Why Fish Don't Exist

“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.”

Throughout the book, Miller explores how we use names to order our understanding of reality. In this quote, Miller is exploring how the passion for dividing the world into categories started from childhood, for David Starr Jordan. In this obsession, Jordan was somewhat of an iconoclast; as this quote suggests, by Jordan’s lifetime, taxonomy had fallen out of favor, and was no longer the popular scientific discipline it had been. This quote also points to the theme of the importance of persistence: Jordan doggedly pursued taxonomy despite the fact it was not fashionable, and by pursuing his passion, he obtained personal and professional success, and discovered thousands of species previously unknown to science.

“Psychologists have studied this, by the way, the sweet salve that collecting can offer in times of anguish. In Collecting: An Unruly Passion, psychologist Werner Muensterberger, who counseled compulsive collectors for decades, notes that the habit often kicks into high gear after some sort of ‘deprivation or loss or vulnerability,’ with each new acquisition flooding the collector with an intoxicating burst of ‘fantasized omnipotence.’

As a child David Starr Jordan lost his beloved older brother to typhus, an instance of the unpredictable influence of chaos over our lives. In this quote, Miller highlights one possible response to chaos—to double down on attempts to exert control over the world. After Rufus’s death, Jordan began to pursue taxonomy with more passion, collecting flowers and other plants, and recording their images and scientific names in his journal. As this quote suggests, this is a common response—that having lost control, some people find collecting helps people feel they’ve restored it. Miller notes that psychologists warn that while the impulse can provide some relief, it can also have negative consequences.

“As David grew older, as his shoulders filled out and his lips plumped, his hunger for new specimens only intensified. But he couldn’t seem to find anyone who cared. No matter how hard he studied, no matter how many new species names he learned or taxonomy papers he was able to get published, he explains, ‘at school no attention was paid to this interest of mine.’ He got into Cornell University, earning a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in just three years. But he had trouble finding work. Universities were looking for sociable men in smartly tied ties who could command a classroom with swagger and a pointer. The quiet, skinned-knee, dirty-elbowed crawling around in nature that David so loved was looked down upon as child’s play.”

In his collecting, Jordan proclaimed a commitment to the hidden and significant, rather than those species that are the most beautiful. But early in his career, Jordan was at risk of being insufficient himself; having devoted himself to a field of study that was not popular, he struggled to find work. Nonetheless, he persisted, eventually finding other scientists who appreciated the direct study of nature as much as he did, eventually achieving professional success. This quote underscores the persistence Jordan had to display to reach that point, which speaks to one of the core themes of the book: the importance of persistence. It also foreshadows how much Jordan changed over the course of his life, from a quiet, determined young scientist, to a swaggering, sociable man himself.

“By 1873, when David was a freshly minted Cornell grad, one of the most famous naturalists of the day, Louis Agassiz, had grown gravely concerned about the future of the trade. Agassiz was a Swiss geologist, a charismatic bear of a man with bushy mutton chops, who had earned his fame by being one of the earliest proponents of the ice age theory. Agassiz had only come to this vision of an earth coated in ice after making meticulous observations of fossils and scratch marks in the bedrock. As a result, he believed the best way to teach science was to scrutinize nature.”

This quote introduces one of the pivotal figures in Jordan’s life: the famed naturalist Louis Agassiz. Jordan and Agassiz were in many ways kindred spirits: they both believed in the importance of the direct study of nature, and both had a passion for taxonomy. When Jordan was selected as one of the young naturalists to participate in a training program Agassiz was running on Penikese Island, off the coast of Massachusetts, it changed the course of his life: not only did he engage in fish collecting expeditions for the first time, but he also learned a belief that would shape his thinking for the rest of his life: that by examining nature closely, we can not only learn about other lifeforms, but we can also derive moral lessons from the creatures studied.

“Specifically, Agassiz believed that hiding in nature was a divine hierarchy of God’s creations that, if gleaned, would provide moral instruction. This idea of a moral code hidden in nature—a hierarchy, a ladder or ‘gradation’ or perfection—has been with us for a long time. Aristotle envisioned a holy ladder—later Latinized to Scala Naturae—in which all living organisms could be arranged in a continuum of lowly to divine, with humans at the top, followed by insects, plants, rocks, and so on.”

