School of the Arts Writing Professors Anelise Chen and Leslie Jamison in conversation. Introduced by Sarah Cole, Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts and Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature.
About Anelise Chen’s Clam Down: A Metamorphosis:
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?
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Praise for Clam Down: A Metamorphosis:
“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.”
“‘Clam Down’ is 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.”
“An inventive and emotionally compelling study of the contradictory impulses to connect and to hide.”