Clam Down A Metamorphosis

From the acclaimed 5 Under 35 National Book Foundation honoree comes an innovative memoir about honoring the ways in which we sometimes need to retreat in order to set ourselves free.

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. Finally, the writer must confront her own "clam genealogy" to interview her dad who disappeared for a decade to write a mysterious accounting software called Shell Computing. In learning about 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 examples from art, literature, and natural history, she 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?

Anelise Chen is the author of the experimental 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. Her hybrid memoir, Clam Down, is based on her mollusk column for the Paris Review. She has received residencies and fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Blue Mountain Center, Banff Centre, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, NPR, BOMB Magazine, The New Republic, VICE, Village Voice and many other publications. Chen received her MFA from New York University and her bachelor’s degree from the University of California Berkeley. She is currently an assistant professor of creative writing and director of undergraduate studies in creative writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.