"How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures" by Sabrina Imbler (nonfiction; 2022)

 **A series of essays about the wonder and majesty of marine life, paired with stories of the author's experiences as a female, queer, mixed-race person in the largely white and male field of scientific journalism.  An absolute winner**

Yup.  This one is a winner

This will be I believe only the second nonfiction book I've written about for this thing (the first being the truly fantastic "The Cooking Gene" by Michael W. Twitty).  I read very little nonfiction for fun, simply because I have to read so many articles and reports and white papers for work.  When I relax, I generally prefer fiction, and generally prefer speculative fiction at that (that said, I do love graphic novel memoirs, will probably get around to writing about one or two of them as well).  But man, this book is special

So, in short, this is a collection of essays about marine life.  I think anyone who's studied even a little bit of ocean life learns pretty quickly that there is some absolutely bonkers stuff happening down there.  Sabrina Imbler is a science journalist by trade, and has a great way of explaining these creatures in accessible and interesting ways

But in each chapter, Imbler takes the lessons learned about these creatures and draws a parallel to her own life, her own experiences.  This is a memoir in disguise (at least a nominal one) as a collection of zoology essays.  And it's gorgeous

In the first chapter, Imbler informs us that wild goldfish can grow up to a foot long, that they are in fact some of the hardiest creatures out there.  We only think of them as small, fragile creatures because that's what we force them to be by keeping them in small bowls.  She tells us that, in fact, goldfish dumped into ponds and rivers by owners who no longer want them often end up taking over the entire ecosystem

And then she talks about the pressures that shaped her, the monumental expectations of her elite prep school where students "were killing themselves because of all the pressure, enough suicides for the CDC to deem the deaths a 'cluster.'  I remember one student's obituary included his ACT scores."  She talks about how she wasn't able to grow, become herself, come to terms with her sexuality, until she moved away into the wider world:

Release a goldfish, and it will never look back.  Nothing fully lives in a bowl, it only learns to survive it.

I will always be a little bit in love with feral goldfish.  I know this is the wrong lesson to take form it all.  I know they wreak an irreversible kind of havoc [. . .] But when I think about ponds infested with gallon-big goldfish, I feel a kind of triumph.  I see something that no one expected to live not just alive but impossibly flourishing, and no longer alone.  I see a creature whose present existence must have come as a surprise even to itself.

Imagine having the power to become resilient to all that is hostile to us.  Confinement, solitude, our own toxic waste.  Salt, waves, hundred-pound sturgeons that could swallow us whole.  Imagine the freedom of encountering space for the first time and taking it up.  Imagine showing up to your high school reunion, seeing everyone who once made you feel small, only now you're a hundred times bigger than you once were.  A dumped goldfish has no model for what a different life might look like, but it finds it anyway.  I want to know what it feels like to be unthinkable too, to invent a future that no one has expected of you

I loved this book for the way she ties together, unsubtly but powerfully, the lessons learned from life in the ocean and the lessons she's learn through the challenges of her life

In another chapter, she tells us about the Chinese Sturgeon.  It's not doing so well these days, and uhh spoiler alert, it's all humans' fault.  The dams we've built along the Yangtze river and others are blocking the fish from returning to their spawning grounds, with devastating consequences (growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I know this story very well from the same thing happening to salmon populations), among other reasons:  "These giant fish survived the asteroid and the Ice Age and so much more, only to be wiped out by cosmically puny obstacles:  Our dams, our boats, our chemicals, our taste for caviar."  She then talks about her grandmother, who fled China during the war and came to America surviving countless pains and difficulties.  Now, in her old age, her grandmother's story is coming to an end:  "My mother was the first to inform me, warning me over the phone that I should not act alarmed if my grandma lost her train of thought, or if she began speaking to me in Mandarin [. . .] Sometimes it feels like she is returning to China, and I wonder if she is also returning to her memories. I am afraid to upset or strain the tether she holds to the present, to America, to the only part of her life where I exist"

In another essay, she talks about the devastation humanity has wreaked upon the blue whale population ("Scientists estimate that we killed 360,000 blue whales in the first six decades of the twentieth century" . . . there are currently fewer than 10,000 left).  She writes a "Necropsy Report", a marine biologist's formal autopsy for an animal, of a beached whale, and she traces the impact a whale's death has on the entire ecosystem that depends on it--including the population of bottom-feeders that has evolved to wait years or even decades for food, nursing hunger until a whale dies and its body falls to the ocean floor.  As we instead drag these corpses out of the ocean to be broken down into whale oil and skeletons for museums, those communities continue waiting for food that may never come.  And yes, then she intersperses this with a "Necropsy Report" of her first serious relationship, going through the history and the factors in an attempt to determine the proximate cause of death, how something that was so important to her died and she was left waiting and alone

