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.
Illustrated by Kathryn Eddy
Extracts
“Notes from Underwater,” Cincinnati Review
Praise for Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl
You need (at least) eight arms to hold this savvy and astute collection of essays. Like any of the “polyvital” sea creatures described herein, Daughter of Mother of Pearl does many things at once: it offers microscopic peeks at sea creatures you might have only considered in passing, it considers topics normally reserved for science with artfulness and biased heart, and it even looks at the very human act of writing as a flawed biological feat. Read this book by the sea, or read it to be transported across several seas—of time, of thought, of earthliness.
—Elena Passarello, author of Animals Strike Curious Poses
Under Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s gaze, small uncharismatic invertebrates become heroes of our fragile ecology. Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl shows us what jellyfish—often regarded as villains, clogging up our warming seas—can teach us about love; what starfish know about living multiple lives at once, and much more. This is a book to be savored slowly, like a ritual of deep attention, offering the calm of hygge in literary form.
—Maria Reva, author of Endling
