Anelise Chen is the author of the novel So Many Olympic Exertions, a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She is a 5 Under 35 Honoree from the National Book Foundation. Chen is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at Columbia University. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her family.

Clam Down defies traditional genre boundaries. What was your creative process like when deciding how to structure such a hybrid, genre-blurring memoir?

I’m neurotic and indecisive about many things—often debilitatingly so—but somehow with writing I’m able to trust my intuition. I usually write a few “exploratory” drafts to get a feel for the material, then at some point another faculty takes over. I don’t question my intuition. The first essay came to me very quickly. Yes, I did freak out for a day or two after pressing send, worried that the editor would think it was too weird. But that was the great thing about that freefall time of my life, when so little mattered. It didn’t feel like things could get any worse. I felt like I had nothing to lose.

The difficulty of the form came later when I had to figure out how to sustain this highwire act. Luckily, the more research I did, the more I could feed into the project, and eventually other voices came through, such as my dad’s. I was already writing from the perspective of a clam, so in a way, I’d given myself a long tether and implicit permission to try everything. Why not give my dad a voice? Why not give invasive Asian clams a voice?

How did the metaphor of “clamhood” evolve as you wrote and did your understanding of it shift over time? What does the idea of “retreating into your shell” mean to you now, after having written the book?

Initially I thought being a clam was about shutting down in response to emotional hurt and overwhelm, and that it was a natural response. I still think it’s an instinctive response that can be adaptive and get you through difficult moments, but there are other times when it can be maladaptive. The key is to figure out the balance. Sometimes it’s necessary to isolate and recuperate; other times it’s better to come out of your shell and speak up. In the examples I dug up, people opened up when they regained confidence, or when the world outside began to feel less hostile. Outside circumstances might have changed, or the subject changes internally which affects the perception of outside danger.

My understanding of it now is that we have to see the ways in which permanent retreat can be antithetical to survival. I wrote this early in the book, but I didn’t feel the resonance of it until now. A clam has to open its mouth to live, even if it seems inconvenient or dangerous.

Were there any books, essays, or artists that shaped your approach to memoir writing or that gave you permission to write this book the way you did?

Yes! I have a partial list that I included in the acknowledgements, but here are a few on the top of mind. The first book that helped me was Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear. To write that book, she told me she was reading memoirs of immigrant women, and these memoirs were often multigenerational stories. Anna Tsing’s work in general has given me great courage to do what I want. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass, her essay on learning the language of animacy in particular. When I read Under the Sea-Wind by Rachel Carson for the first time, I was so inspired by how forward thinking she was, how revolutionary, and how much fun she had with the form. The speculative histories of John Keene’s Counternarratives and Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Mitz by Sigrid Nunez. These are all very serious and very playful books. I’m sure I’m forgetting someone important here…

When blending personal narrative with research or philosophy, how do you maintain a cohesive voice?

I don’t know that I managed to do it successfully the whole way through, but there’s no trick to it. Basically–just writing a lot of drafts and editing a lot. My agent has read drafts where afterward she told me she was “losing the voice” and then I knew I had to keep tinkering. Another practical piece of advice is that you can’t get too carried away with the research. You always have to come back to the story. I’ve deleted many pages of expository material and “fun facts” that I wanted to include. I often read out loud to myself and when I feel that my interest is flagging, I know I have to come back to the story.

What’s your take on memory as material? How do you handle moments you only partially remember or remember differently than others might?

This is something I’ll say now, but I don’t know if I’ll take it back later. The more “scenified” something is in a memoir, the more suspicious it makes me, because I can be sure it didn’t happen that way. We don’t remember in full scenes–maybe some people do, but I don’t. I find fragments to be more authentic, so a book like Annie Ernaux’s The Years, where it’s just bits and pieces of images, phrases, recollections, feels much more honest. You’ll notice there are quite a few extended scenes in my book, and that’s because I wanted to create an immersive experience like you’re reading fiction, so when I couldn’t remember a line of dialogue exactly, I just made it up. I also did a fair bit of condensing, so I would make one conversation out of several conversations.

As for what I remember versus what others remember: I am the writer and the more diligent note taker so I tend to privilege my version of things! My mom just told me recently that she doesn’t remember buying my ex a Valentine’s gift—she thought I made that up—but I have the receipts to prove it!

What advice would you give writers who might be considering turning a difficult period of their lives into a memoir? Did you have to get a certain amount of distance from the events to feel ready to write about this topic or did you write about experiences as they were happening?

I was lucky, because I got the invitation to turn the experience into writing so early on. I was living the experience and writing it and it was okay because I had this scrim, a clam character, to hide behind. As long as I had that shield, I could do it. It didn’t feel too painful; neither did it feel too exposing. Being a clam gave me the distance I needed.

If I were to write the same events today, I probably wouldn’t be able to do it because the strong emotions are gone, and I know I came through it okay, so there’s no sense of stakes. When I was living it, I was in suspense. It was a suspended question: Would I be alone forever? Would I stay a clam forever? In that sense, my advice would be…try to write about it as much as you can in the moment. Take notes, be true to the moment, even if you aren’t going to publish it right away.

How do you decide what parts of your life to share on the page and what to protect?

I mostly want to protect other people in my life. I have actually very little shame about what I reveal about myself, but I am hesitant to implicate others if I haven’t asked for their permission. I say as little as I can about certain things if I can help it. As much as I can get away with not revealing. I think this makes my storytelling weaker, but I’m okay with that.

What do you think is the memoirist’s job: to document, to make meaning, to entertain, to connect or all of the above.

I think the memoirist’s job is to make meaning and to entertain, but I don’t know if it’s possible for a memoirist to document. A journalist documents, or an impassioned observer documents, but not a memoirist. The story we’re telling is always filtered through our subjectivity; it’s always a biased version of events. But I think the point of memoir is to allow yourself to be entertained by it! If you’re able to feel something, and understand what a person went through, I think that’s enough.

Clam Down by Anelise Chen

Inspired by her mother’s frequent typo, Anelise was on a mission to “clam down” after her divorce, which led her to retreat into her shell and reflect on her relationships. After a writing retreat where she learned more about processing through writing, she went home to rebuild her relationship with her father, who had spent over a decade developing Shell Computing, a new software system, causing him to lose focus on the relationships that matter.

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