This quote speaks to one of the facets of the book’s theme of the importance of names in ordering reality. Names are not simply reference points: they also situate things in relation to one another. For Louis Agassiz—and David Starr Jordan after him—the discovery of a species, which is brought into being by giving it a name, allows one to position that species on a ladder of complexity. While Jordan would ultimately deviate from Agassiz in some ways—especially in his acceptance of the theories of Charles Darwin—he would retain his belief in the connection of morality to the ordering of life.

“Shortly after those six young men boarded the steamer home in shame, David stepped onto a little schooner with a fistful of nets. Having caught Agassiz’s eye that first morning as he explored the shoreline inspecting rocks, David was one of the few campers chosen to come along on the first dredging expedition. ‘Here I made my first acquaintance with fishes of the sea,’ David sings, ‘which were brought up in bewildering variety.’ He doesn’t put names to any of the creatures flopping around in that net, for at that moment they were still mysteries to him, the shimmering and scaly clues beckoning him to a puzzle he would spend the rest of his life trying to solve.”

This quote describes the pivotal moment at which Jordan, who grew up on a farm, first encountered fish, while attending a training program run by famed naturalist Louis Agassiz. With this quote, Miller deploys characteristically literary style and vivid description to paint a picture of the moment Jordan came face to face with the beings who would shape his life. This quote also illustrates Miller’s use of primary materials to reconstruct Jordan’s life (in this case, his journal). Ultimately, this quote highlights the irony of Jordan’s quest: that having spent so much of his own life trying to understand fish, he was unable to see the piece of the puzzle that would come after his death: that fish don’t exist.

“Chaos, he informed me, was our only ruler. This massive swirl of dumb forces was what made us, accidentally, and would destroy us, imminently. It cared nothing for us, not our dreams, our intentions, our most virtuous of actions. ‘Never forget,’ he said, pointing to the pine-needly soil beneath the deck, ‘as special as you may feel, you are no different than an ant. A bit bigger, maybe, but no more significant’—he paused, consulting the map of hierarchies that existed in his head—‘except, do I see you aerating the soil? Do I see you feeding to accelerate the process of decomposition?’

I shrugged.

‘I do not. So you are arguably less significant to the planet than an ant.’”

Lulu Miller describes her father as a lively man who lives as he pleases; for him, this freedom comes from his scientific worldview, and his sense that existence is meaningless. In this quote, Miller describes the moment where she asked him about the purpose of life, and he told her there wasn’t one. For Miller, this was an early brush with chaos, which she will go on to explore (and experience) throughout the book)—a realization that no one matters, handed to her by her father. This passage also illustrates a technique Miller uses frequently throughout the book, which is partially a memoir—animating passages with vivid recollections from her life.

“But I did not believe him. That I could so quickly ruin this intricate thing we had built together over the years. I begged him to reconsider. I assured him that the girl thing was a blip, a slip-up, that it would never happen again. But he was too angry, too hurt. He did not want to be with the kind of person who could be that reckless. Without him, the world went dark. Our friends knew what I had done and drew away from me. I avoided my family, not wanting to explain what had happened. My work, the science stories I had once chased with such glee, fell flat. Just proof, in various disciplines—chemistry, neurology, entomology—of how bleak and meaningless it all was.”

A pivotal moment in Miller’s own life came after she cheated on her longtime partner with another woman, and he left her. The loss was devastating for Miller, who describes thinking of her curly-haired partner as a source of refuge. In this quote, Miller describes how in the aftermath, much of her life was sapped of meaning. It was in the throes of this difficult period that Miller thought of David Starr Jordan, who she’d encountered years earlier. At the time, Jordan had seemed hopelessly naïve, to try and rail against the forces of chaos. But during her own personal maelstrom of chaos, Miller begins looking to Jordan for guidance on how to persist through difficult times.

“The men get increasingly creative in their naming. They name ugly fishes after their enemies, pretty fishes after friends. They are not shy to pay homage to their leader. A little flame of a fish plucked from Hawaiian waters gets the name Jordan’s Wrasse, Cirrihilabrus jordani. There is Jordan’s snapper. Jordan’s grouper. Jordan’s sole. Lutjanus jordani. Mycteroperca jordani. Eopsetta jordani. They are nearing a thousand. A thousand new species that in all the millennia of human history only David and his men have been able to find.”

