Clam Down: A Metamorphosis

by Anelise Chen Narrated by Anelise Chen

Overview

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.

“A marvel and a delight . . . This is a book that will stay with me forever.”-Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters

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?

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

These are poignant, sometimes tragic glimpses of a life. But they also read as strikingly fresh. . . . The story it tells, of emotional change and growth, is a human one—which is precisely what makes it so moving.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

“Clam Downis a balm for our algorithmically determined lives; it’s not feeding us what we already want, it’s delivering on what we didn’t know we needed.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“An inventive and emotionally compelling study of the contradictory impulses to connect and to hide.”—Vulture

“Hiding in your shell, in Anelise’s words, ​‘to become silent when one is in pain,’ is often presented as something shameful. In exploring when this behavior is adaptive, Chen welcomes humor, dignity, and curiosity.”—The New Haven Independent

“A dreamlike, albeit carefully studied, tale exploring introversion, hardening one’s exterior as a means of self-protection and reliance . . . A poignant and wholly original memoir of liberation through confinement.”— Kirkus Reviews

“‘Genre-bending’ is, perhaps, an overused descriptor, but Anelise Chen’s memoir of navigating the aftermath of divorce as a reclusive bivalve is among the best of the bunch.”—Literary Hub

“Chen’s surreal tone and dry humor . . . elevate this above similar tales of self-discovery. For readers willing to take the plunge, it’s a treat.”—Publishers Weekly

“Chen’s genre-defying memoir turns her mother’s innocent typo—an exhortation to ‘clam down’—into an investigation of her own ‘clam genealogy’—that is, the family history and forces that led her to retreat into her shell following a divorce—as well as what we can learn from those most cloistered of sea creatures.”—The Millions

“In a genre-bending memoir on divorce, Anelise Chen dives into history, biology and emotional transformation in a book that defies comparison.”—SheReads

“Chen presents . . . a personal yet expansive discourse about physical and psychic freedom, the burden of choice, and the consequences of stagnation.”—Booklist

“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.”—Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters

“A marvelously funny and affecting memoir that reads like no other.”—Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“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.”—Eugene Lim, author of Search History

“A candescent, transporting metamorphosis from reluctant bivalve to woman.”—Lisa Hsiao Chen, author of Activities of Daily Living

“Ingenious, hilarious, and deeply moving, Chen’s work beguiles us, defies easy categories, and manages to be both wide-ranging and profoundly intimate.”—Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward

Kirkus Reviews

2025-04-17
Going into her shell.

As Chen struggles in the aftermath of her divorce, her mother, wishing her daughter to calm down, repeatedly texts the author this misspelled advice: “clam down.” This leads Chen to write of herself as having morphed into a clam: “She hadn’t meant to become a bivalve mollusk, but it happened.” The result is a dreamlike, albeit carefully studied, tale exploring introversion, hardening one’s exterior as a means of self-protection and reliance. “Since her transformation,” she writes, “she was more convinced she could hold it together.” Chen, the author of the experimental novelSo Many Olympic Exertions, mines reclusion with a full commitment to metaphor, opting for descriptions that provide distance from the rawness and expression of her emotions. The layering transforms this unusual memoir into a palimpsest. Chen’s tone avoids anthropomorphizing her nameless female subject, referred to only as “the clam,” but her notes on parallels between mollusks and people glimmer as the author’s vulnerable revelations: “Clams, like humans, needed to open their mouths to live.” Chen’s life continues—she travels, reads, teaches, spends time in social situations and dates—even as she denies her personhood: “Her shell held her together…she lived inside it, it contained her—she couldn’t see beyond it….Then she would be able to look back, one day, to see what she was creating.” In the book’s second half, the author intersperses chapters narrated in the first-person perspective of her father, who shares many of Chen’s hermetic traits. (“I don’t like talk to anybody.”) The clam, meanwhile, makes supernumerary references to Darwin’s evolutionary theories as well as myriad historical and modern representations of mollusks. Her meditations lead her to examine “her family’s Asian clam tendencies” and to question, then accept, her father’s preference for solitude. The book drags a bit, yet it pays off as Chen, ultimately, steps into her own voice with a greater understanding of healing.

A poignant and wholly original memoir of liberation through confinement.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940190883985
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	06/03/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

She hadn’t meant to become a bivalve mollusk, but it happened. Several nights ago, after a rib-bruising bike crash caused by momentary inattentiveness and conditions of reduced visibility (sobbing while cycling), the mollusk had briefly succumbed to an episode of hysteria, during which her mother kept texting her to “clam down.” Clam down, she had commanded in that sober, no-­nonsense way. At first, the clam looked all around her, like, Who, me? Until she realized that her mother was addressing her.

