Lessons in Chemistry

I loved Lessons in Chemistry (2022) by Bonnie Garmus and have no idea why it took me so long to get to it!

Elizabeth Zott is a chemist in 1959, at a research firm in southern California. She meets Calvin Evans, the hotshot of the office, when she appropriates beakers from his lab because, as a woman, she is not given the equipment she needs to do her job. They later meet in a movie theatre when he vomits on her, and such begins their relationship.

Today, we would say that they both had extremely traumatic childhoods, but that was the way of the world in the 1940s. She refuses to get married because she knows she will not be able to maintain her career afterwards, but they do cohabitate, which was a scandal at the time. I would also say today that neither Calvin nor Elizabeth read as neurotypical, but which was seen as just weird or odd at the time. A dog finds them, who Elizabeth names Six-Thirty because that’s the time he came into their lives. Calvin teaches her how to row, which is kind of funny since she can’t even swim.

One technique about the writing that I loved was that it’s written in a kind of omniscient perspective, including parts that are written from Six-Thirty’s perspective.

Tragedy strikes, and Elizabeth remains, now pregnant, when neither of them wanted children to begin with. Of course, single motherhood was unacceptable then, so she loses her job and any way to make a living. She does the best she can after the birth of their daughter, Madeline (who Elizabeth calls Mad), with the help of Six-Thirty and a neighbor.

One day, after trying to fix a problem Madeline is having at school, Elizabeth is offered a job filling a cooking timeslot on the local television station. She’s a chemist, not a TV personality! She’s a hit, though not without the scandal of being a woman who speaks her mind live on television.

Meanwhile, Mad is on a quest because of her family tree project at school. She writes a letter that sets some things in motion and we find out the truth of Calvin’s backstory.

It’s really well-done. One of my millennial book group friends thought that Elizabeth was whiny and didn’t understand why she couldn’t get over herself. But I don’t agree. The things that happened to Elizabeth happened routinely. I was a child in the 1970s, and I remember my mother and grandmother talking about when they couldn’t even wear pants outside the house and had to wear dresses. My grandmother didn’t ever even learn how to drive. Because they didn’t go to college, the jobs they were able to get were very limited, and even if they had been able to go to college, they still would have been limited in what they would be able to study. The 30 years between 1959 and 1989, which is about when I graduated from college with a degree in Chemistry, was almost indescribable in terms of how women thought and what we expected for ourselves.

The fact that Elizabeth Zott was a self-taught chemist in 1959 was huge–she was a complete outlier and it was clear that chemistry was what she loved and she knew herself to fundamentally be a chemist. The obstacles that she overcame were impressive, and the abuse and sabotage that she had to deal with were shameful.

And it was pretty close to weight-neutral. There were some neutral descriptors of one character’s thick ankles and thin hair, and Elizabeth even tells women in her studio audience that they don’t need diet pills. There wasn’t any explicit anti-fat bias, which I was thankful for, because the 1960s were not a great time to be a fat person.

I highly recommend Lessons in Chemistry, especially for younger women–this is really what it was like when your mothers and grandmothers were young. Let’s not go back there.