Thank you to the publishers and Netgalley for this early review copy. I wasn't sure what to expect when picking this up, but oh boy, did this touch my soul and resonate with me more than I could have expected. I saw a lot of myself and my Chinese father in these pages (around the anecdotes from the perspective of Asian clams lol). So happy to have read this <3

This book is oddly compelling. I begin with this because I think it's fair to say that the framing of the story—a woman examining her life in relation to a shellfish, set off by her mother's typo—is odd, but also, compelling. I give a caveat to that, and it may not pertain to you, but I could have done without a good bit of the deep dive into actual shellfish history, behavior, etc. I guess I'm more of a superficial metaphor user. I will admit that the framing was more than a one-joke theme, and, despite my hesitancy about so much shellfish knowledge, it worked to relate an incredibly moving story. Chen's determination to know what drove her father was, despite the very specific nature of their relationship, a universal theme that really struck a chord with me. Having had a father who passionately worked in a field I knew little about, I related to the author's search for understanding and clarity. I will admit that I chose this book almost exclusively because I love memoirs, and also, I cannot resist a good typo. It did not disappoint.

p.s. I worked really hard to resist any shellfish puns here, so I would appreciate credit for that.

Fairly solid blend of autofiction about an Asian woman dealing with a breakdown along with nonfiction about clams, and the blend of the two in tackling it makes for a really neat, experimental read. Definitely worth your time.

A Taiwanese American woman transforms into a clam while going through her divorce and ponders about the meaning of love, marriage, and family. Kafkaesque, clever, and playful, this story is what creative writing should feel like. Such a joy to read but at the same time, also a mind-bender. It’s part scientific, part philosophical, and part magical realism. Now I somehow relate to being a clam more myself - definitely a great read for the inclined introvert.

The story also references Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and helps me contextualizes it in contemporary society. It’s always a good sign when an inspired work makes me appreciate the referenced work more.

Special thanks to Random House Publishing Group and NetGalley for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest, independent review.

Clam Down by Anelise Chen is an unconventional and unusual memoir in which Chen uses an anthropomorphic clam to relate the details of her life before and after her divorce, almost like an unofficial ode to Kafka's Metamorphosis.

I did my best to get through this book, but I could only make it to the 25% mark before I DNF'd it. The whole premise of "clam down" stems from the mildly humorous typo from the author's mother, but it feels like it's taken too far with just how much the author leans into the clam metaphor. It is intriguing how similar the author's behavior is to that of a clam, but the amount of clam facts that are included becomes so overwhelming to the point that it's difficult to relate to the human behind the metaphor.

However, I give this book a 2 star rating instead of my typical 1 star DNF rating because I think that someone who is in, or has been in, a similar state of life as the author can relate to how she feels, and might even appreciate the dissociation that comes with the clam metaphor when dealing with such an emotionally turbulent time in life. So the DNF has more to do with me not being the right audience for this book than anything else.

Special thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Clam Down is available now wherever books are sold.

Thank you Random House Publishing Group - Random House: One World for allowing me to read and review Clam Down (a metamorphosis)
by Anelise Chen on NetGalley.

Published: 06/03/25

Stars: 3.5

Clam down is oddly different which I found refreshing. At times I was amused by the storytelling. However, in general the narrative was confusing.

I'm not sure who I would recommend this to. Of note, the author struggled with genre classification.

This is one you have to try yourself. My rating is on the writing style, not the author's life that she shared.

I love that Anelise Chen took her mother's initial typo of "clam down" and ran with it as far as she could go. As a lover of literature that explores anthropomorphizing and zoomorphizing characters, I found her referral to herself as "the clam" delightful. I also appreciated how she researched historical figures like Charles Darwin and Georgia O'Keefe, who had (unbeknownst to me) obsessions with shells as well. She also explored authors like Kafka and Yoko Tawada who use animals as metaphors for human experiences. There were some parts toward the end that I found hard to get through, but overall, I loved her family's story intertwined with her own.

I feel like if I mention how this book is fiction, memoir, and even part science non-fiction, it will feel like there’s so too much going on in this book. However, I found that even crossing so many genres, this book is well put together and so unique and engrossing.

After a divorce, the main character is told to “clam down” by her mom, and then turns into a clam. I was expecting it to feel very Kafka, but it doesn’t really.

i’ve read quite a few memoirs this month about separations and finding yourself after, and thought this would be more of the same, but i was pleasantly surprised by how different and creative this book is. a memoir that reads like a novel due to the third person perspective and sections from the imagined perspective of the author’s father and various sea creatures, clam down is very unique.

i appreciate the way anelise chen chose to dig into her family life and how it affected her personality rather than focusing on what went wrong in her marriage. i think it made for an ultimately more touching story with a deeper level of self-reflection. she draws parallels between a clam’s way of closing up and the way her father has approached his relationships, and how she is now seeing that pattern reflected in her own relationships.

there are a lot of different threads being weaved together here - science, history, art, literature, and her father’s lived experience immigrating to the US from taiwan. i enjoyed the narrative voice and was impressed with chen’s ability to shift styles when needed, particularly when she was writing from her father’s perspective.

i feel like i learned a lot from this while still getting the type of emotional memoir experience that i love!

