Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life
Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist is one of those slippery little books that defy neat shelving. On the surface, it’s about David Starr Jordan, the celebrated ichthyologist and first president of Stanford, who spent his life pinning order onto chaos, one fish at a time. Beneath that polished veneer, though, lies a story of ego, eugenics and the dangerous seduction of certainty – all told with the pacing of a mystery and the heart of a memoir.
Miller traces Jordan’s obsessive quest to catalogue the fish of the American West, building what was then the world’s most comprehensive fish collection. Every jar, every label, feels like an act of defiance against disorder. Even when disaster literally smashes his life’s work – several times – Jordan simply starts again, refusing to accept defeat. At first, his tenacity is almost admirable; then Miller quietly asks the question we’d rather not: at what point does grit blur into delusion?
“When people have this feeling of personal inefficiency, compulsive collecting helps them in feeling better.”
This is where the book’s central tension lives: in the gap between scientific objectivity and the very human messiness behind it. Jordan believed fish taxonomy reflected God’s tidy design, yet he was happy to ignore evidence that didn’t fit. Miller uses his story to probe how “facts” are constructed, showing that taxonomy, classification and even the idea of species are shaped by the biases of those doing the naming. It’s science, yes, but with its seams deliberately on show.
And then there’s the truly unsettling bit. Beyond the fish and the fieldwork, Jordan emerges as an early evangelist of American eugenics. While we like to file eugenics neatly under “Nazi atrocities, mid-twentieth century, far away from us”, Miller reminds us that Jordan helped lay the intellectual groundwork much earlier, arguing for compulsory sterilisation to “improve” the gene pool. It’s a chilling portrait of how scientific authority can be weaponised against the vulnerable, dressed up as progress.
“‘When you give up the stars you get a universe. So what happens when you give up the fish?’ I had no idea. But I knew in that moment, that was it. That waiting on the other side of the fish was something else. That letting go of the fish would result in some sort of existential exchange. And I figured the result would be different for everyone. Just as it had been with the stars.”
What keeps the book from becoming unbearably grim is Miller herself. This is narrative non-fiction with a memoir’s heartbeat. As she unpicks Jordan’s legacy, she threads in her own grief, family history and crises of belief. Her voice is wry, tender and occasionally devastating, as she questions why we cling so desperately to systems of order – stars, fish, family myths – to keep the chaos at bay. The title’s central provocation, that fish might not exist at all (taxonomically speaking), becomes an oddly liberating metaphor for letting go of categories that no longer serve us.
“There is grandeur in this view of life.”
I finished the book feeling both enthralled and slightly unnerved. Miller’s stylistic flourishes occasionally teeter on the edge of over-crafted, but the emotional and intellectual payoff is worth it. Why Fish Don’t Exist is less a biography than an existential detective story about science, power and the stories we tell ourselves to stay afloat. And while it may be a fascinating account of how subjectivity can influence even a highly respected scientist, bringing him down to earth a notch, at heart, it is a reminder of how we hinge our lives upon our faiths, rational or not, to survive the curveballs it throws at us.
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