Lessons in Chemistry

by Bonnie Garmus, Doubleday, 2022, 400 pages
Reviewed by Ted Streuli, January 19, 2023

You’re going to fall in love with Elizabeth Zott. Six-Thirty, too. And probably Mad. You won’t be able to help yourself.

Bonnie Garmus, a copywriter, sat down and wrote the first chapter of “Lessons in Chemistry” because she had just come from a meeting and she was pissed off. Elizabeth Zott, a minor character in a novel Garmus years earlier had given up on writing and banished to a shelf, came rushing back, ready to take on the world in the lead role.

Thank goodness.

Zott is a 1960s chemist, smart and beautiful, and stuck in a lab with a bunch of 1960s chemists who are not as smart, not as beautiful, and not at all female. Her respite from the rampant sexism is the world-famous Calvin Evans, the lab’s celeb, who falls for Zott’s brain and helps her fall in love with rowing.

When Evans is killed in an accident (Six-Thirty blames himself), Zott finds herself alone, pregnant out-of-wedlock – that was a thing 1960s people cared about – and unemployed. She takes a job at a local television station, where the men want a way-above-average sexy hostess to show average housewives how to cook a meatloaf for their husbands, shake her ass for the camera and mix a cocktail at the end of each episode.

Instead, Zott uses the platform to encourage women to challenge every quo that is status while explaining why the steak should be added to the pan when the butter foams because that shows the liquid has cooked out of the butter so the steak can absorb the lipids instead of H2O.

For Elizabeth, cooking wasn’t some preordained feminine duty. As she’d told Calvin, cooking was chemistry. That’s because cooking actually is chemistry.

And chemistry, our protagonist reminds us, is all about change.

Chemistry is change, and change is the core of your belief system. Which is good because that’s what we need more of, people who refuse to accept the status quo, who aren’t afraid to take on the unacceptable.

You will love Zott for her confidence and her unwillingness to put up with chauvinists and idiots, for showing us just how bad it was for women a mere sixty years ago, and how far we’ve come and how far we still must go. She stirs her mostly female audience to a quiet revolt as she encourages them to think for themselves, to assume control of their own lives, to pursue their dreams and, if necessary, to kick the bastard to the curb.

“Whenever you start doubting yourself,” she said, turning back to the audience, “whenever you feel afraid, just remember. Courage is the root of change—and change is what we’re chemically designed to do.”

Early in their relationship, Evans has to persuade the reluctant Zott to try rowing. Her agreement is a greater commitment than Evans realizes; she’s too stubborn to admit that she doesn’t know how to swim. But she comes to adore the sport, which becomes a metaphor for Zott’s humanist world view that no one person is any more important than another.

“Rowing is almost exactly like raising kids. Both require patience, endurance, strength, and commitment. And neither allows us to see where we’re going—only where we’ve been. I find that very reassuring, don’t you?”

Zott’s daughter, Mad, ages enough in the course of the story that we realize she has inherited all the smart genes from her brilliant parents, and that, by growing up in the ’60s and coming of age in the ’70s, she not only would benefit from the early feminism her mother sowed, but also would advance the cause. If Elizabeth Zott is Gloria Steinem with an Erlenmeyer flask, Madeline is Maya Angelou, Cyndi Lauper singing “She Bop” and the indomitable RBG all rolled into a precocious package that will one day decline Mensa’s offer because she can’t be bothered with the likes of its members.

“I don’t have hopes,” Mad explained, studying the address. “I have faith.” He looked at her in surprise.

“Well, that’s a funny word to hear coming from you.”

“How come?”

“Because,” he said, “well, you know. Religion is based on faith.”

“But you realize,” she said carefully, as if not to embarrass him further, “that faith isn’t based on religion. Right?”

Garmus fights the status quo on more than feminism. She takes on religion, sorrow, confidence, food, and our notion of families and relationships. She even makes us rethink dogs. She has Zott, and sometimes Mad or Calvin, address those topics from a scientific point of view, one so rudimentarily logical and rational that it’s hard to imagine we thought about it differently just a paragraph ago.

He’d not had much experience with families, but he’d always assumed that being part of one was important: a prerequisite for stability, what one relied on to get through the hard times. He’d never really considered that a family could actually be the hard times.

Do not be frightened off by the title, fellow English majors. “Lessons in Chemistry” will delight you.

Along the way, it will give you a bit of a history lesson, teach you a few things about sociology, force you to think philosophically, help you reconsider religion, adjust your view of food, and introduce you to rowing and animal husbandry. There’s even a hint of chemistry. With all that in a mere 400 pages, why bother with tuition?

“Lessons in Chemistry” topped the NYT bestseller charts and was on everyone’s best-of-2022 list. TV rights were optioned before the book was published. But why take their word for it?

Take mine: Read it.

As Elizabeth Zott tells her TV audience: “Design your own future. When you go home today, ask yourself what you will change. And then get started.”