Why Fish Don’t Exist: Lulu Miller’s journey to self-acceptance can be writ large.

 

Psychology of Lulu Miller's Why Fish Don’t Exist, Psychoanalysis of Why Fish Don't Exist, Depression and Recovery

 

A friend asked me to read this book mostly to fact check on the chapter that quotes psychologists and psychological studies.  I agreed to do that, and because it felt from the start like a lively book, I offered to read it aloud to the Reluctant Wife (she is also a psychologist) in part so she could weigh in on the psychological chapter, but also as a nice nesting activity (as if we needed more of those in the middle of the pandemic – though it is amazing how little we see of each other given that we are in the same house all day).

Long story short, we were not familiar with the psychologists or the studies that were cited.  The book’s author, an NPR science writer, Lulu Miller, acted as if this research were widely known and pivotal in the field.  If that’s the case, we’re not at the center of the field.  Entirely possible.  But, despite that, we were taken with the book, and, when I was talking this book up with a second friend who is an essayist and is writing a memoir/historical reference, which this is, he acknowledged that he had read it, but was quite critical of it.  “It doesn’t have complete sentences!  I had to include it as an example in my book proposal of something like what I am doing, but I was somewhat embarrassed to be doing that.  It isn’t well written.”

Yet, this book worked well for us, especially as we try to come to grips with a world that is increasingly fluid and as we are confronted with ideas that are novel and, at times, difficult to wholeheartedly embrace on many fronts.  Maybe because we were reading it out loud, we didn’t mind (and frankly didn’t notice) the syntax issues.  Given that Lulu writes for Radio, maybe this is a book that should be read aloud. 

The memoir part of this book focuses on a personal crisis – we might call it a midlife crisis – for Lulu.  She hits a depressive wall that seems insurmountable.  It is partly an existential wall.  A crisis of loss of meaning.  It involves the realization that all that you have believed is real and reliable in the world isn’t quite as stable and reliable as you had imagined it to be.  But the weird part is, what she has been told is not what she believed.  She was not told that you can rely on God, or family, or that the Cubs will never again win the pennant.  Her father told her the same thing that our first friend who recommended the book had been told by her own father.

Lulu’s father, a scientist, told her, when Lulu asked him at the age of seven what the meaning of life is, that the meaning of life is that there is no meaning.  And her father, a big guy, comfortable in the world, used this realization, much as Alexis Rose in Schitt’s Creek uses her knowledge that others don’t really see her, to more freely engage with the world.  His attitude was, nothing matters, so I am free to be whoever it is that I want to be. And he is, somehow, very comfortable with a world that is not predetermined and in which there are no givens – just a set of circumstances, randomly arrived at, that need to be navigated.

As freeing as her father experienced his realization to be – it had the opposite effect on Lulu.  She was made of different stuff than him.  Even or maybe especially at seven years of age, she wanted the things that she did to matter.  She wanted to live in a world where she could make her mark.  A world where she could be important.  A world where one's value could be determined by where you were relative to others.

As she grew older, it came to be that a particular aspect of that world that mattered is that she should be a person who was attractive to men.  When she, as a young adolescent, was judged to be unattractive – to not be at the top of the heap of attractive women – she felt (as many of us did) crushed.  And she bought into this evaluation that others had heaped on her – and she evaluated herself as being unworthy of others’ affection.

When, then, as a young woman, she fell in love with a “curly haired man”, he became someone she loved from a distance, pursued, and finally, much to her surprise and delight, captured.  The world was finally right.  He was just the kind of man she had always wanted to have a relationship with and, to her surprise, when she suggested that they have such a relationship, he was receptive.  She was now OK.  But then she screwed up.  She found herself attracted, in what seemed like a meaningless way, to a woman and she was, for one night, unfaithful to the curly haired man. 

Though in her mind this should have been forgivable, it was not.  The wonderful curly haired man was cut from the same cloth as she.  He apparently measured the world in terms of categories.  She was a woman who was reckless – he didn’t want to be with a reckless woman.  Not spoken, but perhaps thought: he didn’t want to be with a woman who was attracted to other women.  That would put her in another category.  I don’t know.

In any case, Lulu now found herself cast back into her feared space of being unattractive – at least to the curly haired man who now shunned her.  The attachment to the curly haired man had given her life meaning by putting her into a variety of spaces – being attractive, being connected and being able to rely on his support as an anchor point that helped her know that she was a chosen person – just as, ironically, her attachment to her father and all his goofy ways (that included the idea that none of us are chosen – we are all just randomly inhabiting spaces) had also given her a sense of being connected and living a life that had meaning.  But to return to her father’s ways and to accept her father’s conclusions about the meaning of life?  This would have felt like a self-betrayal.  She would become a chaos person – and this would mean that she was not chosen – that she was not at the top of somebody’s heap.  Instead it felt too close to feeling, as she did, that she was on the trash heap.

