Book Description
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.
 
About the Author
Mandy-Suzanne Wong is the author of The Box, a novel, shortlisted for the US/Canada Republic of Consciousness Prize; the novel Drafts of a Suicide Note, a PEN Open Book Award nominee; the essay collection Listen, we all bleed, a nominee for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction; the chapbooks Awabi and Artificial Wilderness; and the exhibition catalogue Animals Across Discipline, Time, and Space. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, her work appears in Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Cleveland Review of Books, Literary Hub, and Necessary Fiction. She is a regular contributor to Asymptote.