Clam Down: A Metamorphosis

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?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781984801845
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/03/2025
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.78(w) x 8.55(h) x 1.19(d)

About the Author

Anelise Chen is the author of the 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. Chen is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at Columbia University. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her family.

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.

Editorial Reviews

04/28/2025

Novelist and Columbia University creative writing professor Chen (So Many Olympic Exertions) serves up an offbeat memoir inspired by her mother’s habitual misspelling of “calm down” as “clam down” in text messages. After the end of Chen’s marriage, her mother’s inadvertent typo prompted introspection about Chen’s tendencies to retreat, self-protect, and stay silent. “Was becoming a clam a kind of wish fulfillment, or was it a curse that prevented her from acting out, from getting angry,” Chen wonders (she refers to herself in the third person as “the clam” throughout). To better understand the clam as a symbol, Chen weaves in scientific research and analyzes literary and artistic depictions of mollusks in works including Italo Calvino’s Comsicomics and painter Hubbard Lathard Fordham’s Portrait of Shellfish. Along the way, she confronts the cracks in her marriage and considers what timidity she may have inherited from her father, who disappeared for 10 years during Chen’s childhood to develop a software in Tawain called Shell Computing. Chen’s surreal tone and dry humor (“Whether there were certain aspects of clamhood that would render her unfit for modern life: that was still to be seen”) elevate this above similar tales of self-discovery. For readers willing to take the plunge, it’s a treat. Agent: Amelia Atlas, CAA. (June)

Publishers Weekly

After Chen splits with her husband, an older man she had been with since her early 20s, her mother sends her repeated texts urging her to ‘clam down.’ In response, Chen realizes—à la Gregor Samsa—that she is a clam, and she decides her clamped-shut mollusk nature could explain everything.”—Vulture

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

“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

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

“A marvel and a delight! . . . This stunning book believes in typos as doorways, divorce as oxygen, mollusks as mercy, and seashells as generative constraints. 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 . . . Brilliant and unpredictable, it 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

“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. Anelise Chen disarmingly walks the reader through this blooming, elaborate, emotional game of shells.”—Eugene Lim, author of Search History

“A candescent, transporting metamorphosis from reluctant bivalve to woman . . . 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.”—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

From the Publisher