In her new film Landline, Jenny Slate plays Dana Jacobs, a woman who finds herself drawn to a man (played by hunky Finn Wittrock) while in a relationship with a different man (played by brainy—though also hunky, just in a different way, you know!—Jay Duplass). At the same time, Dana and her sister find out their father may be cheating on their mother.

While Slate’s parents are still happily married, there were real-life echoes to the movie in her own life during the filming, as she was going through a divorce from her husband (and frequent collaborator) Dean Fleischer-Camp at the time. “It was very hard for me,” she says. “Especially because I’m not a naturally emotionally heavy person, and this was the first time in my life that I ever had panic attacks, that I felt untethered and scared.”

But now, more than a year later, Jenny Slate is in a very good place. “I feel more in touch with my ability to experience pleasure than I ever have,” she says. She’s eating a beef burrito (she’s allergic to avocado, a detail which sounds like it belongs in a modern-day hipster fable) and she is sipping on a lavender margarita. It’s a Monday afternoon in downtown New York; the restaurant is not very crowded, and Slate—dressed all in navy—stands out notably, like a striking blue flower in, uh, an empty Mexican restaurant. I notice that a waiter (who isn’t even our waiter) comes by multiple times—more than a waiter, or anyone, needs to or should—to make sure we have everything.

Slate is quite well known now, particularly among a certain subset of Brooklyn or Silverlake-dwelling types, the sort rarely seen without a tote bag. She is beloved for a variety of her projects—the short film Marcel the Shell and the indie-film hit Obvious Child among them. She also has a good group of friends in Los Angeles, many of them in the industry. “I love my life,” she says. “I think my life is very fun. I love my social circle. I have a lot of friends who are actors, but most of my friends who are actors are people who prefer to go to the movies or just hang out in normal bars or sit in someone’s backyard and have beer.”

Her “vibe,” she explains, “is so chill.” She wakes up early, and she’s in bed by 11 P.M. every night. “Most of my friends, we’re in this thing now where we’re like, ‘Do you want to meet me for dinner at 6:30?’ ” Somehow Slate saying this, in her upbeat, casual manner, makes the notion of eating at 8:30 P.M. seem at once utterly uncool and undesirable. “Once every two months, I’m up until 6 in the morning—with my friends, just talking,” she admits. (A recent such late night involved fellow actresses Jane Levy and Mae Whitman.)

Slate is also in a very good place because she’s taking care of herself. When she wanted to be an actress but was not yet getting sustained work, she felt “brokenhearted,” as acting was the centerpiece of her identity. But now that she has achieved success, she says, “[being an actress] feels like a relationship with myself that I keep up on purpose, and that involves a lot of self-care and discipline and patience, the way you’d treat a good friend.” She says that she has figured out a way to find this sense of wonder and engagement and creative fulfillment in all of her endeavors, however mundane and however unrelated to acting: “It’s about always having a consistent sense of self and connection to your creative curiosity and spirit. I feel the same flavor of excitement that I feel when I get a new script for a movie I’m gonna do as when I fill my house with plants.”

I’ll have what she’s having, etc. etc.—hold the avocado for good measure.

Slate was part of the Saturday Night Live cast for one season, from 2009 to 2010 (a run which began somewhat controversially when she “dropped the f-bomb” in her first episode). She has appeared on a slew of popular television shows (Parks and Recreation, Kroll Show, House of Lies, Bob’s Burgers, Girls), and her starring turn in 2014’s Child—a comedy about a woman who has an abortion, directed by Gillian Robespierre—helped to cement her as a burgeoning comedic acting talent. But the moment Slate—who got her professional start as a Brooklyn-based stand-up comic—truly realized she had made a profound cultural impact came during the casting process for Landline, when a four-time Emmy winner signed on to play her mother.

“When they were like, ‘Edie Falco is interested [in Landline],’ that was probably the first time in my life where I was like, ‘Wow, my work is making an impact,’ because if . . . Obvious Child hadn’t been good enough, she wouldn’t have been interested. When it was like, ‘She and John Turturro [who plays her father] want to do this movie,’ I’ve gotta say, it made me pretty horny.”

Slate herself signed on to the film—which arrives in theaters on July 21, following its premiere at Sundance earlier this year—without even looking at a script, thanks to her relationship with the creative team. “They had the germ of an idea, which was like, ‘We want to make a comedy about a family going through a divorce, and it will have emotional depth, and we’re calling it a comedy, but it might not be a comedy, but it won’t be a sad movie about divorce’ . . . I was like, ‘Yes, let’s do it.’” Slate compares the tone and feel of the film to My So-Called Life, and tells me that when she is encouraging people to see the film now, she asks them, “Don’t you miss My So-Called Life? Don’t you miss your stories?”

As Slate grappled with her own personal turmoil, related to her divorce, during filming, she leaned on her co-stars, who were extremely supportive. “I’m playing a character who is going through changes in her relationship—but actually Dana, although she’s kind of a square and sort of uptight, she has a real undercurrent of joy. I didn’t have that, or I didn’t think I did, except for when I was actually performing, which is my true love. It was the one refuge I had. I found that with Jay [Duplass], we could plug in. I could talk to him about my life without him harvesting that information in any way. He’s just a very respectful person who’s very curious.”