Clam Down is one of the best books I’ve read this year and it’s one of those books that have appeared at an important time of my life (especially with wanting to make a career move).

The story is told from the perspective of our author but she sees herself as a clam and is always in Clam Down mode (which we find out is a typo of Calm Down). Normally the quirk of this novel would wear out quickly but Anelise Chen does a great job of keeping the reader engaged within the 350 plus pages. The narrative also shifts to Chen’s father (minus the clam perspective) but I’ll keep silent about his role.

We also learn more about the Chen family and how at one point, most of the family members had a moment of Clam Down and how they overcame their metamorphosis. The whole book was very thought provoking and I feel like the reader can definitely take something away if they too are going through a sort of dilemma.

Thank you netgalley and randomhouse for the review copy!

I was excited about this book, but I didn’t love it. The premise was interesting. Turning into a clam after being told to clam down instead calm down. Thank you AutoCorrect. Oddly the interesting part was the interviews with the clam the Chinese clams that added historical context. I didn’t quite understand that dad‘s narrative did he write that or was she guessing? It was a little clunky and I didn’t enjoy the book quite as much as I had thought it would so it was a little bit of a slog.

I received this book as a widget and it seemed I interesting. I got about 25% through the book and realized it wasn't holding my interest. I need to be more selective with my widgets.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the arc of this book. All opinions expressed are my own.

I enjoyed Anelise Chen’s structurally inventive, meticulously crafted novel So Many Olympic Exertions (2017), and she returns with this even stranger, more surprisingly crafted book. In a note at the end, she meditates on its genre: “you might think that what you’ve just read is a novel, and that is entirely fine by me … Whatever this is, it’s certainly not a *memoir.” And yet, I’d like to argue that it *could be.*”

Here’s what’s so weird: the title comes from a typo. Chen is going through a divorce, and her mother repeatedly texts her to “clam down,” and this inspires Chen to metaphorically transform herself into a clam. Throughout the book, she refers to herself in the third person, as “the clam.” A third-person memoir allows for a tone of measured examination, echoing something psychological or scientific—and Chen does incorporate quite a bit of clam science—but it’s no less heartfelt.

Chen engages with Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” but this is decidedly not Kafkaesque—the absurd is a way into the mundane, and situations are merely as strange as they are. This is a portrait of a clam slowly moving on, letting go of a past relationship and becoming open to new ones. The clam travels to Taos for an artist residency, and Southwest landscapes shape much of the book.

If that weren’t enough, much of the book is written in the first person—but from the perspective of Chen’s father, Henry. In inhabiting his voice, she explores years in which she felt distant from him, when he was creating a company called Shell Computing or pursuing graduate studies in Taiwan. It’s exaggerated at times, but deeply compassionate. The clam trope intersects with the clam’s father to give Chen a chance to situate her narrative within larger Asian American themes and tropes. She comments a lot on immigration, and in a fun touch, chapters are framed by cryptic cookie-style fortunes from her father’s program.

The book did feel a little too long to me, but I really enjoyed it, and can’t wait to keep following Chen’s penchant for combining esoteric research with interiority.

This piece was beautifully written and truly a unique one.
Not lacking in creativity and I have to say I know more about clams than I ever expected. I will also be frequently thinking about clams for some time now as a result and seeing how they apply to human behaviors and mannerisms.

Clam Down is an exploration of one’s self after divorce, transformation, and the world around us.

The depth and range from light hearted to despair is captivating.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for allowing me to read Clam Down by Anelise Chen.

Happy pub day to Chen, a professor of creative writing at Columbia’s School of the Arts. In her “creative nonfiction” work, the author explores the years following her divorce in which she dismantles the edifice of her self-understanding, unearths her overbearing parents’ stories in order to rebuild these relationships, and paves a path forward in her career. Although Chen structures Clam Down with a narrative arc, including movement towards growth, discovering a theory of love, and resolution of sorts, the book unfolds unconventionally.

Most evidently, she narrates the sections that share her perspective in third person, and she refers to herself as a clam. This metaphorical clam represents her chosen state of isolation and impenetrability, which she protectively created as a child and carried into her marriage, leading to its dissolution. Citing the writer Yoko Tawada, Chen opts to express herself “without centering the self. . .[but rather] to speak. . .as part of something larger.”

Then, Chen pairs her perspective with her father’s (Henry’s) perspective, interlacing these chapters based on her interviewing him. This effectively forms a multidimensional shape of the Chen family’s dynamics and creatively provides valuable background information about his parents’ emotional abuse, unjust treatment as an immigrant from Taiwan to America, and struggles to provide for his family while working as a computer software developer. When we learn that Henry named his program “Shell Computing,” the author submerges herself into self-transformation because she sees the family resemblance to hide oneself for protection. This leads Chen to recognize how her father has been shaped by his experiences of unfulfilled dreams as an immigrant: “her dad‘s clam persona wasn’t a reasonable adaptation to the environmental conditions he found in America.” Chen rejects closing up and simply submitting to the tides, thus pushing her to finish the project we have in our hands.

