Clam Down - by Anelise Chen (Hardcover)

About the Book

"After the dissolution of her marriage, a writer is transformed into a 'clam' via typo after her mother keeps texting her to 'clam down.' The funny if unhelpful command forces her to ask what it means to 'clam down' during crises: to retreat, hide, close up, and stay silent. Idiomatically, we are said to 'clam up' when we can't speak, and to 'come out of our shell' when we reemerge, transformed. In order to understand her path, the clam digs into examples of others who have also 'succumbed to shellfish' to embrace lives of reclusiveness and extremity. This is a story that radiates outward from the kernel of selfhood to family, society, and ecosystem"--

Book Synopsis

In this wondrously unusual memoir, a woman retreats into her shell in the aftermath of her divorce, and must choose between the pleasures and the perils of a closed-up life--a transformation fable from an acclaimed 5 Under 35 National Book Foundation honoree.

"A marvel and a delight . . . This is a book that will stay with me forever."--Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters

We've all heard the story about waking up as a cockroach--but what if a crisis turned you into a clam? After the dissolution of her marriage, a writer is transformed into a "clam" via typo after her mother keeps texting her to "clam down." The funny if unhelpful command forces her to ask what it means to "clam down"--to retreat, hide, close up, and stay silent. Idiomatically, we are said to "clam up" when we can't speak, and to "come out of our shell" when we reemerge, transformed.

In order to understand her path, the clam digs into examples of others who have embraced lives of reclusiveness and extremity. Finally, she confronts her own "clam genealogy" to interview her dad, who disappeared for a decade to write a mysterious accounting software called Shell Computing. By excavating his past to better understand his decisions, she learns not only how to forgive him but also how to move on from her own wounds of abandonment and insecurity.

Using a genre-defying structure and written in novelistic prose that draws from art, literature, and natural history, Anelise Chen unfolds a complex story of interspecies connectedness, in which humans learn lessons of adaptation and survival from their mollusk kin. While it makes sense in certain situations to retreat behind fortified walls, the choice to do so also exacts a price. What is the price of building up walls? How can one take them back down when they are no longer necessary?

Review Quotes

"After Chen splits with her husband, an older man she had been with since her early 20s, her mother sends her repeated texts urging her to 'clam down.' In response, Chen realizes--à la Gregor Samsa--that she is a clam, and she decides her clamped-shut mollusk nature could explain everything."--Vulture

"A dreamlike, albeit carefully studied, tale exploring introversion, hardening one's exterior as a means of self-protection and reliance . . . The layering transforms this unusual memoir into a palimpsest. . . . A poignant and wholly original memoir of liberation through confinement."-- Kirkus Reviews

"Chen's surreal tone and dry humor . . . elevate this above similar tales of self-discovery. For readers willing to take the plunge, it's a treat."--Publishers Weekly

"Chen's genre-defying memoir turns her mother's innocent typo--an exhortation to 'clam down'--into an investigation of her own 'clam genealogy'--that is, the family history and forces that led her to retreat into her shell following a divorce--as well as what we can learn from those most cloistered of sea creatures."--The Millions

"Chen presents . . . a personal yet expansive discourse about physical and psychic freedom, the burden of choice, and the consequences of stagnation."--Booklist

"A marvel and a delight! . . . This stunning book believes in typos as doorways, divorce as oxygen, mollusks as mercy, and seashells as generative constraints. Full of heart and humor, expansive curiosity and gritty intimacy, this is a book that will stay with me forever--for its wild pulse, its compassion, its humility, and its abandon; for its gut-renovation of the first-person and its veins full of wonder."--Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters

"A marvelously funny and affecting memoir that reads like no other . . . Brilliant and unpredictable, it reveals something essential and hidden about the nature of clams, humans, inheritance, rational thinking, obsessions, and love. This book is the companion we all need."--Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

"A modern love story embedded within a metafictional review of animal-metamorphosis tales placed within a cautionary environmental fable enclosed by an immigrant family's saga. Anelise Chen disarmingly walks the reader through this blooming, elaborate, emotional game of shells."--Eugene Lim, author of Search History

"A candescent, transporting metamorphosis from reluctant bivalve to woman . . . There is no other writer who delves with as much comic pathos and brio into the besieged depths of the abject to surface on the shores of the ecstatic self. From the moment this mollusk opens her mouth, we are treated to the most piquant, glorious brine."--Lisa Hsiao Chen, author of Activities of Daily Living

"Ingenious, hilarious, and deeply moving, Chen's work beguiles us, defies easy categories, and manages to be both wide-ranging and profoundly intimate."--Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward

About the Author

Anelise Chen is the author of the novel So Many Olympic Exertions, a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She is a 5 Under 35 Honoree from the National Book Foundation. Chen is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at Columbia University. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her family.