Gregor Samsa went to bed a tired, overworked salesman and woke up as a giant cockroach. Anelise Chen’s own metamorphosis was nowhere near as drastic. Clam Down: A Metamorphosis (One World, 2025) is Chen’s exploration of what it would mean to be a clam, tracing the author’s retreat into her shell on the heels of a divorce and a life in shambles, her transformation, and eventual reemergence.
This “clam memoir” uses an unconventional narrative structure, traversing a wide landscape including interviews with other “Asian clams” (mirroring similar interviews with Chinese immigrants from the 1800s and 1900s), deep dives into mollusk history and behavior and the kinship we can perhaps learn from the various phrases in the English language that stem from the word clam. The emotional core of the book is Chen’s journey to uncover her personal clam origin story, interrogating her “clam genealogy” if you will, by interviewing her father, who is established early on as a narrative keystone of the book, and his disappearance to Taiwan for a decade when she was a child, to work on a secret accounting software he called Shell Computing.
Storytelling, the author argues, serves as our only defense against chaos. We sift through chaos to pick out certain details that we then string together into a plausible whole we call a story. I had the pleasure of chatting with Chen via a shared Google Doc file. We discussed her fascination with mollusks, the mechanics of writing such blended stories that test, explore, and redefine the limits of narrative forms, the perspective and motivations she brings to her work, what it was like to do the Camino de Santiago and how it ties into the larger themes of the book, her relationship with her parents, especially her father, and more.
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The Rumpus: It took you eight years to write this book. What compelled you to write it, and at what point did you know you were going to write it as a “clam memoir?” Can you elaborate on what that initial process was like?
Anelise Chen: I remember the exact moment I started writing the book. I was going through a very painful separation, my life was in shambles, and I was crying in bed because I’d just gotten into a terrible bike crash. I must have texted something hysterical to my mom because when I looked at the phone again, she had texted me several times to “clam down!” And when I saw that text, it was like a light went on, and I started laughing. It was so useful! I carried that phrase around with me for weeks. A few months later, Caitlin Love, a Paris Review editor at the time, reached out because she’d read my first novel [So Many Olympic Exertions] and wondered if I wanted to pitch a column. I said I was really excited about rocks, or alternately I could write about mollusks. I’m glad she didn’t take my rocks pitch! By early April 2017, I had written a draft of the first Paris Review essay. All the main ideas [that were later explored in the book] were there—I wanted to explore why this image of slamming your shell shut was so edifying. But I was also nervous because it hadn’t been in my pitch to write it in third person. She didn’t flinch. Caitlin was an impeccable editor who would see what I wanted to do and supported it all the way. I loved working with her.
Rumpus: One of the epigraphs in Clam Down is from Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude—“Speaking of oneself as another in order to tell the story of oneself. Making oneself absent in order to find oneself there.” Did you know beforehand the perspective you wanted to write from or did that clarity come along the way?
Chen: In my diaries, it’s easy for me to lapse into the second person, especially when I’m exhorting myself to do something, but other times I catch myself writing in third person. It happens when I need to disassociate a bit, like when I’m processing something unpleasant or shameful or bewildering. Later, when I’m reading it over, the critical, craft-side of my brain kicks in, and I make a conscious decision to turn my “she” into a character. But in the case of this book, it wasn’t until I wrote “the clam” that I felt like I had the proper distance. What do you do when it feels impossible to speak? I needed a proxy.
I discovered Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude that first year of writing, and afterward it sat on the shelf above my desk for a long time. Incidentally, Lydia Davis’s Break It Down is another book that I pull down whenever I need to finetune my voice. It’s from Davis that I first learned how to do a tight, close third. Both of these books are so important to me, and I sometimes wonder if they’re secretly in conversation with each other. I can speculate, but I won’t here!
Rumpus: The moment I finished reading the book, I knew I wanted to ask you about form. I found it interesting what you wrote in your author’s note about “constantly pouring one (form) into the other (story) to find the right shape.” You’re a fiction writer and teacher; both of your books so far have been very experimental in structure and content. What has working on them, through this process of “cross-pollination,” as you say, taught you, about storytelling and possibility?
Chen: My first book was a novel that resembled a diary, where I tried to replicate certain diaristic conventions, but for this memoir, I drew upon fiction techniques, to give it more of a storybook feel. Why do I do this? I don’t know! It’s a compulsion! But I like the friction generated by mashing the two genres together. This book is concerned with hybridity, in-between-ness, and transformation, so I thought the form should reflect that. Admittedly, I went a little overboard in earlier drafts. There were talking animals, fairy godmothers, and the clam literally was a clam, in the same way that Gregor is literally a bug. The mechanics of moving that character through space was very funny to me, and I enjoyed writing it, but in the end, I had to pull myself back.
