This is one of the most creative and inventive books I have read in a long time. It is difficult to categorize because it's not quite memoir or autofiction but it reads like a novel, or like experimental creative nonfiction.

I thought it would be a typical sad divorce narrative about how a woman's marriage unraveled and she found her voice on her own. But strangely, the ex-husband hardly factored into the narrative at all, as I never figured out why they got divorced beyond growing apart, nor much of the author's processing of her feelings; it was more of the author coming to terms with who she was as a person and a daughter and no longer a wife. It had very Eat Pray Love vibes in a way if that book was written by a 30-something introverted Taiwanese-American nerd.

According to her author notes, the author got the idea for the book after writing a column about mollusks and reflecting on all the ways she has hid from the world even during her childhood and marriage. She projects a metaphor of her post-divorce life as a clam protecting itself, afraid of the world, and the book then reads like a neurospicy ADHD hyperfixation deep dive into everything about the mollusk. The "clam down" of the title is based on her mother's texts to her, misinterpreting the translation of the word "calm."

The book then covers a lot of ground. Not only in history, going into Darwin and Georgia O'Keefe's paintings of mollusks during her separation from her husband, but also science, as she travels back in time to imagine the history of the invasive Asian clam and immigrant stories and fears, or climate change at the Oregon coast. It perhaps tried to do too much and while at first I was charmed by her hyperfixation because I love it when nerds do this, at times I wondered how it all tied together and got a little bored.

Then where the book really shone is when she decides to interview her own family about her own clam origin story. Her father, a perpetual loner with severe social anxiety, abandoned the family to immerse himself in his project designing accounting security software, which he named Shell Computing. The best parts of the book are when she navigates his complicated love for her through his personal history and learns to find compassion for him as an adult and not a child. I wish we'd gotten a bit more of this personal dimension as opposed to the interesting facts about mollusks, which could often seem tangential.

Overall I really loved this book and thought the author's writing style was absolutely beautiful. I felt like I was seeing her world through her eyes more clearly by the metaphor of the third person clam.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance review copy. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

A unique work of auto-fiction - I preferred Chen's previous book, So Many Olympic Exertions, but enjoyed this one as well

Anelise Chen’s Clam Down is a wondrously unusual memoir that blurs the line between nonfiction and fiction, offering a deeply introspective yet humorous exploration of retreat, transformation, and reemergence. After her divorce, the narrator undergoes an unexpected metamorphosis—not into the infamous Kafkaesque cockroach, but into a clam. This transformation, sparked by a text typo from her mother telling her to "clam down," leads her to examine what it truly means to withdraw from the world and whether isolation is a necessary step toward healing or simply a barrier to overcome. Through a mix of personal reflection, research, and an unconventional storytelling structure, Chen weaves together themes of solitude, family, and interspecies kinship in a way that is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally resonant.

As someone who struggles to stay engaged with traditional nonfiction, I found Clam Down to be the perfect bridge. It reads like a novel while delivering the depth and insight of memoir and research. The sections were captivating, from the revelation of the narrator’s mother as secretly fun and open, to the deep dives into mollusk history and human parallels. One of the more unexpected elements—the interviews with “Asian clams”—initially felt bizarre, but as I read on, I realized they mirrored real-life interviews with Chinese immigrants from the 1800s and 1900s, adding a layer of historical weight to the book.

Beyond the unique structure, I loved the fascinating tidbits scattered throughout—Darwin’s connection to mollusks, Georgia O’Keeffe’s shellfish line, and more. The narrator’s father’s storyline, however, left me both intrigued and slightly puzzled. Did he write his own sections? Were they written in his voice based on interviews? Or were they entirely reconstructed by the narrator? Regardless, I found myself unexpectedly rooting for him, even more than anyone else in the book—a rare shift for me, as I usually champion the women in a narrative. His Shell Company’s icons and his retreat into work were oddly compelling, making his eventual “emergence” all the more satisfying.

In the end, Clam Down is completely unique, witty, and genre-bending. It challenges the way we think about memoir, storytelling, and even our own instincts to close ourselves off or open back up. I’m grateful to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group- One World for the advanced copy and for the opportunity to experience such an inventive and thought-provoking book.