I enjoyed Clam Down and rate it 4 stars for the following four reasons.

(1) The clam (she/her) perspective is quirky enough to keep readers interested. Chen proves the mollusk-woman metaphor (analogy? allegory?) functions as a smart way to connect her story to her father’s impervious, calcareous shell. N.B., I kept wondering if Henry would wholeheartedly consent to his daughter divulging his secrets, but Chen briefly comments that he does in one of the last chapters. Meanwhile, it productively illustrates the idea of seclusion and protection from uncontrollable external forces.

(2) You know I adore a book that encapsulates academia. Not only does Henry struggle to finish his PhD in computer science, but Chen also works several jobs because adjunct teaching doesn’t pay the NY bills. Some of the scientific info on Darwinianism could be shaved off; however, her findings on Leonora Carrington and Georgia O’Keeffe intrigued me. In the end, Chen transitions from adjunct to full-time faculty at Columbia, and the conclusiveness may come across as slightly clean, but I celebrated this. A full-time post—what a dream come true.

(3) Chen wrote this story with a desire to include plot and character development. She successfully searches for a narrative lucidly and believably. By detailing her parents’ sacrificial love for their family unit, Chen learns to open herself up again and register their imperfect actions consistently stemming from love. Maybe I also hope to see healthy developments in families in real life. For this reason, I will certainly point my East Asian friends to Clam Down.

(4) I appreciate the manifold ways the author describes crying, e.g., “whenever they saw saline issue forth, involuntarily, from her eyes,” “perceived as a form of emotional incontinence,” and “then, in the privacy of her own room, she could finally released the miniature sea side contained,” and “[h]er eyes, blurred with fluid.”

My thanks to One World and NetGalley for an ARC. I shared this review on GoodReads on June 3, 2025 (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7583636210).

A very novel and at times extremely densely written book. Part memoir, part research paper, part fiction, I found this held my attention even if I don't think I fully grasped the full story. Still, I appreciate the book

This book was a real struggle for me. It’s supposed to be a memoir but didn’t read that way for me. Maybe the writing style held me up - I persevered but the book didn’t resonate with me. To be totally honest, I don’t “get” it. I felt like this is another one of those memoirs written about fairly insignificant circumstances. Nothing inspirational or even interesting. To be blunt, the book was boring, not something I would normally even finish. The only positive thing I can say about it is that I appreciated the author feeling like a clam and closing down after her divorce. Her writing in the third person as “the clam” was certainly creative and different. Not a book I can recommend.

An unusual read that I admit to having struggled with a bit, perhaps because I was trying to put it in a box- is it a memoir? fiction? science fiction? fantasy? I appreciated the concept of Chen turning into a clam after her divorce. Her relationship with her family and her journey to a different sort of life was interesting. And it's beautifully written, Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. This won't be for everyone but it's a worthy read.

At first I thought I was reading fiction. Then it was apparent I was reading a memoir. But there were all of these digressions about clams in myth and literature and nature and science and art and history. The author had struggled with how to label her book and finally settled on Creative Nonfiction.

Creative it is! This is was one of those books where I early on was not sure where it was going, but I trusted the author and read on. And was led me on an interesting and emotional journey.

Certainly, if she’s a clam, its because he’s a clam. A clam family. from Clam Down by Anelise Chen.

The clam is walled off, shut down. She seeks to understand why.

Her parents had fled Taiwan, a generation that survived ruin and dictatorship, immigration and racism. Her father lived separate from the family while developing a complicated computer program that could ‘do everything’, but which he no longer understands how to use. Did he leave for solitude and peace, or was it torture and loneliness? Her mother said that when she encouraged her daughter to ‘clam down,’ she meant to be strong.

The clam is writing a book about her father. She is accepted into a writers residency program where she can focus on herself and her book. She interviews her dad, seeking to understand.

The clam incorporates stories of her father’s life in Taiwan where history books were propaganda. Imagined interviews with an invasive Asian clam reveal the history of Chinese laborers in early gold rush San Francisco, a “city built on madness,” and the degradation of the environment.

This startling memoir about the search for wholeness, connection, and transformation takes huge risks for an emotionally impactful result.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley.

This book just wasn’t for me. The synopsis sounded more intriguing than the final product. This is an odd read, but it’s nonfiction and sometimes that doesn’t always work. I will stick with weird fiction instead. I just couldn’t relate with what the author was saying, I found her thought process to be downright confusing and pointless. The writing style was very dense. Either the author is not of this world or I am a very dimwitted person to not understand the message she was trying to convey. A total head scratcher of a book.