This quote, which describes the period after Jordan became president of Stanford University and tapped the resources of Leland and Jane Stanford to carry out ambitious collecting expeditions across the globe. It highlights Jordan’s outsize contribution to science—how he discovered a fifth of all known fish species—and, by describing how Jordan’s men named fish after him, gives a sense of his influence. It also foreshadows some of the darker aspects of Jordan’s personality. Jordan was known to hire friends for faculty positions, and the crush those who opposed him; in a similar way, fish are named according to their appeal—a naming practice that also serves as a reminder of the way in which naming things is often accompanied by an implicit ranking of their importance.

“One important rule about holotypes. If one is ever lost, you cannot simply swap a new specimen into the holy jar. No, that loss is honored, mourned, marked. The species line is forever tarnished, left without its maker. A new specimen will be chosen to serve as a physical representative of the species, but it is demoted to the lowly rank of ‘neotype.’

Neotype: a specimen later selected to serve as the representative specimen for a species when the original holotype has been lost of destroyed.

Even scientists like ritual.”

As the daughter of a scientist, and a science journalist herself, Miller long thought of science as a beacon of truth, but ultimately concludes that it’s a tool, and a flawed one at that. This quote, which illustrates the book’s theme of the role of naming in creating reality, is an example of how science can be flawed. By describing the creation of holotypes as a ritual, Miller is highlighting how science is not an infallible source of truth, but a knowledge system with its own blind spots and ritualized practices, which should be constantly challenged.

“Something about its form doesn’t seem to quite obey the laws of physics. But when you trace your finger along its contours, searching for where the breakdown in geometry occurs, you come up empty. Indeed, its genus name, Agonomalus, comes from the Greek for ‘no corners.’ A = without + gonias = angle, corner. Taxonomists from longer ago had also noticed how its kind seems to defy the laws of physics. Agonomalus jordani. Jordan of the No Corners. Like a Mobius trip, two sides, btu one, somehow. The boundary between them an unfindable thing.”

This quote describes the moment when Miller comes face to face with the holotype of the only species Jordan named after himself: a small, dragon-like fish named Agonomalus Jordani. Jordan had discovered the fish off the coast of Japan in 1904. Examining its spiny form, Miller wonders why Jordan chose to name the fish after himself, given that the fish seems to defy easy categorization. Ultimately, in its fearsome shape, Jordan wonders if there’s a kind of confession: of Jordan’s own ruthlessness, which he will go on to exhibit towards those who opposed him, and those he deemed unfit.

“David picked up a drippy brown fish, the width of his palm, with red spots down its back and a bifurcated tail. He stared into one of its marble-black eyes, ransacking the labyrinth of his memory, his many trips all over the globe. Can I place you? He wondered. In a net? Or on a spear? Can I remember where it was you slowly flopped to death, as you became mine? He paused. He squinted.

And then he had to let go.”

After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake struck, Jordan raced to his lab to find fish scattered across the floor, with many destroyed and many more separated from their name tags. Despite the chaos taking over the campus at large—at a university of which he was the president—Jordan devoted time and resources to saving as many species as he could and reuniting them with the plates bearing their scientific names. In this quote, Miller deploys one of the literary devices she uses throughout the book—imaginatively recreated moments from Jordan’s life—to paint a picture of the moment when Jordan began sorting through the species. As this quote suggests, he wasn’t always successful, but the fact he tried at all is testament to his nearly boundless capacity to persist.

“He was sounding more and more like my father. The way to live was, in every breath, to concede your insignificance, and make your meaning from there. Everywhere I looked, I saw it. Stern warnings against hubris, against magical thinking. In his syllabus for a course on evolution, for example, he sneaks in a whole section on the cosmic impotence of man. “Nature no respecter of persons,’ he writes. ‘Tampering impossible…Her laws immutable…He who defies them wields a club of air.’ I can only imagine the impassioned diatribes that accompanied these notes, his fist held high in the air. His cosmically impotent fist.”

In this quote, Miller hearkens back to an earlier stage in the book, where she describes her father’s determination to live with gusto in the face of the meaningless of existence. Reading Jordan’s writing, she finds evidence of a similar philosophy—that humans had a duty to fight against ignorance and to face the difficult truths about life. Ultimately, this quote highlights a darker strain of Jordan’s own personality; while he railed against magical thinking in others, claiming that nature does not respect humans, he proves unable to apply this to his own life, and his personal conviction in man’s ability to reshape nature, and the ability that granted him to withstand criticism, would have dangerous consequences. Finally, the quote also displays Miller’s use of lighthearted language and humor to tell Jordan’s story, describing Jordan waving his ‘cosmically impotent fist,’ in the face of an uncaring universe.