One of my favorite pieces in the whole book is her discussion of deep-sea life, cataloging the fascinating discover of vast and vivid ecosystems huddled around deep-sea vents, areas in which scientist had long since assumed that the ocean pressure and lack of light made life completely impossible.  Then she talks about the way the queer community has an incredible affinity for creating spaces to find and support each other, a similar bulwark against unimaginable pressures, "Hydrothermal vents revolutionized many of science’s core ideas about life, how and where it could exist. It is only logical that scientists assumed the strange creatures living on the seafloor would survive on the flecks of fish that died nearer the surface, the scraps of sun-touched society. But these animals eked out an alternative way of life. I prefer to think of it not as a last resort but as a radical act of choosing what nourishes you. As queer people, we get to choose our families. Vent bacteria, tube worms, and yeti crabs just take it one step further. They choose what nourishes them"

(I'm not saying the only reason I loved that essay was because of some very choice shade, but I will say that, as a Seattleite, I almost spit up my drink when I came to a passage about how, "I moved to Seattle in the fall of 2016, a few months before Trump was elected and the sun left for good. My new neighborhood was more than 80 percent white and yet advertised itself as “the center of the universe.” Fremont’s county council proclaimed this status in 1994, when the city was a haven for artists. But Fremont would be gentrified in a matter of years, taken over by offices belonging to Google and Sporcle, and other tech companies with insidiously charming nonsense names. Recreational marijuana was legal in Washington, and we lived a few blocks away from a pot shop owned by a white man named after the Buddhist term for enlightenment.")

One of the most personal essays in the entire book (of very personal essays) is the one about the cuttlefish and its remarkable camouflage abilities.  Colors, textures, black-and-white checkerboard, cuttlefish are awesome.  But that's not what Imbler wants to focus on:

We often conflate the cuttlefish’s ability to morph with camouflage, assuming they only use it to hide. Nature documentaries call cuttlefish the masters of disguise. This strikes me as the least interesting thing about the cuttlefish, not just because of the dreariness of the backgrounds they most often blend into but also because camouflage is a body language deployed against predators and others that would harm or devour you. Reading a creature through its camouflage seems a misguided attempt to understand its true nature, its whole self. It would be like studying a zebra while it flees from a lion, or a mouse as it cowers in a hollow log. I want to know how cuttlefish morph when there are no sharks around, only other cuttlefish. I want to know what kinds of transformation the cuttlefish is capable of when it is motivated not by fear but by community and sex, and I am not interested in calling it a disguise.

Imbler talks about the way cuttlefish use camouflage and other visual changes (did you know cuttlefish have eyes that are among the most attuned to polarization in the entire animal kingdom?) to attract mates, to intimidate rivals, to communicate with other cuttlefish.  And she talks about how she has changed herself over the years:  From when she ditched her childhood bubble dresses and long locks in favor of jeans and buzz cuts; to the tattoos she's chosen to get and the way each made her body feel more like her own; to the phases she's gone through her life when she's taken on the wardrobe of her partner (she moves to Seattle and dates a woman there, "I'm a walking L.L.Bean catalog, and I certainly feel queer, but I also feel white, like I am cosplaying as someone who boulders"), to every other step she's taken on the journey of changing her body as she gets closer to the person she wants to be.  Unlike many of the essays in the book, this one ends rather unfinished:

Each time I try to write this piece I feel differently about my body, my gender, myself. Each time I conclude that I must not be ready to write it; best to experience the thing and then wait a few years to reflect, the advice generally goes. But if I don’t write it now, how will I trace my own evolution? So I dub this essay a pseudomorph, a gibbous moon, a silhouette in ink of the person I am now and whom I may no longer resemble in the future.

And so, that's what this book is.  A profound and fantastic opportunity to learn.  Read this book, and you'll learn 50 new things about sea creatures that you didn't know before, and 500 new things about being female and queer and mixed-race that maybe you didn't know before either

I loved this book

Like millions of other mortal beings, when I learned about the immortal jellyfish, I envied the animal. It wasn’t the immortality itself that I coveted but its mechanism. Our traditional notions of immortality are so languorous and passive: Jesse Tuck, the everlasting teen, sips from a magic spring and stays seventeen for eternity, just like Edward Cullen from Twilight. I grew up thinking of immortality as something won with a drink or a bite or a pill, a static and irreversible state of being. But the immortal jellyfish has no notion of these tepid forevers. Its immortality is active. It is constantly aging in both directions, always reinventing itself, bell shrinking and expanding, tentacles retreating into flesh and wriggling out again. It is not living forever but reliving forever.