Why Fish Don't Exist

Lulu Miller is an American radio producer and science journalist. Because the book is a memoir, Miller is present as the narrator and speaker. Her interest in David Starr Jordan emerges from her search for meaning and for support, having been introduced to the meaningless of existence at a young age by her scientist father and having struggled for much of her life with depression and suicidal ideation. Ultimately, her encounter with David Starr Jordan does provide a model for how to live a good life—but not in the way she anticipated at the outset of the book.

Miller’s description of her own life is the testament to the impact of chaos: Miller grew up in a family with two older sisters and a bold, rule-breaking scientist of a father who embraced the meaningless of life and let the realization fuel him to live a life that was “big and good” (36). He encouraged Miller to adopt a similar perspective. Once, while on a family vacation as a child, Miller asked him if what life was about. In response, he told her that nothing mattered; there was no God, but one should embrace life anyway. Miller says that as a child, she struggled to reconcile herself to this idea, which was even more difficult for her as an adolescent. At sixteen, she survived death by suicide. Ultimately, though, she survived her adolescence and found refuge in university, in the ‘curly-haired man’ who would become her partner. Seven years into their relationship, however, they broke up, after Miller was unfaithful. The schism let chaos back into Miller’s life. In the aftermath, she began looking to David Starr Jordan as a model for how to persist in the face of constant chaos.

Miller deploys her talents as a radio producer to investigate Jordan’s life. She interviews experts and delves into archives to learn how Jordan kept going despite losses, setbacks, and frustrations. She identifies with some of what she finds, but ultimately she is forced to reject Jordan as her role model. Above all, she is troubled by Jordan’s ruthless pursuit of his ambitions and his oversized self-confidence—in spite of the fact that he criticized self-delusion in other people—and especially, his enthusiastic support for eugenicist ideas. Miller’s investigation into Jordan leads her to an answer that she didn’t anticipate. In her research, she finds a book called Naming Nature, from which she learns that the evolutionary group of fish—to which Jordan in many ways devoted her life—does not exist. The fact we think it does, Miller learns, is reflective of the human tendency to follow our intuition, which sometimes leads us astray. By letting go of accepted categories, Miller writes that she’s found a source of hope in her own life—that the world always has something new to show us. Miller writes about her own coming out of the closet as an example of this. She concludes the book by saying, “My measly brain could have never dreamt up something as infinitely intoxicating as her” (195), referring to her girlfriend.