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. Imbler writes magnificent essays about being queer in a straight world, being mixed race in a white world, being gender queer in a binary world, and relates the sometimes elusive experiences and intractable challenges through the mysterious lives of creatures who come from deep in the sea. Imbler tries to bridge the worlds she straddles with her existence and her writing, using the animals' colorful lives, fruits of creative genetics. Each of the essays is about another lesson on survival and adaption that Imbler sees reflected in the history of her life, and in the wild of the ocean.

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. 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 AbyssImbler is a terrific talent... with brutal candor and elegant metaphor, [ My Life in Sea Creatures] reveals the gap between where we are today and a truly inclusive and connected world Science Magazine 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. Conclusion: The proximate cause of death may be falling in love with the idea of a person, or the idea of a relationship." 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.” Sabrina Imbler writes with i ncredible curiosity, compassion, and wit. This is a book that asks us to care not simply for one another, but for creatures far distant from us-for the sea, the land, and the worlds we make together JESSICA J. LEE, author of Two Trees Make A Forest

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. I loved this. A double helix of queer memoir and marine biology that twists together beautifully MARK HADDONThere 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. 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.” 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. This is a miraculous, transcendental book... To write with such grace, skill, and wisdom would be impressive enough; to have done so in their first major work is truly breathtaking. Sabrina Imbler is a generational talent, and this book is a gift to us all ED YONG, author of I Contain Multitudes 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

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 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?