When I awoke, and after I’d finished my first bout of violent vomiting, I heard my parents already talking through the options to get me out. My mom had been an emergency-room nurse and a physician’s assistant for 35 years. But on the 700 missions she and my dad had conducted as volunteers for the Bend, Oregon, search and rescue team, neither had ever dealt with a rattlesnake bite.
Lying on my back in the grass, I thought maybe that was all the venom would do—make me sick. Or maybe I was dying. I didn’t know it then, but in the medical community, the rule about rattlesnake bites is “time is tissue.” How many minutes or hours elapse before you get the antivenom, usually in a hospital, determines your fate: an afternoon in the ER, amputation, or perhaps, in my case, death on a stone bridge.
Though Renaissance nobles could not have missed the unfortunate traits that ran like fractures through the House of Habsburg, not until the 1830s did the term heredity acquire its modern connotation as a biological legacy. Because the term first specified material inheritance, often from eldest son to eldest son, we tend to think about heredity in terms of straight lines: bloodlines, patrilines, and eventually germ lines. Our word for a diagram of the lines of descent—pedigree—is probably derived from the French pé de grue, or “crane’s foot,” evoking an image of a pencil-like leg ending in straight, splayed toes.
Yet linear thinking doesn’t begin to do heredity justice, and in his sprawling, magisterial new book, the science writer Carl Zimmer shows why. She Has Her Mother’s Laugh brims with rich stories and colorful actors—some sinister, some brilliant, some both—and delves into scientific research, history, and ideas made intimate through the author’s personal experiences. The result explodes any unitary idea of heredity. Zimmer limns portraits of multiple intersecting heredities, more like the web of a spider than the foot of a bird.
So why write a memoir at all? Throughout his career, Lynch has faced constant questions about his celebrated but often divisive, occasionally impenetrable projects, from the groundbreaking TV show Twin Peaks to movies like Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Dr. He's always been reluctant to unpack his nightmarish symbolism, or let inquisitive fans past the surface level of his life.
Still, fans looking for insight into Lynch's methods will certainly find it in the book's accumulation of memories and opinions, drawn from his family, romantic partners, and collaborators. Lynch and his co-author, journalist Kristine McKenna, alternate chapters in the book, with McKenna first presenting a traditional, heavily sourced report on an era in Lynch's life, and Lynch discussing the same years from a more personal point of view. They describe the results as "basically a person having a conversation with his own biography."