“Baumeister and Bushman are quick to point out that not all high self-esteem is bad. They often find themselves needing to explain, palms in the air, that high self-esteem can be great! High self-esteem, they say, can make you freakishly peaceful (or ‘exceptionally nonaggressive,’ as they put it), because you’re so comfortable with yourself that criticism does not threaten your self-worth. They believe it’s the very small subset of people with easily threatened high self-esteem that are the dangerous ones.”

In the 20th century, popular conception of self-delusion shifted. What had, for much of Western history, been viewed with suspicion, came to be viewed in a different light, as researchers found that the ability to delude oneself—which was rebranded as ‘positive illusions’—is a crucial component of being mentally healthy and resilient to stress and setbacks. Other researchers found that ‘grit’—another term for persistence—is one of the most important ingredients of success, and that grit is fueled by positive illusions. But as this quote illustrates, these illusions have a darker side, and when accompanied by a sense of superiority and aggression, can make people aggressive. This quote also speaks to Miller’s facility as a science communicator, highlighting how she uses casual, evocative language (freakishly peaceful) compared to the more technical language of scientists, to tell the story.

“Despite my mounting suspicion of David, I forced myself to encounter his good side, to breathe it in. I carefully read the handwritten remembrance by Jessie calling David the ‘miracle’ of her life. His many poems, odes to the hidden and insignificant of this world, sea sponges and sea stars and even grass itself. I read about his tireless work protecting the fur seal from overhunting; I handled the heavy, engraved medallions he won for advocating peace—his passion in later years. I read the article he wrote called ‘where Uncle Sam’s Solar Plexus is Located,’ in which he argues that America’s most vulnerable spot was its hub of weapons manufacturing in the mid-Atlantic. A nation too reliant on ‘the killing business,’ he wrote, was ‘in a bad way.’”

Over the course of Why Fish Don’t Exist, Miller revises her opinion of Jordan several times; in describing the evolution of her own thought, Miller brings the reader with her through these fluctuations, inviting the reader to challenge their perception. In this quote, Jordan is describing the aftermath of her investigation into Jordan’s behavior following the death of Jane Stanford. Speaking with various researchers, Miller hears from some that Jordan may have been involved, while others question that hypothesis. Either way, his behavior seems proof of his ruthlessness, and Miller takes to the archives, to find evidence of Jordan’s better side. While she’s suspicious, she attempts to avoid the very trap she believes Jordan may have fallen into—of holding onto a belief, and distorting evidence to fit her worldview—and so seeks out material that speak to Jordan’s positive contributions. Nonetheless, even Jordan’s positive contributions are tainted; as Miller will explore later in the book, Jordan’s opposition to war, for instance, was informed by his belief that the ‘best’ men would go fight, leaving lesser men behind to breed—an extension of his eugenicist worldview.

. “The word was coined back in 1883 by a British scientist named Francis Galton, a famous polymath in his own right, who also happened to be the half cousin of Charles Darwin. When On the Origin of Species had first come out, Galton had read his cousin’s book and been so inspired he called it a new ‘epoch in my own mental development.’ Once Galton had come to comprehend that there were forces of natural selection shaping the array of life on Earth, it dawned on him that perhaps you could actually manipulate those forces to select for a master race of humans, by breeding out traits he incorrectly believed to be associated with blood: poverty, criminality, illiteracy, ‘feeblemindedness,’ promiscuity, and more.” 

While Charles Darwin advocated for genetic variety as being key to a healthy species, his theories were twisted by those who saw in them proof of their being a hierarchy of human beings. One of them was his cousin Francis Galton, who created the study of eugenics, which set out that certain traits were heritable, and that selective breeding could produce a master race of people. Jordan would become one of eugenics early champions in the United States—without him and other supporters, it’s possible Galton’s theories would have been dismissed. In time, eugenics would go on to play a crucial role in many of the horrors of the 20th century, from the Holocaust to the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of people in the United States. 

