BookBrowse Reviews Transient and Strange by Nell Greenfieldboyce

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An intimate and emotional collection of personal essays exploring difficult everyday issues such as parenthood, relationships, and aging through a lens of scientific wonder.

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Throughout her powerful essay collection, Transient and Strange, science reporter Nell Greenfieldboyce uses her knowledge of and interest in science to reflect on her own life. These reflections skillfully combine topics that at first might seem incongruent. In one essay, she juxtaposes the discovery of black holes with her difficult first sexual experiences, and her uncertainty about her memories of those events. In another, the merging of her fascination with meteorites and the pain of seeing her parents' health decline becomes a moving contemplation of the impermanence of life and the search for meaning within it:

"Maybe I'll find a meteorite, and maybe I won't. Maybe all I'll ever do is quietly sift through a bunch of ordinary, sometimes beautiful stuff, searching for something ethereal that I'm not equipped to recognize and probably won't ever truly understand."

Other essays include her attempts to calm her young children's fear of tornados with meteorological facts, her grief at the inevitable death of a spider in her window as winter sets in, and the differences between her own childhood and her children's as embodied in the toasters they have grown up with. The last, and longest, essay focuses on the struggles she and her husband went through in starting a family. Her husband, who has polycystic kidney disease (see Beyond the Book), has a 50% chance of passing the disease on to their children. In the essay, entitled "My Eugenics Project," she summarizes the ugly history of the eugenics movement and shares the complicated emotions she grappled with when considering their options. One was to screen for the disease in utero—but would they really be comfortable aborting a fetus that tested positive, perhaps multiple times? Another possibility was screening embryos prior to in vitro fertilization, but that was very expensive and had a low rate of success. Furthermore, she worried about the ethics of these efforts, since people like her husband led happy, fulfilled lives with the disease.

While each essay stands on its own, the collection as a whole becomes something greater, with insights from later pieces connecting with and deepening the reader's understanding of earlier parts. The final essay in particular adds an extra dimension to Greenfieldboyce's relationships with her husband and children. The book deals with painful topics such as miscarriage, sexual assault, and parental death in an open, frank way that ultimately feels poignant but hopeful. It does not shy away from the flaws of the world and the people in it, but instead shines light on and finds beauty in them. Greenfieldboyce's writing is fast-paced and straightforward but introspective, even feeling personal and conversational as she is explaining scientific concepts, and often including amusing or emotional asides about the people who made the discoveries she's discussing.

While science is certainly present throughout the book, and in fact acts as a framework for it, the main focus of these essays is on Greenfieldboyce's life and relationship with the world around her. While this is done in a very compelling way, readers drawn by an interest purely in science or her career as a science reporter may be disappointed. I would recommend the book to those looking for memoirs with a personal focus, particularly one related to parenthood and family relationships. Conversely, I think Greenfieldboyce's entertaining, easy-to-parse explanations and the way she connects those explanations to the tender moments of her life mean this could be a hit even with readers usually uninterested in science-based books.

This review first ran in the February 7, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.