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| ID: Cover of How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Imbler |
How Far the Light Reaches is a semi-autobiographical collection of essays subtitled “A Life in 10 Sea Creatures”. The author, Sabrina Imbler (they/them), is a science journalist and nature writer, and they use these various weird and wonderful sea creatures as a framing device to examine their own life as a queer and mixed-race person from outcast childhood to creative adulthood. Although the themes are frequently tough — one essay is a delicate but painful dissection of how disordered eating can be an unintended legacy shared between mother and child — Imbler always brings it around. The best way to describe the reading experience is like a long chat with a reflective older queer sibling, from which wisdom and humour alike flow like a river.
You do not need to be a marine bio student, or even particularly interested in the subject, to enjoy this book. Imbler’s characterization of the creatures around which they frame each chapter is always accessible, in lay terms, and frankly will make you love each creature all the more. Even the weird deep-sea worms will have you in your feelings by the end of the essay (yes, I promise). The science is also largely correct (though I have read that there are some inaccuracies here and there in service of the narrative), so you can feel that you have learned something by the end of it. I also really appreciated the great diversity of life-forms that Imbler included, and the fact that the parallels drawn between the creatures and Imbler’s experiences were not always immediately obvious, i.e. not overdone.
Alongside being a truly lovely ocean book (one of my favourite kinds), this is also an authentically, unabashedly queer book. There is messiness in every essay, from familial relationships to early romantic relationships to gender to sexuality to bad first gay haircuts. There is even a little queer history interspersed throughout, something I happen to greatly appreciate (if you saw me speak at the Queer History Talks on the 12th, what were you doing at the Devil’s sacrament?). For me, this book recaptured the feeling I had reading the first bits of queer non-fiction I found as a young teenager — that first discovery of an other with experiences both familiar and foreign, but different in the same ways as you, the sense of initiation into something bigger than yourself — just with a bit more maturity behind it. Again, although it is an honest look at a queer life and thus cannot escape harder topics, light still reaches through the whole book, putting it solidly in the sunlight zone (haha, get it, benthic zones like in the ocean?). If you’re looking for a fun, accessible, but still thoughtful read, How Far the Light Reaches is the essay collection for you.
As always, I wish for you all a term full of joy, love, and sea creatures (if you like that sort of thing).
Best fishes, Rowan (she/they)