Reading Anelise Chen’s Clam Down, I wondered, “Where does memoir end and fiction begin?” Her book suggests that the possibilities for artifice in nonfiction are endless. The book describes how, following the dissolution of her marriage, Chen finds herself adrift and sometimes hysterical. Her mother repeatedly texts her to “clam down,” and, through the typo, transforms the writer into a mollusk. Chen henceforth refers to herself as “the clam” and from this perspective, evaluates the joys and dangers of retreating into her shell for good. Clam Down recalls Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa turns into a giant insect. The use of surrealism in nonfiction allows Chen to heighten the intensity of her despair while playfully acknowledging its dramatization. 

Chen admits that the classification of the book tortured her in the months leading up to publication. Ultimately, she decided on Creative Nonfiction since it “fit the spirit of the book best.” Chen argues that no story can be entirely accurate: “Jorge Luis Borges puzzles over this dilemma in his story ‘On Exactitude in Science,’ which describes a map so precise it is exactly as large as the territory it represents. Like maps, we know that stories can’t be told at a scale of 1:1. If they were, they would be incomprehensible and useless.” For Chen, an assistant professor of creative writing at Columbia University, it’s not only possible to capture truth through fiction but also inevitable and necessary. Of course, Chen wants to remain faithful to events and emotions, but she also understands that the reader must be entertained. To that end, she draws on the imagination and, in doing so, brings us closer to life. For example, she interviews her father Henry to learn more about her clam genealogy. Her father had left their family for a number of years when she was a child to focus on developing small business accounting software that he named Shell Computing. Rather than provide the back-and-forth of their various conversations, Chen narrates entire sections from Henry’s first-person point of view to “follow a more conventional emotional build.”

Since the publication of her debut novel So Many Olympic Exertions in 2017, Chen has remarried, had a child and finished this memoir, which took her 8 years to write. I recently invited Anelise over for coffee, and we talked about the transformation of the memoir genre and her return to peak (human) form.

Hyphen: Was narrating from the perspective of the clam something that you came to later, after you had already written a significant amount of the manuscript? 

Anelise Chen: No, no, the clam came right at the beginning. I pitched the essay to The Paris Review as first-person nonfiction, but then I was struggling. When I switched to third person, it made a lot more sense. Also, when I switched to writing in my dad's perspective, his sections unlocked. Finally, I thought, this is the voice, this is the tone. I can capture his absurdity and humor.

Hyphen: What were you able to uncover about yourself as a result of writing about your experience in the third person, specifically from the perspective of the clam?

AC: I uncovered this genealogy of clams. At first, I thought, isn’t it funny that I can be a clam? When I went home, I realized that my parents are also clams. Our coping mechanism is to shut down. And of course, all of the research that I included in the book is a way to extend beyond the vector of myself. Because I put myself in this genealogy, I could understand that I was not actually alone in this experience. Plenty of others have been through it. Then, the grace and the forgiveness came a bit easier. I didn’t have to pathologize it so much. It felt more normal in a way. I could decide from there if I wanted to continue to be a clam. Because I had this idea of building out concentric circles of belonging, the self and then the family and others in the environment, you see yourself within this context and how your genealogy acts on you. You can relinquish some of the blame about all the ways you’ve fucked up and don’t like yourself. You can let that go a bit.

Hyphen:  What were some challenges involved in telling a story with multiple points of view?

AC: I really enjoyed writing all of the sections. I think it made it easier. I don’t think I could have carried the book with just my point of view. I felt like the other points of view opened up and aspirated the story. It would have felt too suffocating with the clam over and over again. The Asian clams section was just very fun to write, and I didn’t concern myself with how an Asian clam would think.

Hyphen:  How were you able to maintain the memoir’s narrative throughline without a consistent point of view? 

AC: There is a consistent point of view. The clam’s. The book is unified by the clam and her search. Because it is a search. There is a question proposed: What does it mean to be a clam?I write everything in pieces. At some point, it becomes easy to know where things go because there’s a chronology of events. There’s an early stage of writing a book when anything can go anywhere, and that’s a very frustrating moment because placing an event somewhere could change everything after that. But once you have it all laid out, the shape solidifies and you can start building off of that.  

Hyphen: What was the process like of capturing your father’s voice? 

AC: It was fun. I did it over one summer during the coronavirus pandemic. I’d been trying to interview him for many years, and it wasn't always that productive. I went about it in a weird way. I sent him a list of questions, and he would email me back. The responses were not at all what I had been soliciting or hoping for. Then I would call him and he would say, “What do you want?” That went on for a couple of years. Then finally, before the pandemic, I went home and he showed me everything. After that, the more materials I gathered, the more I talked to him and read his texts and emails and notebooks, the more I got into his voice. I didn't include a lot of his poetry in the end. When my mom was translating his poems for me, we were crying because one poem seemed prescient about the fact that he would always be on another shore from us. I tried to write that chapter where I discovered this poem and how I had been moved by it and how he had been apart from us basically my whole life. I couldn't make the tone work, so I scrapped it. It felt mournful in a way that felt passive. I liked it when we were in dialogue, because his voice is so vibrant. 

Hyphen: The photographs that he took of his room in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, were affecting. The empty room and the vista outside his window paired with his communications with you felt like News from Home. How did you feel creating such an interesting character in your dad when he had caused you so much frustration in the past?