It made sense. Ever since the dissolution of her marriage, she had been consuming a lot of calcium carbonate. This was what clams and other shell-­building animals used to make their shells. These days, she kept rolls of Tums in her bag, which got whittled down throughout the day with alarming speed. On her desk, beside her usual writing implements—pen, notepad—was a flip-­top container that was more fun to feed from. It rattled percussively when she shook the tabs out into her palm. They were the tropical variety, in delicate pastel colors: flavors that felt like a getaway. Like all getaways, the balm was instant but brief, hence the need for repeated doses. Humans were not supposed to ingest more than six per day, but clams could eat them as needed. Both species possessed a stomach, and hers hurt most of the time.

Looking back, it hadn’t been the first time her mother had issued that particular command. All summer, no matter what the mollusk had tried to convey, the response was much the same. Clam down! Had there been a recent, lengthy conversation about seafood? Or perhaps the typo was made fresh each time, her mother’s subconscious pinning the bivalve as ideogram for conduct during crisis. Indeed: The word fire in Chinese looked like a flame; the word water like a running stream; the word peace depicted a woman safe at home (notably a character in both daughters’ names). Perhaps the word clam in English looked calm to her.

Everyone knows it’s useless to tell an upset person to “calm down,” but “clam down” was always a hoot. The first few times it happened, the clam (for now she was a clam) laughed and sent a screenshot to her sister, who was equally tickled. “She writes that to me all the time too!” They hahahahahaha’d into their text threads. Together, they recalled the document they once discovered on a shared Google Drive that turned out to be their mother’s journal. This journal had read more like a captain’s log than a confessional text, as it betrayed nothing about how their mother felt. Which was uncanny because this was a journal she kept during some of the family’s most tumultuous years. In lieu of emotion, the journal was full of exhortatory language, with which she compelled herself to think positive, lose weight, and stay

claaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaammm

(Either their mother had fallen asleep while typing that sentence, or it was meant as a stage direction: read while screaming.)

Oh, their mother’s clam smile. That tight, insistent grimace that stretched from jowl to jowl. With it, she could smile her way out of anything.

Admittedly, the girls didn’t know much about clams. Their early exposure to sea life had been restricted to the seafood section at the 99 Ranch Market, a kind of poor kid’s aquarium. Upon being released from the car, they would rush over to the heaped bins to gently torment the sea creatures. They tapped on their shells with metal utensils until the animals snapped shut and shot out spurts of murky brine. Whether condemned to the seafloor or as food items to be poked and prodded by children, these creatures still had recourse against pain. If you shut yourself tight enough, nothing would happen to you.

A cursory Google search revealed that most people want to know whether clams are alive, or happy. Now the clam was at the library at the university where she worked, surrounded by books. No longer in denial about her true species, she was here to learn more about her evolutionary history.

She was reading from a book called Animals Without Backbones. Its cover featured a cartoon drawing of a squishy, undeniably phallic shape with googly eyes, amoebic and alert.

Clams belonged to the phylum Mollusca, which derives from the Latin mollis or “soft-­bodied,” the book explained. The molluscan body plan generally consists of a strong, muscular “foot” and a layer of tissue called the mantle that protects the viscera in the main body. Some mollusks, like clams, limpets, and snails, build protective shells out of calcium, while other mollusks, such as octopi, squid, and slugs, evolved to lose them. The shell-­less mollusks, it should be said, are the intelligent species of the phylum, while she, a clam, “neither flees nor turns on its attacker but lies quiet and defenseless within its hard shell until this is split open, with a rock, to expose the soft, flabby, deliciously edible, bite-­sized invertebrate within.”

She flipped the page.

Despite being helpless and delicious, clams have nevertheless managed to persist through time, thanks to their simple, ingenious technology. What clams lack in intelligence they make up for in endurance. Clams are “particularly hardy” creatures, appearing in the fossil records as early as the Cambrian period some 510 million years ago. Which means that clams had survived the extinctions of other, superior creatures, such as dinosaurs and mastodons. Some clams are so tough they manage to dwell 17,400 feet down on the dark seafloor, enduring hydrostatic pressure of almost four tons to the square inch. And down there, they live on and on. The oldest living animal ever discovered was a deep-­sea quahog named Ming the Mollusk, who was 507 years old when he was dredged up from the ocean floor.

As the clam read on, she began to feel cozy, validated. Perhaps it was the coffee, or the sun slanting in through dusty windows. These facts were doing a lot to legitimize her methods. By clamming down, her species had actually done quite well for itself. Hadn’t this clamming down method worked well enough in her marriage? Instead of opening her mouth to spew seawater or sand, she swallowed whatever was bothering her and worried it under her tongue until it gleamed. She would coat the small agitation until it became round and pink and polished. Alone, she might examine the object, evidence of a job well done. Look what I’ve made! Look what I’m capable of! In this way, she could look at the problem without any lingering feelings. After all, she was an artist; she made beautiful things, and this was how she felt strong.

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