“Stroll down the National Mall in Washington, and when you get to Twenty-First Street, look north and you will see him. Francis Galton, in bronze, over the doorway to our nation’s temple to science, the National Academy of sciences. Walk up the main promenade on Stanford’s campus, and one of the first statues to greet you is that of Louis Agassiz, believer that blacks are subhuman, still presiding from his Corinthian pilaster. Behind him is a massive sandstone building, with sweeping archways and a clay tile roof, named in honor of the man who toured our country calling for the ‘exterminate[ion]’ of society’s most vulnerable groups. Jordan Hall.” 

In the latter half of the book, Miller expresses frustration that, despite Jordan’s embrace of the damaging philosophy of eugenics, he continues to be revered as a scientific pioneer. In this quote, Miller demonstrates how this is not only true of Jordan; many figures who promoted beliefs that many people today would find repugnant are nonetheless honored in academic settings. This speaks to Miller’s conclusion that science is a flawed tool, and that certainty should constantly be questioned: while figures from the history of science may have contributed important insights to their field, their legacy is not settled, and should always be subject to reinterpretation.

“To let go, at any point—from his first read of Darwin to his last push for eugenics—would have been to invite a return to vertigo. He would have been transported back to being that lost little boy, shaking before a world that had just taken his brother. A terrified child, powerless before the world, with no way of understanding or controlling it. To let go of that hierarchy would be to release a tornado of life, beetles and hawks and bacteria and sharks, swirling high into the air, all around him, above him.”

In this quote, Miller highlights an aspect of one of the book’s core themes—the inescapable influence of chaos. Miller describes how Jordan clung to his belief structure, a drive that hearkens back to the loss of his brother as a child, and the frenzy for collecting that that loss engendered. In this way, Miller suggests that Jordan’s certainty was motivated by the same fear of chaos that struck her as a child. Nonetheless, Miller ultimately chooses to deal with that fear very differently—by accepting the role of chaos, and the good and bad things that uncertainty can bring, rather than seeking to shut those out.

“As I kept driving, I pictured all the dandelions in the whole wide world nodding their heads in unison at me finally getting it, waving beyond my wheels, shaking their yellow pom-poms, cheering me on. At long last, I had found it, a retort to my father. We matter, we matter. In tangible, concrete ways human beings matter to this planet, to society, to one another. It was not a lie to say so. Not a sappy cop-out or a sin. It was Darwin’s creed! It was, conversely, a lie to say only that we didn’t matter and keep it at that. That was too gloomy. Too rigid. Too shortsighted. Dirtiest word of all: unscientific.”

After encountering a woman named Anna, who’d been forcibly sterilized as a young woman because she’d been deemed ‘unfit,’ Miller drives home, contemplating what this woman’s life meant. Ultimately, she comes to conclude that Anna’s life matters in a relational way—that it might not matter from the standpoint of the universe, but in the story of existence on this planet, all human life, and all lives more generally, contribute something important to one another. As Miller states in this quote, this is akin to dandelions, which some may see as a weed, but others see as a source of medicine, or of habitat. By adding that holding onto the idea that life doesn’t matter is unscientific, Miller is turning the logic on its head; rather than supporting the principle that a scientific worldview necessarily sees the world as devoid of meaning, Miller suggests that holding onto that worldview despite evidence to the contrary is denying the curiosity inherent in science.

“Did you see it there? Flashing across the spectacles of the taxonomists, refracting off their scalpels, glimmering across the cover of this very book—the insidious way that Chaos finally demolished his fish collection once and for all?

It wasn’t lightning or flood or decay or a massive sinkhole opening up and swallowing them all away. No, she had a far crueler method. She made him do it by his very own hand.”

In this quote, Miller is introducing the revelation that she sees as a stroke of cosmic justice, undoing Jordan’s years of careful collecting. In the book’s final chapters, Miller expresses disappointment for how Jordan was able to end his life with his reputation intact, despite the harm he’d caused to others in his pursuit of his goals. But in pursuing his goals, he also laid the groundwork for their undoing; his work on taxonomy, which brought hundreds of fish species into existence through the act of naming, was ultimately used to conclude that ‘fish’ as an evolutionary category doesn’t exist. The fact that this happened is a source of hope for Miller; what had seemed proof of the uncaring world—that Jordan had died a successful and beloved figure—is upended by the surprising conclusion about fish themselves. In this way, this quote speaks to what Miller concludes is a reason to persist despite obstacles; that the world can always surprise us, in both good and bad ways. This quote also contains an instance of a technique Miller uses throughout the book; speaking directly to the reader in the second person, as a way of inviting them into the narrative.

