might have assumed would emerge from the mind of the stand-up comedian whose monologues are punctuated by “poop and fart jokes,” as she put it, among other bodily concerns. But “Little Weirds” wasn’t really meant to be funny.

“People had approached me like, ‘Would you like to write some humorous blah blah blahs?’ ” Slate said. “And my answer was, ‘No, I don’t think I can.’ ”

She proposed an allegorical eco-feminist tome that she imagined would be in the vein of bell hooks. That didn’t work out, either.

The book Slate did write, which Little, Brown will release Nov. 5, is more autobiographical than sociological or critical, but it doesn’t quite fall into the category of personal essays. The word “divorce” only appears a few times in its pages. Disclosures are often cushioned by whimsical rhetorical devices. Proper nouns, even the name of her dog, have been largely left out. She writes about nurture and nourishment: returning to the (almost certainly haunted) house where she grew up; drinking a beer alone in the airport; saying hello to the dog first, and the human second, if at all; admiring the ferocity of other women; watching the solar eclipse in a crowd of strangers; picking the perfect flower to fill her window boxes. You might call them personal abstractions.

“Little Weirds” has retained some of its original feminist underpinnings, in its reverence for nature and the female body and its condemnation of male arrogance. Slate, who is 37 and was raised in the Boston suburb of Milton, said she couldn’t have written like this in her 20s. “Even though I grew up in a privileged situation — I went to private school, and my parents are both artists, and I had access to a lot of literature and art, and I had a really caring family and good health and safety — I don’t really feel like anybody directly spoke to me about feminism,” she said. “I didn’t understand that it was important to say directly that you are a feminist, and I didn’t know what it meant.”

It wasn’t until she was cast in the 2014 film “Obvious Child,” which revolves around a comedian’s unplanned pregnancy, that she came to understand the relationship between her body, her voice and the rest of the world. She credits her feminist awakening to that film’s director, Gillian Robespierre. They have become serial collaborators, ever since Robespierre identified something sensitive about Slate’s stand-up.

“I think a lot of really dramatic actors cannot do comedy,” Robespierre said, “but I do think there are more comedic actors and comedians who can perform difficult scenes and go to those deeper, darker places onscreen in a natural way.”

Slate, a self-described “moderately successful actress,” has leaned more comedic than dramatic in her career. But every now and then she gets a casting call that defies any notions she has about her range, like the time she was asked to read for the role of Pennywise in the film adaptation of Stephen King’s “It.”

“I had to put my computer across the room and look at it with binoculars and be like, ‘Sorry, I’m so sorry,’ ” she said, recalling her incredulity at the email. Then she began to envision a world in which she got the part. “Do I have boobs as female It?” she wondered.

Slate released her first comedy special, “Stage Fright,” on Netflix last week. The feature cuts from a stand-up set at the Gramercy Theater in New York to documentary-style interviews with Slate’s parents, Nancy and Ron, and her sisters, Abby and Stacey. (Her grandmothers make memorable appearances, too.)

In the Netflix special, Slate also shares artifacts from her childhood: the Laura Ashley wallpaper, the debate trophies, the hexlike poems scribbled on the walls of her closet, cursing the classmates who wronged her. There’s a wistful and resigned quality to it all — she expresses doubt that she will amount to anything other than a “weird aunt” in a world full of disappointing men.

“Little Weirds,” like many books published since 2016, makes dutiful references to Donald Trump and the reverberations of his election, though none so explicit as the ones Slate makes in conversation, about the proliferation of hate speech, violence and restrictive gender-based laws.

“When Gabe Liedman, my comedy partner, and I first started doing comedy, we felt really free to use language that were slurs against women or Jews or gay people, because we felt that that empowered us,” Slate said. “And now it’s like, I don’t want to hear that at all. We are in an emergency, and you can’t use that language because it’s all flammable.”

Since April, Slate has been living, mostly without air conditioning, in the childhood home of her fiancé, Ben Shattuck. The couple also spends time on Cuttyhunk Island, off Cape Cod, where Shattuck is the director of a writers’ residency and where Slate in June gave a widely covered speech to the island’s one graduating eighth grader.

