Overview

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.

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9781644453735

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Reviews

""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 ""[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

""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 ""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 ""For lovers of Sabrina Imbler's How Far the Light Reaches and Lulu Miller's Why Fish Don't Exist, jump into this collection of essays radically reimagining the ideal of 'the self' through coexistence with other species. She teaches us to cherish the many other life forms while knowing we will never fully understand them.""--Lucy Yu, Electric Literature ""[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 ""Wong's sensibility aligns with and compellingly amplifies that of scientists who study invertebrates out of wonder and awe for their fascinating lives. . . . She argues that when dealing with unknown and to some extent unknowable animals, imagination may produce 'truths that are more potent and essential than facts.' I admire how fearlessly she owns this point.""--Barbara J. King, Science

""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

Author Information

Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a Bermudian writer of fiction and essays. Her books include the novel The Box, shortlisted for the US/Canada Republic of Consciousness Prize, the novel Drafts of a Suicide Note, and the fiction chapbook Awabi.

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