AC: I love that people are responding well to him! We actually have a very good relationship. After this book, especially, we understand each other now. I don't feel any jealousy or resentment toward his likability. In fact, I struggled with the second half of the book. My dad was going to have to take it to the end. I was relying on his charisma.

Hyphen: You were able to understand your father through his approach to work, which maybe you could appreciate as an adult in thinking about your writing career. How did this inform how you saw him as a father? It didn’t change the fact that he left for Taiwan to build his company. 

AC: I got over it, because when I first started writing, I was coming at it from the perspective of a wounded, abandoned child: Why did you do that? Why did you leave us? How could you make that decision to work instead of being with us? But through writing the book, it’s like, well, he actually made the right choice for him and for us in a way. He had to put the oxygen mask on himself, right? So I no longer have any resentment about it. It was an extreme case of ambition. 

Hyphen:  Tell me a little about that period in your life after your marriage came to an end. What appealed to you about retreating into your shell for good? 

AC: It was an instinctual response; it wasn’t something I chose to do. Yoko Tawada’s book Memoirs of a Polar Bear describes how animals know without learning. They have a set of behaviors that they perform that no one taught them. She also says that language isn’t the only way to mediate experience. There are other ways to communicate that don't have to be language. They can be dreams or body language, which are each valid forms of communication. This happened to me when I wrote Olympic Exertions too — I was trying to get back into the body. So much of my life happens in my head. I’m talking to myself, and I have lists of things that I need to do. My internal monologue is taken up with directives: You have to do this and you have to do that. Look to the future while still assessing the past. It’s feverish and incessant. What happened to me with both books was a total collapse of that mode and going back into the body and trying to figure out what it was telling me.In the Georgia O’Keeffe section of the book, I describe how she was painting clams and critics were saying that it felt like an emotional valve had been shut off. I similarly had this sense of closing in on myself, of clamming up and feeling safe in solitude.

There are other ways to communicate that don't have to be language.

Hyphen:  When you were writing this book, how did you re-access that period when you were a clam even after you’d moved past it in your real life? 

AC: It's something I have to do with all of my work. We're constantly changing from year to year, and a book is years in the making. Of course, you're not the same person, so you have to turn yourself into a character in order to make that narrative consistent. It's like acting. You inhabit your character and then you write from there. 

Hyphen: Your research looked into the reclusive lives of various prominent figures including Charles Darwin during his study of barnacles and Agnes Martin after she set up her spartan studio in New Mexico. What are your thoughts about the isolation involved in creation and discovery? Is it a necessary crucible experience or a false constraint to think that one can only create apart from others?

AC: I definitely think you have to be apart from others to create, but it doesn’t have to be a permanent apartness. I was actually just having a text argument with my mom. I desperately need a space to work because I share my office now with my son’s room. I really need a studio and I wanted to get one, and my mom said, “You can just come to my house to write. I have plenty of rooms.” I cannot. I texted her a picture of Philip Roth’s Connecticut country home. He had this really nice pool house office that was in the yard, far away from the house. The caption says: “I have to be completely alone in a place that’s all my own in order to write.” And my mother ended up criticizing his setup. [laughter] Of course, there are always exceptions. James Yeh and I were just talking about Rachel Cusk yesterday. Cusk says she can only write in bursts. It’s a classic mother conundrum. But anyway, I don’t think isolation has to be an absolute state. You can go into your own space, and it doesn’t have to be a literal space — it can just be in your head.

Hyphen: Your memoir explores the boundaries of nonfiction, and you cite autofiction authors including Chris Kraus and Annie Ernaux as inspirations for this work. Do you conceive of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction any differently after finishing your memoir? 

AC: It’s still very easy to me. In fiction, you have free reign. You can make anything up. And in nonfiction, you can’t. Things have to be more or less true. I mean, it’s not entirely true. You have to make some elisions, but it’s more or less true. Your intention is not to lie about something. When the animals are quoting poetry in the store, for instance, I trust that the reader understands that I did this through my writing, that this is an artifice. They know they are being told a story.

Hyphen:  Are there other works that are bending genre — either in fiction or in nonfiction — that are currently exciting you? 

AC: For this next project that I’m working on, I was like, I have this amazing idea. Then I realized it was just a form of Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy. As you’re reading it, you really have to tell yourself that this isn’t her. This isn’t the memoir of Rachel Cusk, the writer. But it’s so convincing. It feels so truthful. I want to figure out why that is. I love Sigrid Nunez for that reason too. It feels like you are dropped into their head and overhearing their thoughts. That’s mostly what I read for. I could watch a movie and be immersed in a world in another way. But literature is the only medium to get immersed in someone’s head.I remember the story of Nuwa from childhood. A snake woman blows on clay people to give them life. When you are making a composite character in fiction or trying to create a cohesive monologue from different stories, how do you get them to feel real? How do you breathe life into them? That’s my question now.

Hyphen:  Do you feel like life is happening just beyond the work or do you feel like it’s the height of life to be in the midst of artistic creation? 

AC: Of course, I feel like life is always happening elsewhere. Don’t you?

Hyphen:  I don’t need a lot of life to be happy, actually.

AC: Me too. I think that’s the clam’s way. You can kind of just be a filter feeder. It’s like, I’ll just take one scrap. That’s all I need.