This article is part of a series called How to Human , interviews with memoirists that explore how we tackle lifes alarms, marvels and bombshells.

One day Lulu Miller , the co-founder of the science podcast Invisibilia, was out birdwatching with her father. She was 7 years old and eye level with his friendly belly, when she blurted out one of those deep questions kids like to ask: What is the meaning of life? Under a hot summer sun, her fathers answer tore open her world. There was no meaning to life, he said. Everything was meaningless.

So begins Millers origin story. That 7-year-old would grow up to become an award-winning science reporter with a mission to tell stories that give meaning to life, to investigate why we are here and how we live out our days. One such story was that of David Starr Jordan, a 19th century taxonomist who sought to bring order to the natural world. He spent decades trying to collect every species of fish, and over the years he amassed a shoal numbering in the thousands. But then the 1906 San Francisco earthquake hit, and his lifes work stored in glass jars fell to the ground and shattered. But instead of wallowing in his loss, he did the unexpected. He tried to put his collection back together. He looked chaos in the eye, and said, I dare you.

Thats where Miller picks up the story. In her new book, Why Fish Dont Exist , which comes out on Tuesday, she dives deep into the story of a man who believed he could make sense of the chaotic world. She investigates how Jordan was able to overcome not only the loss of his lifes work, but the human loss of his children, his wife and his colleagues who all died too young. Jordan possesses a godlike level of resilience and Miller explores where it came from and how she could learn from him.

Why Fish Dont Exist, strangely, could not have been better timed, publishing during a global pandemic that also seemingly came out of nowhere and upended millions if not billions of lives in unthinkable ways.

HuffPost caught up with Miller by phone, as she took a walk in her neighborhood in Chicago. This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.

Where are you right now? What do you see?

The streets are empty, its completely empty because its pretty freezing and rainy right now. But Im all bundled in my kick-ass giant coat and hat and I even see some bark and pine cones and the moss looks extra green because its that gray and rainy.

I feel like we should start our conversation with the topic of chaos. Your book is a study in how chaos strikes without warning, and with coronavirus striking in a similar fashion, it feels as though your book publication could not have been better timed. So thanks for writing a book about chaos!

Youre welcome, I really wanted to sell some books. Make it relevant.

The book opens with this same idea that chaos can strike at any minute Jordan trying to salvage his collection of fish after the 1906 earthquake hit San Francisco. Our world right now feels like it was hit by an earthquake in the form of COVID-19. One minute we were going to work and the next minute we werent, and one minute we were sending our kids to school and the next minute were homeschooling them. And for you, one minute you were about to go on a book tour and the next it was canceled. When the news of the coronavirus started to bubble up did you think of Jordan during this time? Did you see the parallel?

So on one hand, I was so bummed and I was sulky and profoundly disappointed, but then the next step was like, You dont get to pout about this, when your book is about how to move forward in chaos ... You should never be surprised when chaos foils all your plans. That is, you have just written a book that maybe even gets a little preachy at the end about how to see the good in chaos, and if you cant see the good in this moment you are the biggest hypocrite, you have spent 10 years thinking about this kind of moment.

So I think I felt disappointed and then I immediately was like, OK, what did you just try to teach yourself? And I think I havent been as quick as I would have liked to recalibrate or move out of the paralyzed, frustrated zone, which also feels so petty in comparison to everything that is going on. Im so lucky Im safe, everyone I love is safe and well thus far, and I think each day that goes by I just appreciate that more.

Anyway, so I think Im actually authentically on the other side of that aspect but now what Im trying to do is just think about like, okay, we are all in a huge moment, theres so much uncertainty ahead, theres so much uncertainty about what do we do to be a good worker, a good family member, a good citizen. So yeah, Im trying to just think about some of the lessons of the book and how to apply them to my life.

OK, so for the purposes of the reader coming to this story, could you talk about the moment you came across Jordan and what it was like and what you thought about?

Yeah, so I was in my early 20s and it was totally random. He was basically a passing anecdote while I was getting a tour of the California Academy of Sciences, and the little detail was that this guys entire lifes work of fish specimens, fish collecting, discovering new species, ordering them, thousands and thousands of jars a huge amount of it came down in the 1906 earthquake. Shattered, the fish were separated from the names. And as he stood there in all that wreckage, instead of just giving up, he invented this little new technique of sewing a label to a fish so that should another earthquake come, the names would never get separated.

And I dont know, it just struck me as this little perfect emblem of human persistence and just the refusal to back down in the face of all these huge forces that will always do us in. When I first thought about it, I just was like, Oh you fool, chaos will keep destroying you. I dont know what it was, I just thought he was pathetic. I thought he was an Icarus, I thought he was a fool.

And then I didnt think about him for years. Then in my late 20s, I had just screwed up a bunch of stuff in my own life and I found myself in my own proverbial wreckage, personally and professionally; I had left radio and I was trying to write fiction and I was really bad at it and I was lonely and I screwed up a whole relationship and I was in a new place, I didnt really have a community, and I was just alone, and lost. I wanted to keep pining for this person who I really wanted to get back together with but was showing me no signs that he was going to ever take me back. And I suddenly wondered, Am I being crazy or is this hope and this persistence the kind of faith you need that ultimately wins you, sails you through the storms, like is it actually noble and beautiful?

And then I thought of this David Starr Jordan guy again and I was like, I wonder what happened to that dude, because he is the most comic example of this, and did he end up a king with tons of kids and admirers or did he end up alone and poor and a fool?

So then I set out to not knowing what else to do I set out to research his life, thinking Id write a very short essay and get a little clarity or a little hint of what to do for myself. Then it just spiraled because he had such a weird tale and he was also a profoundly interesting person to study because he left behind so much to go through and hes funny and hes kind of evil and it just made him a wonderful person to obsessively research while I wasnt sure what the heck to do with my life.

Thats such an interesting way to take solace in the wreckage of someone elses life and figure them out. As if they could offer a map of the way out.

Its like the journalist predilection; I think sometimes you go and see how other people are getting through similar questions or similar situations and its such a privilege to get to be able to do that for a living. But yeah, I was doing that with him for a while.

This brings me to another question. Jordan just loses so much, like theres so much fire and loss. I was thinking this is actually a story about loss, and that loss, and perhaps tragedy, are other words for chaos. They help label and explain the unexplainable. That was something I took away from everything that kept happening to Jordan.

Well, youre actually totally making me think about something differently right now, which is that I think when I went into writing about him I was sitting in this growing loss of this person, who is alive, and it was my fault, but I was staring at that loss, and in a way I couldnt take my eyes off it, the shape of the loss, what was gone, how this person wasnt even responding to jokes in my head. I was just looking at the shape of the hole of the loss as it grew larger and larger in my life, and considering its contours and studying the loss, I was transfixed by it.

And then here is David Starr Jordan, this person who didnt seem to look and seemed to move right on. I think in a weird way, like for as much as that man named things and ordered things, one thing he was really good at doing was not getting transfixed by his loss. Like the minute the lightning strikes, he doesnt study the fire, the ashes, or wonder what went wrong. He just keeps going. He turns away, he turns to the future. And you see that time and time again, like the fire, the death of the wife, the earthquake, the death of the colleague.

Maybe loss is the one thing he doesnt study and name and maybe thats part of his trick, maybe thats actually part of what he can teach us. I will sit around and consider my loss forever, like three years went by as I stared at it and tried to order it, and its one of the few things he wasnt interested in looking at. For as much as he studied the world, loss was one of the few things he didnt seem to consider.