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

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From a brooding octopus mother that starves herself while looking after her eggs we get the author's thoughts on their relationship with their mother and their unhealthy body image. From the life of a Chinese Sturgeon we get their thoughts on their grandmother and mother's origins in China and their family's immigration to the US. Particularly harrowing is their essay on the Sand Striker Worm (formerly named after an abuser whose penis was severed by his victim) and their thoughts on consent and sexual assault in their own life. There are many more essays here as well, each fascinating for the illustrations they provide for all the identities that the author embodies.

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 writing is lovely; the science is usually--but not always--cleverly integrated, the perspective interesting, though occasionally so very developmentally young. I'd love to read more about what Imbler does with their life in twenty years. This} is a bright, shimmering gift of a book that deftly glides and weaves, exploring sea life and the self with boundless curiosity, tenderness, and wisdom... Every essay in this brilliant debut collection deserves to be treasured NICOLE CHUNG, author of All You Can Ever Know 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.”

Watch out for the bit where humble pet goldfish are released into open water and all hell breaks loose This far-reaching, unique collection shatters our preconceptions about the sea and what it means to survive.

How do we place our selves in the natural world? What are the costs and gains of our attachment to it? Where would you put Sabrina Imbler's astounding book on the shelf? In a separate section, marked: Awe and Wonder PHILIP HOARE, author of Albert & the Whale Each essay in their debut collection profiles one such creature: the mother octopus who starves herself while watching over her eggs, the Chinese sturgeon whose migration route has been decimated by pollution and dams, the bizarre Bobbitt worm (named after Lorena) and other uncanny creatures lurking in the deep ocean, far below where the light reaches. Imbler's debut weaves the wonders of marine biology with stories of their own family and coming of age, implicitly connecting endangered sea life to marginalised human communities and asking how they and we adapt, survive and care for each other. 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 young queer science writer on some of the ocean's strangest creatures and what they can teach us about human empathy and survival 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 profoundI 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. Imbler pulls off an impressive feat: a book about the majestic, bewildering undersea world that also happens to be deeply human Vogue

A delicious balance of the zoological and the personal. Imbler manages to gaze both inward to the self and outward to the strange selves of the creatures in the world's waters ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN, author of Harmless Like You There was one stunning paragraph where the author knows she is being hypocritical, but is talking only of her own half-Chinese ethnicity and complaining of it. I am complaining about the moment when the Asian woman's parentage is explained by one white person to another - Chinese mom and Jewish dad - like a caption, a specimen ID. A superb must-read... [a] collection of fascinating essays [which] explores the wonders of rivers and oceans in the light of the writer's own life Tablet My Life in Sea Creatures is an ingenious book that shows, with a glittering skill, how the precious life around us enriches our world and our ways of living. This is nature writing with an open and daring heart SEÁN HEWITT, author of All Down Darkness WideConclusion: The proximate cause of death may be falling in love with the idea of a person, or the idea of a relationship." A beautiful lure that caught me; the lush colors of the cover, the temptation of sea creatures, explorations of identity. Overall, it was an interesting collection of pieces that interested and occasionally challenged me. I can be honest enough to say that Sy Montgomery and her attempts to do something similar drives me bonkers, perhaps because I've had my fill of straight, white, middle-class women. Intersectionality and grey areas are everything. 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 Each essay in their debut collection profiles one such the mother octopus who starves herself while watching over her eggs, the Chinese sturgeon whose migration route has been decimated by pollution and dams, the bizarre Bobbitt worm (named after Lorena) and other uncanny creatures lurking in the deep ocean, far below where the light reaches. Imbler's debut weaves the wonders of marine biology with stories of their own family and coming of age, implicitly connecting endangered sea life to marginalised human communities and asking how they and we adapt, survive and care for each other.

If You Flush a Goldfish: I had no idea how devastating goldfish were in the environment, which makes the fact that they are so common a little bit horrifying. I would have wanted to learn a little more about this. I understand that this is a childhood fascination, but given where the essay ended, with a story of mutually discovered transformation, I would have chosen a different water creature. Perhaps a coral, which utilize a variety of reproductive techniques and go through some cool physical transformations. Compulsively readable, beautifully lyric, and wildly tender... A breathtaking, mesmerizing debut from a tremendous talent KRISTEN ARNETT, author of Mostly Dead Things I loved this. A double helix of queer memoir and marine biology that twists together beautifully MARK HADDON As a mixed Chinese and white non-binary writer working in a largely white, male field, science journalist Sabrina Imbler has always been drawn to the mystery of life in the sea, and particularly to creatures living in hostile or remote environments.My Life in Sea Creatures] feels like a quiet tidal change in books for our community and beyond... Sabrina's bioluminescent prose stuns DIVA It’s a gloriously queer narrative, exploring Imbler’s relationships, gender, and queer community more generally. They also discuss their mixed race identity, both personally and in relation to their mixed race partner. In one essay, they write about how to give a necropsy report of dead whales, and then they reiterate different versions of the necropsy report of a previous relationship, giving a different proposed cause of death each time.