Clam Down

About Clam Down

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?

Early Praise

“With a candescent, transporting metamorphosis from reluctant bivalve to woman, Anelise Chen takes us from a taxidermy shop in Paris to the lives of Darwin, O’Keeffe, and Agnes Martin, the canyons of the Southwest and the bowels of her immigrant father’s quixotic and doomed accounting program, restlessly probing her origin story to divine her future. For me, there is no other writer who delves with as much comic pathos and brio into the besieged depths of the abject to surface on the shores of the ecstatic self. From the moment this mollusk opens her mouth, we are treated to the most piquant, glorious brine. As her father would say, it is top cream, top brass.”—Lisa Hsiao Chen, author of Activities of Daily Living

“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

“Underneath the clam’s infamous stoicism, a confused heart considers how its body has kept score. Clam Down is a modern love story embedded within a metafictional review of animal-metamorphosis tales placed within a cautionary environmental fable enclosed by an immigrant family’s saga. As Anelise Chen disarmingly walks the reader through this blooming, elaborate, emotional game of shells, her strategically conversational persona unguards us, allowing her intricate metaphors to align into stunning revelation.”—Eugene Lim, author of Search History