Book Review: How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler
By Maddie Woda
Before reading Sabrina Imbler’s memoir-in-essays, How Far the Light Reaches, I knew them as The New York Times science reporter who crafted the buzzy article “It Started Out as a Fish. How Did It End Up Like This?” (Both science geeks and regular geeks alike went nuts over Imbler’s Killers reference.)
Imbler does an excellent job of making deep-sea creatures relevant in their memoir, a collection of ten essays connecting themes from their personal life to aspects of marine biology. In “My Mother and the Starving Octopus,” Imbler uses a self-sacrificing female octopus to dissect their own relationship with their mother. In “Beware the Sand Striker,” the reader learns about the predatory, man-sized marine worm, the sand striker, alongside Imbler’s exploration of sexual vulnerability and how to render assault.
Some of Imbler’s essays suffer from thematic connections that lean toward the obvious, but this doesn’t detract from the honesty and intelligence displayed in the writing itself. In the most nuanced essay, “Morphing Like a Cuttlefish,” Imbler examines their gender alongside the shifting camouflage techniques employed by both male and female cuttlefish. The reader can guess the essay’s subject based on its title, and yet the way Imbler describes the extremely visceral experience of yearning to shape shift brings new heat to the topic.
Overall, this collection is a thing of beauty, a welcome voice in a field dominated by white, male writers.
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Maddie Woda is a graduate of Columbia University in New York City with a degree in English. She has writing published in The Maine Review, The Columbia Review, Dead Fern Press, The Emerson Review, and others. She currently lives in Brooklyn and is an editor at Zibby Books.