Rumpus: In the author’s note, I also appreciated the insights on the behind the scenes decisions made to tell a more streamlined story—what you wrote about all stories being artifices, useless and incomprehensible, like maps, if told at a scale of 1:1. Going off that, are you a plotter, a pantser, or somewhere in between? How did you approach writing this and how long did it take for all the pieces to fall into place? You have listed the sources of research, as well as the inspirations in the author’s note—the “fictional works that read like nonfiction, and nonfictional works that read like fiction”—but it cannot have been easy to juggle the various things the book attempts (in tone, in topics, in individual but interlocking narrative arcs).
Chen: I love that word, “pantser!” I’ve never heard that before. Does it mean “flying by the seat of your pants?” I guess I’m both a plotter and a pantser. I have to plot because that tricks me into thinking there’s a plan, and I won’t waste time, but once I’m writing, all the plotting goes away and I’m once again lost, marooned. I might as well be in the middle of the ocean. What a horrible thing, writing. It’s daily suffering, daily confusion, and when you’re out there, nobody can help you except yourself. You have to have the right skills to get out of that. I guess I’ll stick with this nautical metaphor even though I have no idea how to sail, but I imagine you’d need to read the stars and the wind and memorize certain complicated knots. You need skills. You need to have in the back of your mind a constant running hypothesis of how the structure, pacing, mood, voice, perspective will go. And those are all variables, and every decision is capable of setting you on a path, and so you need to have a gut sense, an internal compass. And if you stray, you’ll need to have a good alert system, like, “This isn’t working.” Even though I didn’t know how I was going to get there, I knew I wanted it to be experimental and propulsive but also crammed with genealogical research—maybe I wanted to do too many things. Well, what’s done is done. For my next project, I’m hoping that I can learn to enjoy that feeling of being lost and then feel more joy and celebrate when I land at a destination, even if it’s not where I originally meant to land.
Rumpus: We’ve talked about process, but what are the tangibles or intangibles that draw you towards the stories that you write? And is there anything you’d like readers to take away from them?
Chen: I sat in on one of my former students’ classes last week, and he was telling his class that writing is thinking; writing is discovery. I think that sums up perfectly my own relationship to writing. I write to think, to discover, to articulate. I am always trying to think through something. And hopefully in my books, I can also bring readers along on that journey of thinking and discovery.
Rumpus: I have to ask—even though I held off this question for so long—why mollusks? What are some of your favorite mollusk facts that you learned during your research, and why? And what can we learn from clams?
Chen: I took my writing students to the Rutgers Aquaculture Innovation Center in Cape May recently. We learned so much there, but this was my favorite thing: Did you know that free-floating baby oysters have to find a little bit of substrate to secure themselves to before they can begin their adult lives? And that the ideal substrate they’re looking for has the chemical composition of, basically, another oyster shell? It makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint—if a habitat has proven to be hospitable to your kind, it must be safe. It’s a pre-selected place.
I love this factoid because it’s an illustration of the ways we build ourselves upon our predecessors: our parents, our ancestors, our heroes. Our stories can only begin after we cement ourselves in some way to the past. We adhere to their example, they show us the way, they give us the courage to start to grow and become what we want to become. It’s a way of paying homage, but also to recognize that we’re part of this colony, this genealogy, for better or worse.
Rumpus: I love that! That deep interconnectedness that you bring to light throughout the book. What were some of the insights about yourself, your parents, and your family history that “being” a clam helped you to uncover, probe, and understand?
Chen: Writing the book allowed me to understand my parents more fully, especially my dad. Before writing it, I had no idea what happened to him after he disappeared to write his Shell Computing accounting software. I only knew that he was trying to write this top-secret program that was supposed to be the most secure program on the market. That period of his life was a total blank to me, so much so that when I saw the headlines in 2014 announcing that the inventor of Bitcoin had supposedly been “discovered” living just a few blocks from my parent’s house, and that he was a reclusive Asian man who had once been an engineer, I clicked on the article half-expecting to see my dad’s picture. There were so many similarities in their stories. What was the throughline here? I wanted to understand the larger forces at work. Where did this obsession with security come from? Since then, I’ve talked to a few of my childhood friends about their parents, and it seems like the clam dad profile is actually quite common.
Rumpus: I was really impressed with how you were able to capture your father’s voice during his chapters and would love to know how the process for that unfolded.
