Trending topics: Metamorphosis

As I write, springtime is, quite literally, in the air. In the mornings, we can’t quite decide between pulling on a sweater or simply donning a T-shirt. Daffodils, eastern redbuds, and serviceberry trees are blooming, finally bringing pops of color to winter’s barren landscape. Eastertide marks the cycle of resurrection, a celebration of life’s insistent, relational dance with death. It feels like an appropriate time to turn to books about the many metamorphoses we witness, analyze, or survive.

“She hadn’t meant to become a bivalve mollusk, but it happened,” opens Anelise Chen’s Clam Down. Echoing Kafka’s work in The Metamorphosis, Chen’s genre-defying memoir excavates the post-divorce metanoia of a writer who finds herself inexplicably transformed into a clam. The prompt for her transformation—her mother’s text messages to “clam down” in the wake of crisis—endows the typo with a certain kind of power to summon the protective covering of a shell, a place of retreat but also alienation. Clam Down is the work of a writer in more ways than one, interrogating the nature and form of narratives, metaphors, and family lineage. Chen’s family immigrated to the United States from Taipei when she was a child, and Clam Down also behaves as a story about the formative waters of immigration, and finding a way back to belonging.