Robespierre and Elisabeth Holm would send Slate drafts of the script; the one piece of feedback she gave was that, as much as possible, she thought the focus should be taken off the men. “They were trying to decide how to write Dana’s story of infidelity and does she end up with her college boyfriend. . . . After a while I was like, ‘Why are we thinking about the men?’ I’ll tell you what I want to see: I want her at the end of the movie to not be condemned as bad or elevated as good or great because she is unfaithful. I want her to be shown as someone who realizes she needs to be able to make choices. She needs to figure out how to do that the healthy way, because having an affair is not healthy, and pick the partner that will allow her to exercise those choices, or just ask questions.” Slate concludes, “That’s where we ended up.”

Slate in part chalks up this current state of equanimity she is enjoying to being single and to a commitment to focusing on herself. (Slate dated Chris Evans for close to a year, before the two broke up this winter.) “This is the first time in my adult life that I haven’t been in a relationship, that I’m just all alone, and I do whatever I like to do,” she says. “Because I’m a person who also likes to keep an eye on my mental health and my body health, I’ve treated myself nicely.” She uses some vivid imagery to describe how she sees herself at the moment: “I feel like a little machine that puts out flowers into the air. My motor’s always going. There’s always bubbles coming out.”

Slate, despite her rapidly increasing public profile (she notes that she can’t go to the supermarket in her neighborhood now without at least three people excitedly stopping her), does not think of herself as famous. “Maybe I’m totally wrong,” she says, when asked about her relationship to fame, “but I don’t think I am.”

She does, however, perceive that she has an intense following, if among a particular subset. “I know that there’s something that maybe is almost an Internet thing, where I am exposed and known, and I understand that. But compared to some of the people that I know, I don’t really feel like I’m a very famous person. The only time when it’s different is usually when I’m spending time with a more famous person, and my spot gets blown up, and it’s irritating.” She describes her fanbase as having an almost niche quality. “I feel like I do my work for everybody, but there’s a certain group of people that take it in. It’s not super mainstream. It’s a really peaceful existence. I don’t get paparazzi’d at the airport. I feel safe.”

Slate’s relationship with Evans received much attention, especially during the press tour for their film Gifted, which was released after the two had broken up. (She also was on the receiving end of many headlines when she recently walked out of a movie theater with Aardvark co-star Jon Hamm). Having her personal life covered is, unsurprisingly, not something she enjoys. “I don’t think anybody would. For me, it connects to a very deep-seated belief within a patriarchal system. If you’re a woman, the system actually owns your private life; the system has an opinion on your decisions; the system has a verdict on how you have sex and who you have sex with, and anything in between. For me, I am not open to that. I get really pissed about it, because it’s only my business.”

As such, she has never had the urge to clear up a rumor on Twitter or otherwise clarify any aspect of her personal life. “No, I have more of an urge to get on Twitter and be like, ‘I just pooped like Okja,’ than to be like, ‘Yes, it’s true, I’m dating so-and-so.’ How much of an asshole would I have to be to assume that anyone gives a shit, a true shit, that I say the information? What they like is the gossip. What they like is the uncertainty and conjecture and all of that. What I like is my privacy and to be able to just do whatever I fucking want and kiss whoever I want in my own time because I’m a woman in 2017.”

Slate draws a comparison to The Handmaid’s Tale (which she is currently devouring). “I’m also just really not open to being known as the woman dating so-and-so. I think that’s four tiny steps away from being Offred”—referring to the way that handmaids are named in reference to the men they’re assigned to.

Slate—who is currently working on a Marcel the Shell movie with ex-husband Fleischer-Camp (“the most interesting, beautiful, difficult, worthwhile experience of my career and of my life”)—says she wants to write a book of essays at some point soon (“modern feminist creature essays”). Eventually, she’d also like to write a film vehicle for herself.

“I’m toying with it, yeah. I would like to write a studio comedy for myself, because I don’t love the studio comedies for women. I want to write something that’s more like a John Candy movie for myself, but where I’m John Candy.” She elaborates: “[It will be] something sweet, because a lot of the stuff for women is really aggressive and [has] drugs and drinking and like, ‘We’re being like the guys.’ I want to make something that is a big studio comedy where I’m a woman, just a woman doing very particular things, an actual character. That’s what I want.”

Over the course of our lunch, there are a whole variety of women—Jill Soloway, Rihanna, Miranda July, Rebecca Solnit, Shirley MacLaine, Jillian Bell—whom Slate riffs on with severe affection. When asked if she has any career role models, she responds immediately—as she does in most of her responses—with a visual.

“If I could follow a path, it would be a group of women who are linking arms, and those women would be . . . Madeline Kahn, Rosalind Russell, Ruth Gordon, M.F.K. Fisher, Virginia Woolf, Clarice Lispector, Tilda Swinton, Marisa Tomei, I love Michelle Pfeiffer. Meryl Streep, you gotta put that in there. And leading the pack, because of joy and vulnerability, Gilda Radner.”

She looks up at me, seemingly still processing this mural she has painted. She adds, “I’m just the poodle that follows behind them with a big pink bow on her head, waiting for my little time.”