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A review by purplepierogi
Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller
2.0
I don’t know if this phenomenon has a name, but there is definitely a genre of book in which the writers project their emotional turmoil onto some long dead, real, usually profoundly flawed person, and then act surprised when that person turns out to be horrible. god, stop doing this! who gave this woman a book deal? this is Julie and Julia with a random woman going through a breakup and a dead eugenicist taxonomist. dude!
I think most of my violent reaction to this is because, god, the writing style is so, so twee. it's one thing to wax poetic about deeply problematic historical figures without disclosing their deep, life-long associations with eugenics, but it's so much worse with the fluffy, millenial-quirky tone this book employs. at first, I was like okay, lots of description, lots of fragmented clauses, it’s feeling very MFA. well, the author does indeed have an MFA and that's fine but an inspection of the author bio blurb reveals that she's also co-creator of the NPR podcast Invisibilia, which I actually hate for this same rambling and handwringing. here's an excerpt: "Morning after morning, I resisted the sunshine beckoning outside the windows, the scent of eucalyptus whispering come-hithers." this is the whole book.
the tone of speculation also grated on me, heavily. to be fair, she draws from archives and biographies and it's understandable she would like to disclose in some way this is her imagination at work, not mind-reading. But it was so annoying that every other word was 'perhaps,' or 'maybe.' Example: “Then, cracking his knuckles, perhaps, or removing a crick from his neck, he would inhale some of Earth’s good air, and exhale, for the first time ever, its name.” We're given the rich details of David Starr Jordan's world, and then yanked out of it with a repetitive marker that this is just some author's fixation and daydream. there wasn't enough memoir here to actually connect the dots and so we are just brought along down the rabbit hole of deeply sentimental reflections on this man, just to marinate in it.
I think most of my violent reaction to this is because, god, the writing style is so, so twee. it's one thing to wax poetic about deeply problematic historical figures without disclosing their deep, life-long associations with eugenics, but it's so much worse with the fluffy, millenial-quirky tone this book employs. at first, I was like okay, lots of description, lots of fragmented clauses, it’s feeling very MFA. well, the author does indeed have an MFA and that's fine but an inspection of the author bio blurb reveals that she's also co-creator of the NPR podcast Invisibilia, which I actually hate for this same rambling and handwringing. here's an excerpt: "Morning after morning, I resisted the sunshine beckoning outside the windows, the scent of eucalyptus whispering come-hithers." this is the whole book.
the tone of speculation also grated on me, heavily. to be fair, she draws from archives and biographies and it's understandable she would like to disclose in some way this is her imagination at work, not mind-reading. But it was so annoying that every other word was 'perhaps,' or 'maybe.' Example: “Then, cracking his knuckles, perhaps, or removing a crick from his neck, he would inhale some of Earth’s good air, and exhale, for the first time ever, its name.” We're given the rich details of David Starr Jordan's world, and then yanked out of it with a repetitive marker that this is just some author's fixation and daydream. there wasn't enough memoir here to actually connect the dots and so we are just brought along down the rabbit hole of deeply sentimental reflections on this man, just to marinate in it.