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My Life in Sea Creatures

My Life in Sea Creatures is an utterly original, lyrical collection of essays about the ocean and what its creatures can tell us about human empathy and survival.

Sabrina has always loved the ocean. They protested goldfish captivity at the local pet store as child, worked on a research boat as a student, wrote daily 'ocean news' for the non-profit Oceana blog as a young adult. As a queer, Chinese-American they felt alienated from much of the scientific establishment but deeply compelled by the creatures they discovered and the illumination their lives offered.

While rooted in fact, teaching the reader something new about life in the ocean, in My Life in Sea Creatures Sabrina goes beyond simply pondering the wonder of marine biology and explores it through a deeply human lens: one that is emotional, empathetic and queer. Through striking portraits of sea life — from slowly starving octopuses (who brood their eggs for 4.5 years) to prehistoric sturgeon (who survived an ice age but are now being poisoned in the Yangtze) — they also explore family stories: Sabrina's experience coming out as queer and non-binary in their 20s, their mother's disordered eating, their grandmother's escape from the Japanese in war-torn China.

This far-reaching, prismatic collection shatters our preconceptions about the sea and what it means to survive.

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 240
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781784743956
  • Release date
  • 2022