Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

By Lulu Miller

A Best Book of 2020: The Washington Post * NPR * Chicago Tribune * Smithsonian

A “remarkable” (Los Angeles Times), “seductive” (The Wall Street Journal) debut from the new cohost of Radiolab, Why Fish Don’t Exist is a dark and astonishing tale of love, chaos, scientific obsession, and—possibly—even murder.​

“At one point, Miller dives into the ocean into a school of fish…comes up for air, and realizes she’s in love. That’s how I felt: Her book took me to strange depths I never imagined, and I was smitten.” —The New York Times Book Review

David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him. His specimen collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—which sent more than a thousand discoveries, housed in fragile glass jars, plummeting to the floor. In an instant, his life’s work was shattered.

Many might have given up, given in to despair. But Jordan? He surveyed the wreckage at his feet, found the first fish that he recognized, and confidently began to rebuild his collection. And this time, he introduced one clever innovation that he believed would at last protect his work against the chaos of the world.

When NPR reporter Lulu Miller first heard this anecdote in passing, she took Jordan for a fool—a cautionary tale in hubris, or denial. But as her own life slowly unraveled, she began to wonder about him. Perhaps instead he was a model for how to go on when all seemed lost. What she would unearth about his life would transform her understanding of history, morality, and the world beneath her feet.

Part biography, part memoir, part scientific adventure, Why Fish Don’t Exist is a wondrous fable about how to persevere in a world where chaos will always prevail.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Release date: Apr 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501160370

Lulu Miller

Lulu Miller is the cohost of Radiolab, host of the kids podcast Terrestrials, and author of the bestselling book Why Fish Don’t Exist. 

Book preview

Cover: Why Fish Don’t Exist, by Lulu Miller

More Praise for Why Fish Don’t Exist

A small marvel of a book.

—The National Book Review

Lulu Miller moves gracefully between reporting and meditation, big questions and small moments. This book is a magical hybrid of science, portraiture, and memoir—and a delight to read.

—Susan Orlean, New York Times bestselling author of The Library Book

"Why Fish Don’t Exist is a book about losing love and finding it, a book about how faith sustains us and also how it grows toxic. It’s a story told with an open heart, every page of it animated by verve, nuance, and full-throated curiosity. I loved this book for its sense of wonder as well as its suspicion of that wonder—its belief that on the other side of interrogation there are even deeper, more specific enchantments waiting."

—Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams

I love this book’s profundity and wit, its moments of darkness and heart-bursting euphoria, and I love the oddball, literary charisma of the mind that wrote it. Plus, by the end—I’m not joking—Lulu Miller may have actually cracked the secret to life.

—Jon Mooallem, author of This Is Chance!

A wild ride… that upends our idea of what fish (and we) are in the grand scheme of things.

—Slate

From page one, Lulu Miller is building something. A personal philosophy. A story. Of a man. Of America. It’s all of these things but it’s something bigger still and it all happens so gradually that by the last few pages, I was shocked to find myself in tears. Like in her radio stories, Lulu Miller coasts along, seemingly without effort, until she coldcocks you. This book is a beautiful reminder of the sublime mystery of our being alive.

—Jonathan Goldstein, creator of the podcast Heavyweight

Wholly unique and a true delight.

—Refinery29

An incredible and inspiring book that you must read… Seriously, get it.

—Jad Abumrad, founder of Radiolab

The original, intricate illustrations… that accompany each chapter are captivating, with an otherworldly, even nightmarish quality. They lend the book an air of antiquity, as though the reader is holding a nineteenth-century science text or a Bible.… Intriguing and illuminating.

—Washington Independent Review of Books

Lovely and mysterious and always looking at something else, the way the best books do.

—Orion magazine

Engrossing… thought-provoking… Lulu Miller does the job with style and intelligence.

—Chicago Review of Books

This is the book I’ve recommended to people more than any other in the past year.

—Ari Shapiro, host of NPR’s All Things Considered

I really, really love Lulu’s book, in part because it’s just weird as hell.

—John Moe, author of The Hilarious World of Depression

Ingenious… A quirky wonder of a book.

—Kirkus Reviews

With the intrigue of a murder mystery, this slim work is also a philosophical exposition on the human inclination to make order out of chaos.

—Library Journal

Profound… Gripping, and sure to be on readers’ minds long after the final pages.

—Booklist (starred review)

This eye-opening nature read… will literally have you seeing the world in a new way.

—Book Riot, Best Books of 2020 So Far

A touching blend of biography, science, philosophy, and self-reflection. Like its provocative title, it is full of surprises.

