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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.
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?
"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 presents... . [A] personal yet expansive discourse about physical and psychic freedom, the burden of choice, and the consequences of stagnation." —Booklist
"Clam Down is a marvel and a delight! This stunning book believes in typos as doorways, divorce as oxygen, mollusks as mercy, and seashells as generative constraints. From the moment I started reading it, I could hardly put it down—carrying it around like a talisman, crawling inside it like a wunderkammer, putting my ear to it like a shell, so I could hear its vast, surprising ocean. 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. I treasure it." —Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters
"Clam Down is a marvelously funny and affecting memoir that reads like no other memoir out there. Chen's uncategorizable book is brilliant and unpredictable, and 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
"Anelise Chen writes deeply idiosyncratic and beautiful books. Clam Down is ingenious, hilarious, and deeply moving. Chen's work beguiles us, defies easy categories, and manages to be both wide-ranging and profoundly intimate. The perfect work for this fraught time." —Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward
This information about Clam Down was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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