[Event] Book Talk | Clam Down by Anelise Chen

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ABOUT THE BOOK

A wondrously unusual memoir about a woman who, in the midst of mourning her divorce, retreats into her shell and renegotiates her relationship to solitude, shame, and connection—from an acclaimed 5 Under 35 National Book Foundation honoree.

“We've all heard the one 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" 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. But 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 a genre-defying structure and written in novelistic prose that draws 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?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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.

IN CONVERSATION WITH

Marie Chen 張素玲 was born in Chiayi City, Taiwan, in 1957. She and her family moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1990. She graduated from Taiwan National Normal University and finished two years of graduate study at Chinese Culture University's Drama/Theater Arts Department. She also has a master's degree in Theater Arts and Dance from Cal State Los Angeles. From 1985-1990, she was a drama script writer for Taiwan Television Enterprise. Inc. She was the owner and director of Futurelink School, an afterschool program in Arcadia, California, from 1993 to 2017. She is working on a bilingual food memoir based on her childhood memories of growing up in Chiayi.