Keynote
Seventeen ingenious essays devoted to snails’ and aquatic invertebrates’ uncanny ways of living
Book Title
Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl
Cover Image
“[Wong] has made sea snails totally present on the page, magically uncurling their opaque inner worlds, making them resonant subjects of marvel and love. . . . Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl is up there with some of my favorite animal writing of the past decade.”—Ania Szremski, 4Columns
Body
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.
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.
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About the Author
Credit: Heather Kettenis
Praise
“Mesmerizing. . . . Relentlessly empathetic, these essays reframe nonhuman beings as individuals worthy of respect. Readers will be moved.”—Publishers Weekly
“[Wong’s] gentle coexistence with other life-forms stands in stark contrast to humanity’s predilection for exploitation. . . . A passionate paean to life’s wonders.”—Kirkus Reviews
“This mesmerizing collection from novelist and essayist Wong uses observations of small invertebrates to tackle questions about selfhood, consciousness, and humans’ relationship with nature.”—The Millions
“Wong’s investigations undulate, beckoning an embrace of the unknowable, and with it a call to better coexistence.”—Orion Magazine