So, in a sort of compromise, Lulu began exploring the life of a scientist who was the antithesis of her father – an ichthyologist – a fish scientist.  She read a bit about him and his passion for organizing drew her to him.  He claimed to have identified fully one fifth of the species of fish known to man by the end of his life.  And even when his specimens were destroyed by the San Francisco earthquake (an earthquake that coincidentally destroyed my great-grandfather’s collection of North American bird’s eggs), his faith in his ability to organize and categorize was not shaken and he worked to fight against the chaos that Lulu’s father, relying on the second law of thermodynamics, assured her underlies the apparent order of the universe.

So, Lulu immersed herself in the world of David Starr Jordan, a person whom she hoped would be the anti-Dad.  A scientist like her father, but a person like herself who realized that the universe has order and, within that order, a hierarchy of meaning that organizes the world and clarifies who (and what) has value and who (and what) does not.  David Starr Jordan, the ichthyologist, the man who, when told by his puritanical parents to give up categorizing bugs, switched to categorizing flowers, the first president of Stanford University; a paragon of scientific credibility and determination; and a man who believed in a set order, became Lulu’s hero and obsessional focus of interest.  She would dig herself out of the hole she was in by using the spade that got her there to begin with.

And this was my second friend’s second criticism of the book.  Jordan was, in his mind, despite Miller’s attempts to pretend he was going to save her, flawed from the get go.  He could, he maintained, see the twist coming from a mile away.  OK.  I don’t deny that I could, too.  But I think my attitude toward it, like Lulu’s Dad’s attitude towards life being different from hers, was different from my friend’s.

I didn’t like David Starr Jordan from the get go.  Maybe I didn’t like David Starr Jordan because it’s just that I am, by nature, a messy guy.  Maybe I was jealous of his scientific and academic success.  Maybe I was envious of the home in Northern California that Stanford provided, and that he filled with plants and animals, easily moving from indoors to outdoors in that world with no winter. 

Unlike my second friend, I gave Lulu a pass on choosing a flawed hero because I wanted her to knock Jordan off that pedestal.  But I don’t think I was alone in that.  I think Lulu hired him to be the guy who could be knocked off the pedestal.  I think that I wanted what she did; to somehow find a way to come back into the orbit of her father – on her own terms, I hoped – not just because her father was a much more likeable guy than Jordan initially was and certainly than he turned out to be, but because we both know, to our dismay, that the world is entropic.  Indeed, part of the reason I am a reluctant psychoanalyst is because of the scientific, and therefore limit-based nature of the field.

And Lulu did have to knock someone or something off a pedestal in order to get better.  Freud’s description of mourning – which he likens to depression – which is what Lulu described herself as fighting – involves an interminable fight with an object (a representation of a person – or people – that have lodged themselves in our brain).  The fight is interminable because we can neither kill the person off (and be alone) nor can we rely on them, because they are no longer there.  So we get stuck in an endless battle that never seems to resolve.  If she had to cut someone loose to get free herself, I wanted it to be Starr.  But I think I knew she also would, in the process of doing this, loosen the tie both to her Dad and, weirdly, to herself.  But those ties would be loosened, not severed.  I was rooting for her to sever the tie with Jordan.

By the way, we are also of course talking about transference, that psychoanalytic concept that Freud observed where we discover in new people aspects that are reminiscent of people we have known before.  In this case, Lulu was hiring David Starr Jordan to stand in for the curly haired man – but more centrally for her seven year old self.  She wanted to emulate Jordan, to collect and organize and create a well-tended world, one where she was on top of it (including, perhaps, being the apple of her father’s eye) but this would mean that Jordan would, like the curly haired fellow, not have created a place for her as she actually was rather than as she wanted to imagine herself to be – and she, oddly, would also not be able to keep that place for herself.

OK, that was a bit heady, but the essential idea is that we have to get over ourselves.  But we absolutely do not want to do that – because we fear that this means that order that has supported and sustained us will disappear beneath our feet.  We will be lost without the organizing structures that school, and scouts, and our (not quite so scientifically oriented) parents have provided us with – and perhaps, Lulu argues, with the parts of our brain that are built to organize the world.  We create a sense of order where we have a necessary and important niche to occupy.