—Jonathan Balcombe, New York Times bestselling author of What a Fish Knows

Remarkable… Lulu Miller draws a heartening lesson—that chaos, which comes for us all, can be defeated by sheer human stubbornness.

—Los Angeles Times

The dazzling scientific story… becomes a lens for questioning the broader binaries we have accepted as givens, as fundaments of nature rather than the human artifacts that they are. It becomes the framework for a tender personal story, part meditation and part memoir—an elegy for Miller’s father and everything he taught her about navigating the world, a reckoning with the dangerous detours she took in navigating her own heart, a love letter to its unexpected port.

—Maria Popova, Brain Pickings (A Favorite Book of 2020)

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller, Simon & Schuster

This is for you, Dad.

Prologue

Picture the person you love the most. Picture them sitting on the couch, eating cereal, ranting about something totally charming, like how it bothers them when people sign their emails with a single initial instead of taking those four extra keystrokes to just finish the job—

Chaos will get them.

Chaos will crack them from the outside—with a falling branch, a speeding car, a bullet—or unravel them from the inside, with the mutiny of their very own cells. Chaos will rot your plants and kill your dog and rust your bike. It will decay your most precious memories, topple your favorite cities, wreck any sanctuary you can ever build.

It’s not if, it’s when. Chaos is the only sure thing in this world. The master that rules us all. My scientist father taught me early that there is no escaping the Second Law of Thermodynamics: entropy is only growing; it can never be diminished, no matter what we do.

A smart human accepts this truth. A smart human does not try to fight it.

But one spring day in 1906, a tall American man with a walrus mustache dared to challenge our master.

His name was David Starr Jordan, and in many ways, it was his day job to fight Chaos. He was a taxonomist, the kind of scientist charged with bringing order to the Chaos of the earth by uncovering the shape of the great tree of life—that branching map said to reveal how all plants and animals are interconnected. His specialty was fish, and he spent his days sailing the globe in search of new species. New clues that he hoped would reveal more about nature’s hidden blueprint.

For years he worked, for decades, so tirelessly that he and his crew would eventually discover a full fifth of fish known to man in his day. By the thousand he reeled in new species, dreaming up names for them, punching those names into shiny tin tags, dropping the tags alongside their specimens into jars of ethanol, slowly stacking his discoveries higher and higher.

Until one spring morning in 1906, an earthquake struck and toppled his shimmering collection to the ground.

Hundreds of jars shattered against the floor. His fish specimens were mutilated by broken glass and fallen shelves. But worst of all were the names. Those carefully placed tin tags had been launched at random all over the ground. In some terrible act of Genesis in reverse, his thousands of meticulously named fish had transformed back into a heaping mass of the unknown.

But as he stood there in the wreckage, his life’s work eviscerated at his feet, this mustachioed scientist did something strange. He didn’t give up or despair. He did not heed what seemed to be the clear message of the quake: that in a world ruled by Chaos, any attempts at order are doomed to fail eventually. Instead, he rolled up his sleeves and scrambled around until he found, of all the weapons in the world, a sewing needle.

He took the needle between his thumb and forefinger, laced it with thread, and aimed it at one of the few fish he recognized amid the destruction. With one fluid motion, he plunged the needle through the flesh at the fish’s throat. Then he used the trailing thread to stitch a name tag directly to the flesh itself.

For each fish he could salvage, he repeated this tiny gesture. No longer would he let the tin tags sit precariously in the jars. Instead, he sewed each name directly to the creature’s skin. A name stitched to its throat. To its tail. To its eyeball. It was a small innovation with a defiant wish, that his work would now be protected against the onslaughts of Chaos, that his order would stand tall next time she struck.

---

When I first heard about David Starr Jordan’s attack on Chaos, I was in my early twenties, starting out as a science reporter. Instantly, I assumed he was a fool. The needle might work against a quake, but what about fire or flood or rust or any of the trillion modes of destruction he hadn’t thought to consider? His innovation with the sewing needle seemed so flimsy, so shortsighted, so magnificently unaware of the forces that ruled him. He seemed to me a lesson in hubris. An Icarus of the fish collection.

But as I grew older, as Chaos had her way with me, as I made a wreck of my own life and began to try to piece it back together, I started to wonder about this taxonomist. Maybe he had figured something out—about persistence, or purpose, or how to go on—that I needed to know. Maybe it was okay to have some outsized faith in yourself. Maybe plunging along in complete denial of your doomed chances was not the mark of a fool but—it felt sinful to think it—a victor?

So, one wintry afternoon when I was feeling particularly hopeless, I typed the name David Starr Jordan into Google and was met with a sepia photograph of an old white man with a bushy walrus mustache. His eyes looked a little hard.

