A book talk by New Haven author Anelise Chen’s Saturday took an intergenerational turn as she called her mother, Marie/Su Ling Chen, to the front. In moving the spotlight to her mother, she figured she might as well “take advantage of the fact that she’s here and grill her maybe.”
A clear-eyed, honest writer, Anelise didn’t shy away from a nice charring. She got right into the meat of the story, inviting Marie to open up about decades of familial stress and inner emotional turmoil.
“And then you would like, hide in the room,” Anelise prompted. “Luckily, we had a clam room. Of course, at the time, we didn’t know anything about that.”
Anelise was celebrating her latest book, a sprawling, surreal memoir she titled Clam Down, released on June 3 by Penguin Random House. She drew a full crowd, packing the room at Edgewood community bookstore Possible Futures. Excited readers and the bivalve-curious found spots on couches, benches, and chairs around the bookstore’s plants and shelves.
In the book, categorized on the cover as “A Metamorphosis,” a woman going through a divorce becomes a clam at the unwitting urging of her mother’s typo-ed texts. “Clam down,” her mother tells her repeatedly over the phone screen. And she does.
Clamming down, it turned out, was pretty useful.
“Despite being helpless and delicious, clams have nevertheless managed to persist through time, thanks to their simple, ingenious technology,” Anelise read to the crowd from the first few pages of her book. Hiding in your shell, in Anelise’s words, “to become silent when one is in pain,” is often presented as something shameful. In exploring when this behavior is adaptive, Chen welcomes humor, dignity, and curiosity.
Marie showed up to the event in a fresh new outfit — new in existence, I mean. Anelise was explaining to the crowd that Marie had made her shirt the night before when Marie swooped in with a correction: “This morning!”
The shirt was iridescent, silky, and highly textured. If Marie looked like a clam herself, it’s because she was. “Clam mom and clam daughter,” she said when she got to the front.
“Reformed clams, maybe,” Anelise ventured.
Marie was once a little girl, laughing and full of energy. Then she got married, not just to a man, but to his family — “a clam family.” Marie used to write, but before she knew it, she had entered into a decades-long period serving as a “maid, driver, and cook” for a set of in-laws who were impossible to please.
“Everything become my work,” she said, on top of her job creating and directing an after-school program. “I was under great stress.”
So how did Marie’s clam room come to be?
It was originally a fireplace in a larger room, but “because Chinese people never use fireplace,” Marie said, the family decided to build a wall around it, making it into a tiny, dark room. When Anelise left for college, Marie moved in. She spent long stretches of time in the chamber, sometimes staying the night, sometimes not, writing every day in her journal. She poured out years of frustration, anxiety, and anger on the page. “Also, I didn’t forget to encourage myself,” Marie added. “That’s why ‘clam down’ thing.”
“That room accompanied me for at least 20 years,” she said,
When Anelise asked Marie whether she would recommend the mollusk life, Marie’s reply was immediate. “No, no, no, I don’t think I would be a clam again,” she said. She thought a little before continuing. “It’s important to come out and seek justice and fairness.”
Marie ended her time in the spotlight with something special she had prepared for the occasion. “[Anelise] actually encouraged me to give a monologue,” Marie said. “I used to be an actor.”
Speaking both in English and in Taiwanese, the language of Marie’s in-laws, Marie began.
“Mom, I have something to tell you.”
Tears sprang up across the room as Marie asked her now-deceased mother-in-law to consider her and her daughters as full human beings. She spoke slowly, exercising a muscle she had taught herself to hide for many years. Her requests came out in simple points.
“Don’t always say my children, my daughters are bad. Actually, they are very good. Also, children are allowed to make mistakes.”
“Don’t always say I’m so selfish and I never care about you. You know it’s not true.”
When Marie was done, she reflected on her transformation to clamhood and back. “At the time, I thought if we all clam down and swallow the pain she gave us, we could all be in peace.” But it never worked. “So I was wrong.”
Anelise’s book, which she called “very much a family memoir,” is about one woman’s life as a clam, but it’s also about the clams who raised her. When her 2‑year-old child Henry jumped into the front, she scooped him up and kept him there while she continued talking and asking her mother personal questions. It seemed that in her family, Anelise was destined to be the last clam.
“Just endure, everything will pass,” Marie used to tell herself. Now, she has a new perspective. “All these things has to be open up and talked about.”