She spends her time reading, writing, swimming in the river behind their house on the South Coast of Massachusetts and napping, as Shattuck, who is also a painter and a curator, has taught her to enjoy. Sometimes they drive his mother’s Prius an hour into Providence, Rhode Island, the nearest city, for dinner and a movie. When they are together, Slate seems most herself; she talks about missing her parents, who live a close-but-far ferry ride away, on Martha’s Vineyard, and reminisces about the time Rihanna complimented her on her dress.

She and Shattuck met two summers ago through a series of meaningful coincidences that brought them north of the Arctic Circle. Slate had flown to Norway to celebrate the 30th birthday of author Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, whom she met in Cobble Hill Park in Brooklyn, in 2014.

“I had just seen ‘Obvious Child,’ and I was walking home through the park, and I recognized Jenny. She was on the phone, and I gave her this incredibly ridiculous, silent round of applause as I walked by her,” Dinerstein Knight said. “She blew me a kiss. And that was the whole exchange.”

They connected that evening on Twitter and began an email correspondence. Dinerstein Knight sent Slate a copy of her first novel, “The Sunlit Night,” to read.

After the celebrations, they planned to visit Lofoten, the archipelago where “The Sunlit Night” is set, to scout locations for its film adaptation starring Slate. Dinerstein Knight and her husband, John Knight, invited his best friend to join them.

Shattuck appears anonymously midway through “Little Weirds.” He and Slate talk about poetry. He roasts chicken, bakes an apple pie. She sees his butt. “Nobody touched me,” she writes, “but it felt like I had been touched.”

This article originally appeared in

Her Book Isn't Funny, and Isn't Meant to Be

SOUTH DARTMOUTH, Mass. — The only piece of fiction in Jenny Slate’s new book, “Little Weirds,” describes a love that grew old in an un-air-conditioned house by the Atlantic Ocean.

The death was announced by the Agnelli family in a statement.

With her husband, Giovanni Agnelli of the Fiat car manufacturing empire, Marella Agnelli owned more than a dozen homes, including an estate in Turin, a ski lodge in the Italian Alps and a Park Avenue apartment in New York. She cultivated an esteemed social circle that included the Kennedys, Henry Kissinger, Katharine Graham and Truman Capote. The couple’s closets were filled with immaculate clothes.

Agnelli’s beauty captivated the imagination of artists and fashion designers. Andy Warhol and Richard Avedon created portraits of her. She was among Valentino Garavani’s earliest and most beloved customers. Capote counted her as one of his “Swans,” the stylish and wealthy women with whom he surrounded himself. He reportedly told Graham, the Washington Post publisher at the time, that if Agnelli and Babe Paley, another of his socialite muses, “were both in Tiffany’s window, Marella would be a little more expensive.”

Agnelli remained active and creative in her later years, purchasing and restoring a dilapidated villa in Marrakech, Morocco, publishing an autobiographical coffee table book and appearing in an HBO documentary about the life of her husband, in 2003.

She was born Princess Marella Caracciolo di Castagneto on May 4, 1927, in Florence, Italy. Her mother, Margaret Clarke of Peoria, Illinois, was a wealthy Anglo-American expatriate, the daughter of a distiller; her father, Filippo Caracciolo, was part of a Neapolitan noble family.

In a first-person article for Vanity Fair in 2014, Agnelli described the company her family kept as “a set of people who spent their days visiting one another’s exquisitely refined gardens and crumbling villas on the hills of Florence and getting into interminable philosophical disquisitions.”

Marella’s world expanded with her education. She studied art and design at the Académie des Beaux-Arts and Académie Julian in Paris before moving to New York in the early 1950s. There she modeled in exchange for the chance to learn about photography from Erwin Blumenfeld, a Vogue contributor.

The life of Giovanni Agnelli, known as Gianni to his friends, seemed in line with the adventurous one she hoped to lead. She had heard stories about his service in World War II from friends and knew well of his tight-knit family’s penchant for glamour and speed.

Fiat, the company Giovanni Agnelli’s grandfather founded in 1899 in Turin, had experienced tremendous growth after the war during a period known as Italy’s “miracolo economico,” or economic miracle. Accordingly, the Agnellis insulated their lives with excess: parties, villas, yachts, cars, women.