Who are you? I wondered. A cautionary tale? Or a model of how to be?

I clicked through to more pictures of him. There he was as a boy, suddenly lamblike, with spilling dark curls and protruding ears. There he was as a young man, standing upright in a rowboat. His shoulders had filled out and he was biting his lower lip in a way that could almost be classified as sultry. There he was as a grandfatherly old man, sitting in an armchair, scratching a shaggy, white dog. I saw links to articles and books he had written. Fish-collecting guides, taxonomic studies of the fishes of Korea, of Samoa, of Panama. But there were also essays about drinking and humor and meaning and despair. He had written children’s books and satires and poems and, best of all, for the lost journalist seeking guidance in the lives of others, an out-of-print memoir called The Days of a Man, packed tight with so many details about said days of said man it had to be broken into two volumes. It was nearly a century out of print, but I found a used-book dealer who would sell it to me for $27.99.

When the package arrived, it felt warm, enchanted. As if it contained a treasure map. I slid a steak knife through the packing tape, and two olive-green tomes spilled out, each glittering with gold letters. I made a huge pot of coffee and sat down on the couch, the first volume on my lap, ready to find out what becomes of you when you refuse to surrender to Chaos.

1.

A Boy with His Head in the Stars

David Jordan was born on an apple orchard in upstate New York in 1851 at the darkest time of the year, which is perhaps why he became so preoccupied with the stars. While husking corn on autumn evenings, he writes of his boyhood, I became curious as to the names and significance of the celestial bodies. He could not just enjoy their twinkling; he found them a mess he needed ordered, known. When he was about eight years old, he got his hands on an atlas of astronomical charts and began comparing what he saw on the page to what he saw above his head. Night by night he went, creeping out of the house, attempting to learn the name of every star in the sky. And according to him, it took only five years to bring order to the entire night sky. As a reward, he chose Starr as his middle name, and wore it proudly for the rest of his life.

Having mastered the celestial, David Starr Jordan turned to the terrestrial. His family’s land swelled and rolled with its own unique constellations of trees, boulders, farm buildings, and livestock. His parents kept him busy with chores, shearing the sheep, clearing brush, and—David’s specialty—sewing rags into rugs (his flexor tendons learning early how to wield a needle). But in between chores, David began to map the land.

For help, he turned to his big brother, Rufus, thirteen years older, a quiet and gentle nature lover with deep brown eyes. Rufus taught David how to settle the horses, with long strokes down the neck, where in the thickets to find the juiciest blueberries. Watching Rufus demystify the earth, David was transfixed; he says he held Rufus in absolute worship. Slowly, David began drawing intricate maps of everything they saw. He drew maps of his family’s orchard, his walk to school, and when he finished the land he knew, he turned to places far away. He copied charts of distant townships, states, countries, continents, until his hungry little fingers had crawled over nearly every corner of the globe.

The eagerness I then displayed, he writes, rather worried my mother, a large woman named Huldah. One day, having had enough, she took his whole pile of maps, creased and stained with his boyish sweat, and chucked it.

---

Why? Who knows. Perhaps it was because Huldah and her husband, Hiram, were devout Puritans. They prided themselves on martyr-y accomplishments like never laughing out loud and beating the sun to the fields each morning. Spending one’s time making maps of lands already mapped would have seemed like a frivolity, an insult to the use of a day, especially when they were struggling as they were, when there were apples to pick and potatoes to hoe and rags to sew.

Or perhaps Huldah’s disapproval was simply a reflection of the times. By the mid-nineteenth century, the obsessive ordering of the natural world was beginning to fall out of fashion. The Age of Discovery had started over four hundred years before, and pretty much wrapped up in 1758, when the father of modern taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, finished his masterpiece, Systema Naturae, a proposed blueprint for all the interconnections of life. (No matter that Linnaeus’s chart was riddled with mistakes: misfiling bats as primates and sea urchins as worms, to name a couple.) As boats raced more frequently from port to port, the excitement of glimpsing exotic specimens and maps—once a way of luring people into shops, taverns, coffeehouses—was wearing off. Dust was collecting upon cabinets of curiosity; the world, it seemed, had become known.

Though there’s a chance it could have been something else. At that very moment, a blasphemous text was screeching through the presses. On the Origin of Species was released to the masses in 1859, just as little David was beginning to scrunch his nose up at the stars. Is there any possibility that Huldah could have read the newspapers, could have sensed that the world’s order was about to cave in?

Whatever the reason, Huldah would not budge. With her fist full of David’s crumpled maps, she told her son to find something more relevant to do with his time.

