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 on 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.

Image “Little Weirds” is out Nov. 5. Credit... Patricia Wall/The New York Times

“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.