“Still confused? Picture it another way. Imagine that for millennia we silly humans incorrectly believed all creatures that lived on mountaintops were members of the same evolutionary group, called ‘mish.’ The fish of the mountain. Mish. Okay. So mish includes mountain goats, and mountain toads, and mountain eagles, and mountain men—burly and bearded and enjoying their whiskey. Now let’s pretend that, even though all these creatures are incredibly different from one another, they all happened to evolved similar protective outerwear to survive at that altitude. Let’s imagine that outerwear is not scales but plaid. They are all plaid. Plaid eagles Plaid toads. Plaid men. Such that they appear, what with their habitat (mountaintop) and their skin type (plaid) to be the same kind of creature. They are mish. We falsely believed them to be all of a kind.”

In the late 20th century, a group of scientists calling themselves the cladists sought to re-examine the tree of life. In doing so, they concluded that fish, despite sharing an environment and an outer coating, are not the evolutionary group many people, including David Starr Jordan, assumed them to be. Instead, some fish have less in common with one another, evolutionarily speaking, than they do with land animals like cows. This quote is an illustration of this principle, comparing fish to a fabricated category called ‘mish.’ The consequence of doing so is a flattening of the complexity found among all these species, denying their unique traits and, in some cases, the closeness of their relationship to humans. In this way, this quote highlights the theme of the role of names in creating reality: the category ‘fish’ created a reality that does not correspond to existence itself. This quote is also an instance of a literary tool that Miller deploys effectively as a science journalist; the use of metaphor to convey a complex idea in comprehensible terms.

“The famous primatologist Frans de Waal, of Emory University, says this is something humans do all the time—downplay similarities between us and other animals, as a way of maintaining our spot at the top of our imaginary ladder. Scientists, de Waal points out, can be some of the worst offenders—employing technical language to distance ourselves from the rest of the animals. They call ‘kissing’ in chimps ‘mouth-to-mouth contact’; they call ‘friends’ between primates ‘favorite affiliation partners’; they interpret evidence showing that crows and chimps can make tools as being somehow qualitatively different from the kind of toolmaking said to define humanity.”

In this quote, Miller articulates a consequence of naming: that it can be used to divide the world. In this case, the divide that is created is between humans and other species. By using one set of language for people, and another for animals, a reality is created, which blinds us to the similarities between species. It also creates a hierarchy where one doesn’t exist. It underscores Miller’s conclusion that science is a blunt tool that has sometimes been used to cause harm. This quote also highlights how the language we deploy can be used to justify our treatment of others: if humans are at the pinnacle of evolution, then their treatment of other beings is reasonable; remove the hierarchy, and human actions become much less defensible. This also applies to people, and the way names were assigned to human beings as a way of rendering them lesser beings, and therefore less deserving of good treatment.

“I couldn’t keep up with her. One day, while riding bikes along to Potomac River, she started racing me, and I couldn’t catch her. I ran five miles most days. And I couldn’t catch her. I liked that feeling. Her mind was faster than mine, too. She could drum up dazzling rants about tentative drivers, about scrambled eggs, about people who sign their emails with only one initial. ‘Are you that busy?!’ she groaned. ‘Are you that beholden to the cult of overwork that you need to communicate that you do not even have those four milliseconds to spare?’”

In the book’s epilogue, Miller reveals how things took a happy turn in her life, after she met a woman in a bar. The woman hadn’t been who she’d envisioned as a mate, Miller says, and had she been too stuck on her preconceived notion, she would not have ended up with this woman. But this quote highlights the capacity of the universe to surprise us. Ultimately, that uncertainty can be a source of joy—as this quote suggests it is for Miller, in her new and unpredictable relationship. This quote also speaks to Miller’s skill as a storyteller, as it references the opening lines of the book, in which Miller invited the reader contemplating someone they love, and that person being frustrated by signing their emails in the way Miller describes here—in referencing this trait here, and revealing how it applies to her partner, Miller is underscoring her role as a character in this story, who has gone on a journey alongside the reader.