Gianni, the eldest of the seven Agnelli children and the head of the family since his parents’ deaths, had a reputation for being a playboy and had frequently been mentioned in gossip columns. So when he and Marella got engaged in 1953, it was a relief to his siblings.

The couple married on Nov. 19, 1953, in the chapel of Osthoffen castle in northeast France. Marella wore a white satin Balenciaga gown with sleeves and a long veil, Gianni a tailcoat and pinstripe pants. He supported himself on crutches, still healing from a car accident the year before. It was the first of many well-documented appearances they would make as a stylish couple.

Another image of Marella Agnelli, from December of that year, would help define an era of beauty. Avedon shot her in half profile, wearing a strapless gown that accentuated her long neck. The black-and-white image, which is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been compared to a Modigliani painting.

After the wedding, Agnelli was not eager to take on the role of housewife. She had recently spent 18 months apprenticing with Blumenfeld and accepted a reporting job with Condé Nast, which she abandoned after the wedding.

What she did love, though, was the leisure and the luxury. In the Vanity Fair article, she recalled a shopping trip in Paris shortly after the wedding. Agnelli had booked an overnight train from Turin, and when she boarded her sleeping car, she found that it was full of her home comforts: monogrammed towels, her favorite toiletries, even fresh flowers.

“This, I soon discovered, was how the Agnellis traveled when they took a night train,” Agnelli wrote. “This was also when I realized I had entered a very different way of life from the one I was used to.”

She developed the Agnellis’ taste for the finer things in life — custom garments, formal dinner parties, designer furnishings — while maintaining a relaxed home atmosphere. After a tour of the extravagant apartment of billionaire couple Sid and Mercedes Bass, Agnelli reportedly remarked: “It will take her another lifetime to understand wicker.”

The couple had their first child, Edoardo, in 1954, and Margherita followed the next year. Agnelli is survived by her daughter, Margherita Agnelli de Pahlen, her brother Nicola Caracciolo di Castagneto and eight grandchildren. Her son died in 2000.

As parents Marella and Gianni continued to refine their image as a power couple. They acquired an expansive contemporary art collection that included works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella; yachted up and down the Amalfi Coast with John and Jacqueline Kennedy and swam in the Adriatic Sea with Capote; collected cars, yachts and private planes; and cultivated acres of pristine gardens at their several homes on three continents.

Gardening was one of Agnelli’s lifelong passions. She spent decades working with English garden designer Russell Page to perfect her family’s 25 acres at Villar Perosa in Turin, and later got involved with the Italian Environmental Fund, an organization focused on preserving historic landscapes. Her love of landscape architecture was cataloged in two books she co-wrote, “Gardens of the Italian Villas” (1987) and “The Agnelli Gardens at Villar Perosa: Two Centuries of a Family Retreat” (1998).

In 2002 the couple founded Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, a Renzo Piano-designed museum in Turin housing their collection of works by Matisse, Modigliani, Renoir and Manet, among others. Giovanni Agnelli died of prostate cancer the next year at 81.

After her husband’s death, Agnelli took on one of her most ambitious projects: the reconstruction of Ain Kassimou, a villa in Marrakech she had purchased from the Hermès family. Interior designer Bill Willis and landscape architect Madison Cox helped her turn the property into an expertly manicured garden estate. Its renovation and cultivation, along with those of her other homes, was chronicled in Agnelli’s 2014 autobiography, “The Last Swan.”

“One is never really ‘done’ with a garden, just as one is never ‘done’ with life,” Agnelli wrote in Vanity Fair, just before her book’s publication. “Day by day and step by step, one just keeps on finding new and clever ways to make them flourish, both in sunshine and in storm.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/obituaries/marella-agnelli-dead.html" id="cb951ba4-6fc9-3d1a-a466-4270b3993ed6">The New York Times</a>.

Marella Agnelli, a descendant of Neapolitan nobility who lived a rarefied life of palatial estates, ornamental gardens, fine art, high fashion and lofty society, died Saturday at her home in Turin, Italy. She was 91.

Marella Agnelli, Society's 'Last Swan' and a Passionate Gardener, Is Dead at 91

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Bonnie Wertheim

Articles written by the author

Her Book Isn't Funny, and Isn't Meant to Be

Marella Agnelli, Society's 'Last Swan' and a Passionate Gardener, Is Dead at 91