Reading Jenny Slate’s “Little Weirds” is like digesting Shakespearean sonnets: It’s different enough from ordinary English that it takes your brain a few, very long sentences to adjust to its sweet, flowery prose.

But once you’ve recalibrated, the actress-comedian’s book becomes a dreamy dessert for the eyeballs that uses playful language to express deep sentiments about heartbreak, anger, wonder and friendship.

It also serves as a romantic hope fulfilled.

Jenny Slate When: 8 p.m. Nov. 8 Where: Vic Theatre, 3145 N. Sheffield Tickets: $59 (copy of “Little Weirds” included) Info: jamusa.com

“Writing this book was a wish for love, and an understanding that if I didn’t find a way to find a self-love, that I really just wouldn’t be good for anyone, including myself,” says Slate.

The star of “The Secret Life of Pets,” “Venom” and the new Netflix special “Stage Fright” penned the fantastical memoir — which details both real experiences of loneliness and daydreams of animals playing classical music — when she was single and grappling with divorce.

By the time of this interview, however, Slate was engaged to art curator Ben Shattuck, and the couple was embarking on a book tour that comes to the Vic Theatre on Friday.

“I like to be in conversation with the person I love the most at the end of a performance of pieces that I wrote in order to get myself back together,” says Slate about touring with Shattuck. “I like that our relationship feels like one of the many happy results from a lot of hard personal work.”

Shattuck actually makes an inadvertent appearance in “Little Weirds,” in a piece of the book Slate wrote about a trip to Norway with friends well before the two started dating. It’s an entry that shows romantic connection obvious to a reader but maybe not to Slate, herself.

“It was one of the first pieces I wrote for the book, and I definitely didn’t think I would see him again. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have written it,” says Slate, who doesn’t explicitly name Shattuck in the section where she meets a “dark-haired stranger” who paints her a picture of a blue flower and recites her verses from a poem in a dream.

“It happens to truly, strangely be true that my fiancé is that man!” Slate confirms.

Ex-husband Dean Fleischer-Camp, with whom Slate co-created “Marcel the Shell,” gets a quick thank you in the acknowledgments at the end of the book, because “we still work together and he’s a very close creative partner.” But it took a while for Slate to be ready to talk about her relationship with Fleischer-Camp, in her writing and comedy, at all.

“I think once I felt like I was able to speak about it in a way that felt specific and concise and not hurtful for either either me or Dean, I felt that as long as I can make it really, really about me and about my specific feeling in my life as a person alone, I can do this,” says Slate.

She likens being ready to talk about her divorce to being a trainer so comfortable with a reptile that she can ”go on TV and hold snakes.”

Today, Slate is confident that “I know how to hold this wild thing.”

And she knows how to write about it, in a language that she describes best: Her writing is “like watching a flower bloom in fast-forward on ‘Sesame Street.’ ”