Like a good boy, he obeyed: he stopped making maps. But like a real boy, he did not. Not really.

The country round about my home was very rich in wild flowers, he writes, trying to blame the earth for his sin. On his way home from school he began to ever so occasionally pluck a velvety blue pom-pom or silken orange star from the grass. Some he’d sniff and let fall to the ground, but occasionally one would linger in his fingers and make it back to his bedroom, where it would lie on the bed and taunt him with its mysterious arrangement of petals. He would try to suppress this desire to know it, its name, its exact location on the tree of life. And he did pretty well, until puberty hit.

On his first day of middle school, David secreted home from the library a little book on flowers. And back in the privacy of his room, he’d sit, manual in hand, desk dirty with flowers, discerning which flower was which, unbuttoning its genus, its species. A near man now, with some hair on his toes, his voice dropping, he’d occasionally taunt his mother by revealing the scientific names of the blossoms they walked by—transmuting periwinkles into Vinca major or sunflowers into Helianthus annuus—as though to say that this passion of his could not be swatted out of him, crumpled up or thrown away. I perhaps strained a point by adorning the conveniently white walls of my bedroom with the names of the different plants as I identified them in turn, he writes.

He began keeping questionable company, with a poor farmer up the road named Joshua Ellenwood who had learned the scientific name of almost every plant in the region. For accomplishing such a feat, the old man was regarded by his neighbors as shiftless and a waster of time.

David was in awe of him. He began trailing the old man on his walks through the countryside, trying to seep up as many of his tricks as possible—the ways species revealed themselves in leaf shape or petal count or aroma. After

Reviews for Why Fish Don't Exist

[judygibson-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An intriguing book but not really about fish. I read it to see if I wanted to propose it for the book club at our natural history museum, but decided it wasn't really a book about natural history. Okay, so what IS it about? Well, that only develops very gradually through this quite readable book. Maybe it's about the categories, the order we place on the world, and how they blind us to the wild diversity of human experience. I know that's vague, but I didn't want to go on and on about for example, eugenicists and white supremacists.

[joan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Musing s on life, love and meaning. Expectations and stubborn habits sabotaging our quest for understanding and creating meaning in chaos. Fabulous read.

[steve02476 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I liked the first half a lot, but I thought the second half was a hodgepodge. Lulu Miller is a talented writer and I’ll try out her next book - and I hope she’ll get a better editor next time.

[Bekah Page Turner · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Really enjoyed this book! It reads part personal memoir and part study in dark History. It is thought provoking and interesting. There is definitely potential for a reread here. Enjoy!

[Wang Fangjie · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wonderful, engaging narrative. Deeply personal, yet also extremely informative. The epilogue, a section most won't pay attention to, is an absolute gem of a read; so romantic, so beautiful, truly finding perfection amidst the the imperfections and chaos of life.

[gwendydd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a charming and surprising book!It is partly a biography of Daniel Starr Jordan, an early twentieth-century taxonomist who discovered and classified a lot of fish. His life story is very interesting and takes some unexpected turns. It is partly Miller's memoir, talking about her search for meaning in her own life. Miller is fascinated by Jordan's indomitable enthusiasm for his work and his ability to remain optimistic despite a lot of major setbacks in his life. She hopes to find the key to his optimism, and to find meaning in her own life. Along the way, she makes some startling discoveries about Jordan, fish, and herself. Miller's writing is delightful to read - she uses very poetic language with just a touch of conversational snark. The book is full of surprises, not only about Jordan, who is a fascinatingly complex character, but also about fish, eugenics, and philosophy.

[katyefk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

David Starr Jordan lived in a time of great changes in our thinking about who is really human. (Early 1900's) Eugenics did so much damage to our culture and our regard for each other that we are still recovering from it 120 years later. A powerful piece and worth reading.

[albertgoldfain · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I liked the tandem biography style. The emotional roller coaster of an invested reaearcher whose subject has a darker side made it a fast nonfiction read.

[charon07 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This enchanting book is a brief biography of David Starr Jordan, icthyologist, first president of Stanford University, and eugenicist, intertwined with a personal memoir and some philosophical musings on entropy, social justice, and what matters in life. I normally wouldn’t have given two hoots about Mr. Jordan, but Lulu Miller framed his concerns with her concerns and made me care very much. I was surprised and delighted to learn that fish don’t exist, but you’ll have to read this little gem for yourself to find out why this is such a life-affirming lesson.

