Nell Greenfieldboyce’s debut book, Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life, delivers on the promise of its title. A carefully woven and emotionally resonant collection of creative nonfiction essays, the book is as much a cabinet of curiosities as it is a glimpse behind the curtain of motherhood in contemporary America.
“For nearly thirty years, I have made my living by writing about science … stories that are designed to inform or delight, [but] I never planned to write about private scenes,” writes Greenfieldboyce, a science correspondent for NPR. “I kept my job as a science reporter separate from my life at home.” Roughly a decade ago, however, that began to change when Greenfieldboyce’s friend invited her to contribute a personal essay to a creative blog run by fellow science journalists. “It felt risky,” she reflects. “A reporter traditionally remains somewhat anonymous, and I had been a reporter for more than half of my life … But once I wrote that piece, I began to write about other personal experiences, too—including ones that were more fraught … I felt compelled to experiment—to essay.”
The essays in Transient and Strange were born out of this experimentation, and their meticulously crafted and graceful narrative arcs showcase Greenfieldboyce’s talents as both a researcher and a storyteller. She writes, “Despite what’s taught in school about the scientific method, much of scientific inquiry, like poetry, involves play and metaphor and idiosyncratic obsessions and just plain fiddling around with mysterious things.”
The mysteries explored within this collection include but are not limited to: tornado chasers and modern weather forecasting, Moby Dick and Cold War fears, aging parents and dial-up internet, children and trauma coping, Stephen Hawking and black holes, abortion and miscarriage, flea circuses and the Black Death, the Black Stone in Mecca and Paleolithic cave art, room tone and polycystic kidney disease, and the eugenics of genetic counseling and fertility treatments.
In each of these explorations, Greenfieldboyce invites the reader into her life and her family, sharing captivating facts about the science behind the phenomena as well as more personal reflections. For instance, writing about a funnel weaver spider who has taken up residence in her house, she muses, “I wondered about her inner experience, what she thought as she crouched in her funnel, whether she had dreams.”
In another essay, on doodling, the author writes, “I think of this book I am writing, the one that’s now before you, another collection of black marks on white that I made in a state of half-aware compulsion … I told a writer friend that my exploration of doodling felt unsatisfying, that this effort wasn’t coming together in a way that made sense, and he reminded me that in an essay, unlike poetry and fiction, one can just come out and explicitly state the point of the piece, the underlying thesis or message. ‘But that implies that there is a point.’”
Indeed, Transient and Strange revels in cultivating an appreciation for layers of reality that are often overlooked or taken for granted—that could easily be mistaken as pointless. But for those who are excited by the mundane—as Greenfieldboyce writes, “Maybe you’re my favorite kind of person, the curious kind, the kind who is intrigued by this unexpected experiment”—and for those who thrill at the chance to follow someone else down countless rabbit holes, the book is a wonder.
For Greenfieldboyce, these rabbit holes are often as akin to science fair projects as they are thought experiments. In considering meteorites, she writes, “Scientists estimate that some 5,200 tons of outer space dust reaches the surface [of Earth] each year; that’s 14 tons per day, about the weight of three ambulances, drifting invisibly down.” You or I might underline this fact on the page, store it up to share as a weird factoid at a party some day, and carry on with our lives. Greenfieldboyce takes a different approach, recounting how she filled a plastic tub with water to place on her roof in the hopes of capturing some of this space dust. She writes, “Even if I’m lucky enough to have my plastic bin positioned out there to catch one at the right time, these spheres of molten-and-then-solidified space rock typically are only a few hundredths of an inch across. A micrometeorite could fit in the valley between two fingerprint ridges. Still, I go through the water in my bin with a strong magnet, to fish out anything that might contain iron.” Failing in that approach, she collects crud from her rain gutters, sifting it and hoping for a discovery that never comes, even as her family lightly ridicules her for her ongoing efforts. But that doesn’t seem to matter much to the author—it’s the search that holds the excitement.
“Maybe I’ll find a meteorite, and maybe I won’t,” she reflects. “Maybe all I’ll ever do is quietly sift through a bunch of ordinary, sometimes beautiful stuff, searching for something ethereal that I’m not equipped to recognize and probably won’t ever truly understand.” In a metaphorical sense, this act of sifting is where the true magic of Transient and Strange lies. Greenfieldboyce writes to reveal the ephemeral and extraordinary nature of our world, sharpening our senses and helping us recognize novelty in the everyday.