Breakaway Books

Authored by Bonnie Garmus; Published 2022; Historical Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️

My mom loved watching Lessons in Chemistry when it appeared on Apple TV, but as I read through the wildly popular novel, I couldn’t find myself joining my mom in her fervor. The novel centralizes a very particular type of intelligence and a very particular type of woman–and while there’s nothing wrong with them, they just didn’t rub me the right way.

The heroine of Lessons in Chemistry, Elizabeth, is a brilliant scientist, and of this, there can be no doubt. After she is unceremoniously fired from her job in the lab, she reluctantly makes a living by presenting a cooking TV show—by treating it as chemistry. At the same time, she is trying to raise a daughter on her own after the tragic death of her partner. Elizabeth is treated patently unfairly as a woman trying to make a career in the hard sciences in the 1950s. It seemed almost over-the-top, but it was almost certainly a realistic portray, up to and including the horrific sexual harassment and the blatant plagiarism of her work. 

Elizabeth is as painstakingly precise in her cooking presentation as in her science experiments. I have to say, one of my favorite elements of the whole novel was the way that she talked about food. It was innovative and, while undoubtedly science-forward, she still made me want to walk into my kitchen and bake. What put me off was the rest of her—Elizabeth clearly had ambition and book smarts, but when it came to emotional intelligence, she consistently stumbled. Moreover, it seemed as if she felt that it was beneath her to grow in this area, to seek to understand how others view the world. Women are so frequently asked to conform to others’ expectations, and I applaud her defiant rebellion against those demands, but the world becomes less rich when we refuse to even try to see the world from another’s perspective. 

It made it seem all the more unrealistic for her cooking show to become wildly popular. The way she talked about food was beautiful, and I’m sure she was inspiring–but didn’t she ever rub her viewers the wrong way? The way she assumed her worldview was the only correct and logical one must have come across in her presentation, and to me, it just didn’t make sense. Her relationship with her across-the-street neighbor was a wonderful contrast, providing a fount of lived wisdom to help shortly after the birth of her child. Their relationship seemed grounded and real. 

All of this is to say–if you’re looking for an empowering to show you that you can fly in the face of male expectations, go on ahead and pick up Lessons in Chemistry. Just remember to tuck in with a plate of brownies, and that in the end, it is fiction.