What Happens If You Turn Into a Clam?

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 a typo, after her mother keeps texting her to “clam down.”

This is the premise of School of the Arts Associate Writing Professor Anelise Chen’s hybrid memoir, 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 father, 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, Chen unfolds a 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.

Chen discusses the book with Columbia News, along with books she’s read lately and those she wants to read next, her summer plans, and why she thinks we put too much pressure on our heroes.

What was the impetus for this book?

I started writing the book in late 2016. I was going through a painful divorce, and feeling despair over certain political developments that seemed impossible to reverse. That season, whenever I looked at my phone, I’d see that my mom had texted me this enigmatic and consequential phrase. She kept texting me to “clam down.” Over time, I decided that this wasn’t a typo, that it was actually a very specific and powerful spell she was casting to help me—or punish me (I hadn’t figured it out yet)—and, suddenly, I realized that I was a clam. What did it mean to be a clam? I imagined myself as this creature shutting its shell tight against the world, and, somehow, I felt better, and I could keep going.

Clam down and carry on. Slowly, I became curious about shells. I wanted to explore these metaphors we have of shutting down, closing up, going silent. I wanted to find examples of other people who had embraced lives of reclusiveness and retreat after crisis. But I was also on my own journey, trying to decide if I wanted to stay a clam. Is it positive? Is it adaptive? Should I fight against it? Then I had to confront the story of my dad, who left the family for a decade to write a secretive accounting software he called Shell Computing. The book is a story of that journey, a genealogical account of my clamhood.

What was it like to go from writing a novel to a memoir? How do you find the two forms different and/or similar?

My first novel, So Many Olympic Exertions, was written in first-person, and mimicked the diaries and journals that I’d read to help me get into the form. For this memoir, I read fairy tales and animal transformation stories and oral histories. The forms are very different, but I think my approach is the same: I’m still trying to find creative, narrative ways to incorporate the research. In my novel, I collected facts, vignettes, and histories about sports and sports failures in particular; in this memoir, I collected stories about others who had made the decision to turn into a shelled creature. The biggest difference is that for the memoir, I had to, more or less, stick to the truth. As true as I could make it, anyway—this is a book about a woman who turns into a clam.

What books have you read lately that you would recommend, and why?

I highly recommend Maria Reva’s new novel, Endlings, and not just because it’s also about mollusks! The book is about a spirited young scientist who is hell-bent on saving her beloved snails from extinction, and two sisters who are searching for their missing activist mother. All of this is taking place during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The book is really about the reasons to keep going when all seems lost. Reva shows how life always teeters on the knife’s edge between annihilation and—if we to dare think it—hope. Over and over again, this novel delivers flashes of beauty and grace—a rotting log on the side of a mine-strewn road is also a cradle for new life; a lone acacia in a war-ravaged field enables the continuation of a lost species. It’s such an important book for everyone to read right now. 

What’s next on your reading list?

I just returned from a conference on metamorphosis in contemporary literature, and I left with a huge list of books that I need to follow up on! These are books about characters turning into animals, monsters, fungi, plants. They span the gamut in terms of genre—feminist retellings of ancient myths, eco-horror, speculative sci-fi, and fairy tale. A few I’m especially eager to check out: Rivers Solomon’s The Deep, Sarah Hall’s Mrs. Fox, Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium, and Madeline Miller’s Galatea.

What are you working on now?

I have been taking notes. I try not to talk about works in progress too much, first, because I am superstitious, and second, I don’t want the “blurb” version to get repeated too often. Otherwise, I’ll be bound to it. It’ll start concretizing in my head, and right now I want the opposite; I want the project to continue to exist in an amorphous, blobby stage of becoming. But in the immediate time period, over the summer, I plan to write a series of short stories in Italo Calvino Cosmicomics-style, from the perspective of talking vegetables, including a genetically modified potato.

Summer plans?

This might be boring to say, but I’ll continue launching my book, which means doing a lot of interviews and events. When I have downtime, I’ll probably be writing. And hanging out with my family. For the last several years, I’ve been meaning to deal with the Airstream camper my husband and I impulse-purchased during Covid, so I will probably try to deal with it (if I have time). Which probably means I won’t. If you know anyone who wants to buy a used one, let me know! The caveat is that it’s probably home to several generations of mouse families at this point, so you’ll have to do the heartless thing and evict them.

What will you be teaching in the fall?

A seminar, Animal Tales, where we will read stories that feature animal characters. It’s a class I’ve taught a few times now, but I’m always cycling through new readings and changing up the exercises. If you’re interested in exploring non-human consciousness, then I recommend it. It is a lot of fun, and I love teaching it.

Which three writers, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party, and why?

They say that you should never meet your heroes. I’m afraid to say that I would love to have dinner with Virginia Woolf, because what if she’s awful in person? What if her voice is grating or she’s a bore or she says something mean to me? What if her political opinions make me uncomfortable? What if I have bad table manners, or get something stuck in my teeth?

I think we put too much pressure on our heroes. The best kind of encounter with our favorite writers is already accessible to us all the time—on the page. I feel like we, writers, are actually quite normal, banal even, in everyday life. Case in point: I so deeply admire my colleagues in the Creative Writing Program, whose work was so important to me when I was starting out as a writer, but most of the time, at faculty meetings, we are just discussing, you know, not having enough of a budget to do certain things, and various tedious bureaucratic procedures. I don’t think I’ve talked with them about books even a single time in all the years I’ve been at Columbia.

That said, I would love to meet three living writers, just in case they’re reading: Sigrid Nunez, Annie Dillard, and Elena Ferrante (whoever she is)!