My Life in Sea Creatures: A young queer science writer’s reflections on identity and the ocean

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I think my expectations for this book of hybrid memoir / essays was a bit too high, so I ended up being disappointed. Although I enjoyed both aspects of Imbler's writing -- science journalism about interesting sea creatures and personal stories about their queer identity and experiences -- the essays felt like two alternating threads that weren't well integrated. Each of the 10 essays in Imbler’s astonishing debut juxtaposes a strange lifeform from the deep with an episode from their own existence as a mixed-race, non-binary American. In How to Draw a Sperm Whale, their first romantic relationship is set alongside the accidental slaying of a whale – with each requiring its own protracted postmortem. In Pure Life, they describe the tenacious oddities that make each other’s existence possible via symbiosis in the scalding chemical soup around deep-sea hydrothermal vents. This is married with the story of Imbler’s arrival in a new city after leaving college, and their desperate search for a queer community “that warmed me until I tingled”. The descriptions of their fluctuating sense of gender and the joy of finding their queer family are lyrical and profound Almost every system we exist in is cruel, and it is our job to hold ourselves accountable to a moral center separate from the arbitrary ganglion of laws that, so often, get things wrong. ”

I really liked this book. It was funny, interesting, sad, and educational. It made me long for a world where people do not see your color, or who you are attracted to, and judge you off of it. It also made me feel bad for these creatures. As bad as we are to other humans, we are even worse to creatures we do not understand. Torturing jellyfish to make them rebirth, or using a special machine to literally shred thousands into little pieces. Ripping mothers away from their eggs, leaving all the eggs to die, because they want to study them. Polluting the rivers and causing one of the oldest existing fish to start dying out. The list goes on, why can't humans just let creatures live? A beautiful blend of memoir and oceanography that explores the ocean's depths and many of the big questions -- about identity, the nature of work, the pull of family -- facing young people today The author is a journalist and writer who covers science and queer issues. They are both queer in terms of sexuality and gender as well as being mixed race. This brilliant collection of essays covers many of these elements of their identity by contrasting them with sea creatures that illustrate key elements. If I were a more ruthless detective of my own life, more sure that I could love myself knowing all the things I’ve done and the things done to me while I was not there, perhaps I would have had the courage to ask him what he was talking about. But I am not, so I did not.” How to Draw a Sperm Whale: I liked this one, although the formatting it vaguely like a report was a challenge. This one tries to parallel their college thesis on sperm whales, information on necropsies, and their first girlfriend, M. (they abbreviate it 'M,' which I found distracting, like we were reading an impression of a medical report, except medical reports would no longer use abbreviations). Given how much I abhor whaling, even the historical accounts of it, it was hard to warm to this section. However, I thought it awkwardly done and felt, well, like a college writing project.I admit that I feel bad that I didn't like this as much as everyone else did. I really loved the first two essays. I loved all the essays, really. It's having them all in one book that was not really for me. In How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, Sabrina Imbler examines a selection of marine life and their methods and adaptations of survival, highlighting what makes these creatures unique. Simultaneously, Imbler shares their experience as a queer, nonbinary POC working in science. Each anecdote is paired with a certain sea creature, their traits and habits becoming the jump-off point to an analogous revelation about Imbler themself. The personal reveries frequently cross the subtle line between candour and solipsism, the cute and the gauche, artlessness and shallowness, sincerity and cringeworthiness. Instances of romantic awakening, admissions of self-loathing, explorations of sexuality and contemplations of racial identity (Imbler is mixed race) convey personal pain but ultimately don’t strike home with much force or edge. One exception is a powerful chapter called Beware the Sand Striker, which combines a study of predators’ strategies in the natural world with incidents of male violence and harassment in the author’s own life, as well as those reported in public #MeToo testimonies. A pinwheel of awe spinning one 'wow' after another SOUVANKHAM THAMMAVONGSA, author of How to Pronounce Knife Morphing Like a Cuttlefish: kingpin cuttlefish are accused of going in drag: males will adopt female patterns to get close to the female for mating. It's a very personal piece that describes in pieces how their sexual evolution morphs.

They looked like raindrops, or tears, water in a state of falling. I couldn’t tell if they were dead or alive. I held one up to the sky and its dimpled gelatin muddled light like a prism, turning sunbeams into deliriously electric blues, cherry-blossom pinks, kelpy greens. I threw handfuls of the blobs in the air above me and the droplets filled the sky, shredding sunlight into rainbows.” Compelling, distinctive and enthralling, Sabrina Imbler has found a whole new way to help us think about and care about the deep and interweaving curiosities of human life and sea life HELEN SCALES, author of The Brilliant Abyss Profound, surprising, and thrillingly strange. I love it SY MONTGOMERY, author of The Soul of an Octopus I suspect this was harder for me because the memoir side of the book was often mostly vague, more tied up into general themes than specific experiences. And because the science side was the same, pulling out little stories here and there. I do not really like that kind of memoir or that kind of science writing. I like to go deep. I like to get into the details. I don't like memoirs or science books that only scratch the surface and there was just too much of that here for me as a reader. It's definitely a personal thing, and I suspect many readers will find a lot to love here.This book] marks the arrival of a phenomenal writer creating an intellectual channel entirely their own, within which whales and feral goldfish swim by the enchantment, ache, and ecstasy of human life MEGHA MAJUMDAR, author of A Burning I also thought thematically the connections between the sea creatures and Imbler's life didn't quite resonate. Although I loved the idea of combining these two disparate genres, the execution didn't work for me. That said, I learned a lot of cool stuff about the ocean and its inhabitants that I won't forget and I appreciated getting this information from a queer feminist mixed race perspective. I would have liked a book that was just that better, I think. My Grandmother and the Sturgeon: Weaving together the endangered Chinese sturgeon and its home in the Yangtze river, her grandmother and her family's escape from the Japanese in Shanghai. This one was quite close to perfect, much like a double-strand DNA. Each story parallels the other.

Imbler is [...] a gifted science and nature writer, capable of describing sea creatures with knowledge, originality and supple poeticism Bidisha Mamata, Observer Us Everlasting: immortal jellyfish actually revert to polyp stage ('ontogeny reversal'). This piece attempts some more poetic license, using second person narrative at times, as well as talking about different lives. "Its immortality is active. It is constantly aging in both directions, always reinventing itself." By way of an exploration of the diverse wonders of marine biology, Imbler reconstructs with raw openness the intensity of their experiences of being a teenager, of coming out, and of gender and racial prejudice Literary Review Why can't she just exist without explanation?" I complain, and as I complain, I know that I am being a hypocrite; if her parentage wasn't given, I would wonder what her mix was, if it was like mine." So having to have the Chinese defined is upsetting, why can't she just exist? But the Jewish bit, well that's ok. It's the only mention of 'Jewish' in the book, so it's pretty obvious that she doesn't think there is anything wrong with defining the white partner as Jewish. Jews, in her head, don't have the same right to 'just exist'. This far-reaching, unique collection shatters our preconceptions about the sea and what it means to survive.My Life in Sea Creatures] feels like a quiet tidal change in books for our community and beyond... Sabrina's bioluminescent prose stuns DIVA