How Far the Light Reaches - Sabrina Imbler

The subtitle of the book is, "A Life in Ten Sea Creatures," and in each chapter Imbler discusses a different aquatic animal. Goldfish in one, sturgeon another, cuttlefish later on. In each chapter Imbler likewise discusses some aspect of their own life, of their effort to come to some sort of understanding with themselves.

So Chapter 3 switches between paragraphs about the Chinese sturgeon, still trying to reach breeding grounds on the Yangtze River that have long since been blocked by dams, and discussing Imbler's maternal grandmother, who grew up in China in the first half of the 20th Century, and fled their home to escape the Japanese Army. Their grandmother is in cognitive decline, and to some extent seems to be returning to those earlier days, speaking only Chinese, recalling mostly how things once were.

Chapter 5 parallels how life clings to the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the sea, with the places queer people find or make for themselves. Those places can be precarious - eliminated by the cessation of magma flow or gentrification - but somehow the life persists and takes root in a new location that supports it.

It's not always a pleasant read - in one chapter, Imbler discusses a stretch of their life where they would frequently get drunk at parties and wake up the next morning with no recollection of what happened between them and the men beside them - but it's also a hopeful book in some ways. It took time, there were apparently many failed relationships, Imbler struggles to understand themselves independent of whoever they were dating, struggles to get comfortable with who they are.

But the final chapter, which discusses the immortal jellyfish, able to regress to the medusa stage in response to severe injury and produce clones of itself a thus-far endless number of times - suggests Imbler reached an internal equilibrium. Imbler can't return to childhood and start over with a better grasp of who they were from the start (the jellyfish sections alternate with accounts from other individuals about what point they'd like to go back to and speak with their younger selves), but they can keep trying to find what identity fits. They aren't immortal, but they are alive. The opportunity still exists.

'Thought the yeti crab's environment seems inhospitable to us, it is nothing to be pitied. The pressure does not crush the crab, and the darkness does not oppress it. It is exactly suited to the life it leads, however strange or repulsive we might find it.'