And this is perhaps the most useful part of this book – something that I think I (and we) have to learn over and over again.  To move forward, to learn something new, we have to unlearn what we already know.  We have, as a species, been working on this idea for a long time – I think the Platonic dialogue Meno includes this as a central theme – to be a good student, to be a virtuous person, to be someone of excellence, we have to recognized that what we know – what has held us in good stead – what we have relied on to get us from point A to point B – has been serviceable, but we need to get it that it is not the most effective means of transportation.

When we are seven, and our mode of transportation is the only one we have access to, being told that we should shed that vehicle is too scary for us to do.  How will we get from here to there without this particular boat?  But when we are thirty, things shift.  We begin to appreciate that there are multiple craft that will get us across the river – and that we might want to trade rowing for sail, especially when the wind is at our backs.

What Lulu learns is that being rigidly attached to categorizing leads to all kinds of hell.  Is it any accident that David Starr Jordan, the king of categories, let’s things slide when one of his buddies doesn’t follow the rules?  Does is make sense that he bullies those who would call him on it – threatening to point out that they are gay and ruining their careers?  Is it a surprise that word leaks back and Leland Stanford’s wife prepares to take David out of his job?  And does it surprise us that he responds by (perhaps) murdering her? 

(What?  Did I just say that the wife of the founder of one of our great institutions of learning – the Harvard of the west – was murdered?  By its first president?  Did I not warn that this was a spoiler alert?  Did I just drive us off a cliff?  Was this, though, the cliff – the details of which we couldn’t make out – but the outline was there – that both my second friend and I saw coming?  By the time it arrives, isn’t it a forgone conclusion?  Hasn’t Lulu already spoiled it?)

So dethroning David Starr Jordan is just the beginning (Oh, he is much worse than just a murderer.  There are other abominations that he is involved in that I won’t spoil for you with the particulars.  But they can all be traced to his incessant need to categorize and organize so that he ends up being at the pinnacle of every org chart).  And it is not really David who is being dethroned.  In the vernacular of the analyst, he is the transference figure and the anger that is directed towards him is displaced from the real person she is directing it towards.  And certainly it is the curly haired man she is angry at.  Or is it?  Perhaps he, too, is a displacement of her own categorizing wish – and the person that she needs to dethrone is none other than herself and her own judging ways with herself.  And that she is able to do this is, I think, the genius of this little text.

It is one thing to dethrone Jordan. We can say bad things about him and whoever else it is that does unethical and immoral things and we can disown him as one of those people.  It is quite another to recognize that he is, in fact, a mirror – a reflection of our own wishes, desires and nefarious capabilities.  We are not guilty of the sins of our ancestors because we have inherited their wealth, but we are guilty because we think and act like they do – and we don’t even know it.  The beauty of  Plato’s Meno is that we have to be stung – we have to be paralyzed – we have to realize that our way of functioning is problematic.

The beauty and the strength of this book is that Lulu is able to make that transformation not because someone makes her do it.  And she doesn’t make it completely.  The chance that she will not just metaphorically but literally kill herself continues to haunt her.  Maybe just shedding her earlier version of herself is not enough.  Maybe that earlier version is still alive and hostile enough towards her to judge her as guilty of having committed a capital offense.  She asks herself, then, if she has done something that is a crime against nature.

So it is reassuring for her to discover that the category of fish does not exist.  It turns out – much to her (and my) surprise, that biologists recognize that scaly things that swim is not a legitimate category.  That lungfish (there it is, right in the name) are more closely related to elephants than to tuna.  Go figure.  Nature does not appear to agree with what to us are very apparent categories.  The surface structure of things is not the same as the underlying order - and order that needs to be discovered through hard and careful work in a world that is constantly shifting and changing.

And this gives her some of the measure of the freedom that her father enjoyed to re-categorize herself.  She does not have to be the best or the brightest to be loved – and, somewhat paradoxically, to have value.  She actually doesn’t, in very fundamental and important ways, end up changing herself or her nature.  She simply seems to – as occurs in the most successful analyses – more fully inhabit herself.

So my reluctant wife is intending to use this book to help people who are struggling with issues of diversity equity and inclusion – especially members of the dominant culture.  She believes that this is a model of acceptance of disowned aspects of ourselves that will lead to acceptance of others.  If we recognize that we are all queer – if we recognize that we are all, in fact, prejudiced (for instance) and that we rely on prejudice to keep us afloat – but that it is an artificial buoy we are holding onto – this book may help us let go of that and lead more joyful lives.

That is the hope, anyway.

We let the first friend know that the psychological research cited in the book was not known to us.  We have not yet had a chance to talk with her about the book.  We will finally be able to get together without masks on soon and we are looking forward to being able to discover the ways in which she has both been challenged by and enjoyed the freedom that goes along with being raised in a family where the parameters of the universe were open to interpretation...

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