Lessons in Chemistry
This book, which shot to the top of the bestseller lists as soon as it was released, is both hilarious and satisfying to anyone with a feminist bent.
It begins in 1961. Elizabeth Zott is a brilliant research chemist, formerly employed at Hastings Research Institute in southern California. She’s also the single mother of a precocious five-year-old daughter.
By a quirk of fate — and the need to pay her bills — Elizabeth has become the host of a popular daily cooking show called “Supper at Six.” Her show treats cooking as chemistry (which it is) and it has a subversive subtext: she assumes her afternoon TV audience — mainly women — are intelligent people who are capable not only of understanding what she is teaching but also of making life decisions for themselves. She ends every show with a signature line: “Children, set the table. Your mother needs a moment to herself.” Audiences love the show.
But this was not the life Elizabeth envisaged. Ten years earlier, she was a hardworking and conscientious graduate student in a PhD program in chemistry, when she was sexually assaulted by her supervisor. But when she fought him off, the university sided with him and booted her out of the program rather than lose an important researcher.
When hired at the Hastings Research Institute, neither her boss nor other members of the all-male team take her seriously. The exception is Calvin Evans, their brilliant Nobel-nominated star researcher: “Why wouldn’t we want women in science?” he says. Calvin and Elizabeth fall in love. The Institute tolerates Elizabeth for his sake, but she fights a losing battle to gain recognition for her work on her own merits.
The story gets more complicated from there, with moments both tragic and laugh-out-loud funny. Ultimately, after many twists, there’s a rewarding ending.
Bonnie Garmus says she situated the novel in the early 1960s as a salute to her mother’s generation of overlooked housewives. But the core message, of women’s need to fight for rights and recognition, resonates equally today. In fact, Garmus was inspired to write the novel when she came home from yet another meeting where her ideas were ignored — but the same ideas earned a “wow” when a man presented them as his own.
Garmus was born in California in 1957. She always had ambitions to write, and studied English Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. After graduation, she worked as an editor for a scientific publisher, then became a freelance copywriter specializing in technology and medicine.
Meanwhile, while working and raising two daughters, she was plugging away at writing fiction. She put aside her first attempt at a novel without finishing it; she finished the second one, but it was far too long and was rejected by 98 agents.
She began writing Lessons in Chemistry in 2015. She was still working on it when her husband’s job took them to London in 2017. There she signed up for a creative writing course, which eventually led to her meeting the agent who fell in love with Elizabeth Zott and the voice of the novel.
The agent guided Garmus through several rewrites, then sent the book out to publishers where it ended up in a 16-way auction, won by Doubleday. After publication in April 2022, it shot to the top of several bestseller lists, and was Goodreads Readers’ Choice for best first novel of the year. Apple TV is developing a series adaptation, tentatively scheduled for release in 2023. Garmus and her husband live in London UK.
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