CLAM DOWN

Going into her shell.

As Chen struggles in the aftermath of her divorce, her mother, wishing her daughter to calm down, repeatedly texts the author this misspelled advice: “clam down.” This leads Chen to write of herself as having morphed into a clam: “She hadn’t meant to become a bivalve mollusk, but it happened.” The result is a dreamlike, albeit carefully studied, tale exploring introversion, hardening one’s exterior as a means of self-protection and reliance. “Since her transformation,” she writes, “she was more convinced she could hold it together.” Chen, the author of the experimental novel So Many Olympic Exertions, mines reclusion with a full commitment to metaphor, opting for descriptions that provide distance from the rawness and expression of her emotions. The layering transforms this unusual memoir into a palimpsest. Chen’s tone avoids anthropomorphizing her nameless female subject, referred to only as “the clam,” but her notes on parallels between mollusks and people glimmer as the author’s vulnerable revelations: “Clams, like humans, needed to open their mouths to live.” Chen’s life continues—she travels, reads, teaches, spends time in social situations and dates—even as she denies her personhood: “Her shell held her together…she lived inside it, it contained her—she couldn’t see beyond it….Then she would be able to look back, one day, to see what she was creating.” In the book’s second half, the author intersperses chapters narrated in the first-person perspective of her father, who shares many of Chen’s hermetic traits. (“I don’t like talk to anybody.”) The clam, meanwhile, makes supernumerary references to Darwin’s evolutionary theories as well as myriad historical and modern representations of mollusks. Her meditations lead her to examine “her family’s Asian clam tendencies” and to question, then accept, her father’s preference for solitude. The book drags a bit, yet it pays off as Chen, ultimately, steps into her own voice with a greater understanding of healing.

A poignant and wholly original memoir of liberation through confinement.