Chen: My dad makes me laugh all the time, especially when he’s being dead serious. I had to find a way to capture his voice, his wisdom and pathos and genuine affection for us. It wasn’t in my plan to write from his POV but once I started interviewing him, and once he started sending me these perfect emails and texts that I could just copy verbatim, I knew that he would have to speak for himself. Also, the tone I was using to write about him was coming out sounding so wounded and petulant and devoid of humor. I did keep some of that in the book, just to have an honest portrayal of where I was, because when I began the book, I was in that position of pointing fingers, like a resentful child. I wanted him to explain why he had left us, so I wasn’t really hearing his story. I was looking for culpability.
At the same time, it was difficult to interview him because, as he says, he tries very hard not to have any emotions, and his past history is painful to recall. Sometimes I’d ask something casually as if I wasn’t planning on using it for the book. Then there was a long period when we didn’t talk.
One summer, I just went home without any clear ideas about how I would crack him open. I went for a swim, and when I came back, he had laid out all of this material that he had collected for me to look at: His journals, his discs, his files, his photographs, articles he had written, all of it. He took me through everything and tried to explain what was going on for him at the time. For instance, he went through a phase when he compulsively traveled and made real estate offers in faraway places, and then something would snap him back to reality and he would pull out of the deal and lose the deposit. Each failed escrow, he said, “represented one more step into retreat.” He also showed me an op-ed he wrote to publish in the Chinese paper. It was very long, and the newspaper wouldn’t publish it, so he bought two full pages of advertising space to publish it himself. It was a letter to the president of Taiwan that outlined his plan for a secure future with China, which included a plan to build a civilization underground to conserve energy and for protection against nuclear bombs. Digging into the ground—that’s literally what a clam would do! I still haven’t read it in its entirety, but he translated some of it for me, and it’s basically science fiction. I seem to remember there were electrical cars and AI facial tracking technology and all kinds of eerily prescient inventions.
Rumpus: Can you talk a bit about what the experience of doing the Camino de Santiago was like, and how that fits into the larger themes of the book?
Chen: I honestly hadn’t planned on going: It was an impulsive, last-minute decision. In fact, I bought all my hiking gear in a tourist store in Santiago. I hadn’t brought anything practical to Spain with me, only two books, Anne Carson’s Plainwater and a Cees Nooteboom one, if you can imagine. Once I got to Santiago, I bought new boots (I wouldn’t recommend attempting a long hike in brand new shoes), a new jacket (the only one on discount was bright pink), hiking poles, a rain poncho, everything. It cost so much money! But I was already in that part of the world, or at least in the general vicinity, and I thought, “If I don’t do this now, I’ll never do it.” I only had about a week, so I knew I couldn’t hike the whole length of the Camino, but I liked the idea of ending at the end of the world, Finisterre. It’s where the pagans originally performed their transformation ritual, where they would throw all their clothes in the sea and then be reborn. I thought, “What a great way to end, there must be a reason why this walk is so popular with divorcees; plus, it’s the shell path, and I’ll earn a lifetime of forgiveness. How perfect.”
But when I was walking it, I realized how lonely and desperate I was, how I was just hell bent on this one goal—ending the project—and there was very little space for spiritual reflection. I knew there was no way I would transform over the span of one week and was hating myself the whole time for not planning the journey properly. I kept thinking, “This is already a colossal waste of time and money. This is a false ending.” And, actually there were these fake signs on the path that locals put there seemingly for fun, apparently in order to lead people astray, and one of these fake signs led a group of us to the top of a steep hill and there we all were, standing there on full display, before everyone realized it was fake. We were all so sweaty and dusty up there and I thought, “This is such a perfect encapsulation of how I feel.” I wanted so desperately for this journey to mean something that I’ve ended up on this hill in the middle of nowhere. When I finally reached the promontory in Finisterre with the 0,000 marker, I sat there for a long time feeling numb. I knew that it wasn’t the end, and that I would need to go back and keep writing. But somehow, after I came back from that trip, that was when I started interviewing my dad in earnest.
Rumpus: How has the writing of this book changed you, and what have been some of your most important takeaways—about yourself, life, existence?
Chen: I’ve just finished reading my own audiobook, and it was a strange experience to return to the book after so long and have to engage with it again, line by line. I came home after the first day of recording and said to my husband, “It’s been eight years and I’m still the same person, I haven’t changed at all.” And he said, “You’re interested in self-acceptance, not transformation” and that was so helpful! I think I understand better now why people shut down, and why it can be a good, temporary solution. But it is possible to come out of your shell and open up again. We have to do it; we can’t stay shut up forever. You can close your shell, but you can also open up. We have the ability to do both. It doesn’t have to be absolute, one or the other.
