Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Mollusks’ innermost selves are absolute secrets because, not only do they hide in shells or distant habitats, but also that’s just how it is with innermost selves.
Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl collects Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s reminiscences, dreams, investigations, and experiments in being with small invertebrates whose vulnerability and creativity inspire radical reimaginings of Earthlinghood. In graceful linked essays, Wong wonders: What constitutes a self if a starfish can twist off one of his arms to explore the seafloor on its own? What is an animate being, considering a living snail is also an inanimate shell? What does love mean to a jellyfish, or time to an octopus? Her encounters with nonhuman animals reshape her language into different forms from collage to fragments, and prompt uncommon engagements with various texts. She looks behind words like “invasive” and “endling” in scientific articles and in poetry, questions natural selection with a bubble-rafting snail, sees the bivalve in Dostoevsky, and studies a speculative treatise about a “vampire squid from hell.”
Personal yet de-personal, at once tender and challenging, Wong’s essays invite humans to rethink our relationship to other beings. Instead of capturing and destroying them, using them as resources or reflections of ourselves, she asks us only to coexist with them—to cherish them although, and because, we cannot fully know them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This mesmerizing collection from novelist and essayist Wong (The Box) uses observations of small invertebrates to tackle questions about selfhood, consciousness, and humans' relationship with nature. In the title essay, Wong turns the life of a sea snail into a bildungsroman, chronicling its journey from a tiny larva to its eventual formation of a protective shell, which prompts questions about the snail's mode of being ("She undulates at the threshold between what we call living and inanimate"). In "The One and the Many," Wong juxtaposes her experience providing a home to a small snail she found attached to a stack of mail with the story of an endangered Bermudian land snail that became part of a captive breeding program. When the snail doesn't leave the open takeaway container she uses to house it, she begins to wonder if her love for the creature is oppressive ("What if it didn't feel like love but like surveillance?"). Love comes into focus again in "How to Love a Jellyfish," in which the author questions what it would look like to marvel at another creature without capturing and using it for one's own needs. Relentlessly empathetic, these essays reframe nonhuman beings as individuals worthy of respect. Readers will be moved.