[jennybeast · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Lulu Miller has a real gift for pulling the reader into a long and winding narrative. I'm really glad I happened to listen to this one as an audio book, because I love her reading, as well. It's a brave and well done exploration of both her personal life and the life of David Star Jordan. I really didn't expect all the twists and turns of emotion and connection, but I appreciated them.

Advanced listener copy provided by Libro.FM

[maryroberta · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent blend of memoir, history and science. Managed to bring personal into the story without self-indulgence. Truly enjoyed this one and author reading was also good.

[nmele_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

By all rights, this slim book should get four or more stars, but reading it left me feeling unsatisfied, I'm not sure why. Miller tells two stories, interlocking the biography of David Starr Jordan, prolific and prominent scientist, with her own search for solid ground and joy. Either story would make an engaging book, so I don't know why together they left me feeling let down. Miller meticulously researched Jordan's life and works, and she fearlessly tells her own story with power. I'm puzzled, so, 3+ stars.

[Lindsay Wilson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

delightful delightful delightful delightful delightful delightful delightful delightful delightful delightful

[Stacey · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book has so much depth and gives you a lot to think about. It is filled with many twists and turns but also with hope. I really enjoyed it.

[Stellah Namulindwa · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As in the Author's words, i am sure to say that this is my "Pen-fails-me-moment"... but in two (2) words "Perfect read" for any one searching for a firm foundation upon which to launch a brave search for the meaning of life, not just life as we are accustomed to (seeing it through a blinkered view) but daring to embrace the entire universe, its varied tempers, Mother Chaos and all the marvelous creatures in it. How little we know, how exhilarating the World beyond the curtain ... In Why Fish Don't Exist, Lulu Miller invites us all to start all over again ... wherever we are , regardless of what we have known before ... to dare flap the mighty curtain!

[Nick Castaneda · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Really amazing. It felt like npr but deeper and looking inside.

[Mary Rose · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

For someone struggling with gaining a sense of order in their own life, this book was a gift. Originally listened to the audio version... I loved listening to Lulu read it - I always enjoyed her radio segments, so experiencing her voice along with her words made the book that much more comforting. If more science-related works were written like this, I’d be well on my way to better understanding the world around me. The strict and rigid factual books I’ve come across, even if they contain wonder, often pass well over my head because I can’t connect to it. Gratefully I can say that was not the case here. This book simultaneously contained good old honest investigative journalism full of what was clearly well researched facts and history about David Star Jordan and the impact of his work and legacy blended with a personal narrative describing the way the research tied into her own understanding of life and order. This effect made the book feel very human and warm. I found myself becoming emotional listening to her trotting out the story - shock and anguish here at this injustice, sadness here at a familiar, shared personal confusion, triumph here at this retribution. I applaud her for the bravery she had in sharing how she struggled with the implication of the research and the framing of the events in her life, finally settling into a sense of quiet, chaotic peace. It’s great to know that no one has the answers, just like you don’t. Thanks Lulu.

[maud · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a wonderful book this is! Just read it and experience it!

[Nancy Swaim · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a wonderful book! With wonderful illustrations! The ideas! the writing! Why wrong science allows right science to develop although that may become wrong science on the way to better science. And love! Heartbreak! Did I mention that the illustrations are amazing?

[Victoria M · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Not critical enough of David in the last chapter of the book. After she spent 8 idolizing this man

[breic-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

A thin book, yet padded. A very shallow and sketchy memoir of her idolization of, and eventual disillusionment with, David Starr Jordan, an ichthyologist and the first president of Stanford. We learn very little about Jordan. But the book is not unenjoyable. I lowered my rating when she said she had never heard of the eugenics movement (really?) and then started misquoting scientists to promote her own agenda. In particular, misquoting Darwin is not acceptable.

[Jennifer Jenkins · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed this book. It’s a mixture of biography of a famous ichthyologist/taxonomist that is tied into a narrative of the author’s own life. In many ways, I found that mixture quite beautiful. As a scientist myself, very familiar in the evolutionary concepts described in portions of this book, I don’t feel like the author adequately describes them for an unfamiliar reader. If I weren’t a biologist myself, I would be very confused.

[Michael Ross Maitland · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love this book. I've been reading it for about 2 weeks and finally finished it when I should have been studying for my end of year exams. During the entirety of reading it, I would keep talking about it with my family (who really couldn't care less but I forced them to listen to me anyway). In conclusion... WOAH!!

[keywestnan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a wonderfully written book that includes science (mostly biology, specifically taxonomy), history, natural history, biography, memoir, psychology, a bit of philosophy and a pinch of true crime. And it works! I learned a lot and will be thinking about it for some time.