Lessons in Chemistry’s Bonnie Garmus: ‘I’m furious about Roe v Wade. But we are not defeated’ – iNews
Bonnie Garmus thought no one would want to read her book. “Friends would ask me what I was working on and I’d say, ‘I’m writing this novel about a chemist who becomes a cooking show host in the ’60s.’ The idea just fell flat,” she says dryly. “I only told a few friends and I stopped because their faces were like, keep your day job.” Cut to a few years later, and her debut novel Lessons in Chemistry is one of the hottest books of the year, destined to be strewn across sun loungers all summer long.
Garmus, of course, has not had to keep her day job. The 65-year-old quit her 9-5 in advertising after the book became an instant hit when it was published in April, topping bestseller charts. It is now being distributed in 37 countries and will be adapted for a television series starring Brie Larsen.
This will come as no surprise to the book’s mounting list of fans (Nigella Lawson, for instance, reported that she was “devastated to have finished it”). It is gloriously witty and crisply told – and features an inimitable heroine in its central character, the uncompromising chemist and single mother Elizabeth Zott.
When she is fired from her research institute job despite her obvious brilliance, Elizabeth sets about quietly changing the world through a TV food show. Her producers may want her to teach the nation’s housewives to cook, but she’s far keener on encouraging them to rebel against the limits society has set for women. “Your ability to change everything – including yourself – starts here,” she tells them.
The novel skewers the hideous injustices (and worse) that Elizabeth faces as a woman trying to make it in a male-dominated field at the time – injustices that resonate all too powerfully today. “I think all of us have Elizabeth Zott in us,” says Garmus. “Many of us have, along the way, been held back or maligned or abused. Elizabeth resonates with people because they look at her and go, me too.”
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Garmus grew up in southern California but has spent the past five years in London, where she’s speaking from today. The book, she says, came from knowing all too well how it feels to be “put down and passed over if you aren’t male”. She started working on it right after coming out of an infuriating meeting she’d had while working with a firm in Seattle.
“I presented my ideas and they were completely swept aside until a man ended up saying exactly what I had said and everyone called him a genius,” she says. “It wasn’t the first time that had happened. I think we women get accustomed to that sort of misogyny in a meeting. That day, I just could not shrug it off.”
Garmus “always wanted to be a writer”, producing her first story at the age of five, about – to Elizabeth Zott’s dismay no doubt – a princess. “My children found it in our basement,” she says, “and mocked me mercilessly.” Her dad was a scientist studying insects, a job that moved the family around the country.
She studied English at university, but then fell into science writing before eventually setting up her own company as a creative director. All the while, she was trying to write fiction in the background. She had two failed novels under her belt before Lessons in Chemistry came along, including a 700-page attempt that she has joked got rejected by agents “about 98 times”. (“You should never submit a book as a debut author ever that’s 700 pages long,” she advises. “Let me save everyone a lot of time.”)
She set Lessons in Chemistry in the 1960s in part because that was when her mum was a housewife, raising Garmus and her three sisters. “This is sort of a salute to the moms I grew up with in my neighbourhood and how much they sacrificed for us,” she says. “They raised a generation of feminists, so I think our moms were doing something a little bit subversive back then, which is to say, don’t be like me – don’t settle for this.”
Her mother, Mary, to whom the book is dedicated, was a nurse before she gave up work to have children. “My mother probably never would have categorised herself as a feminist,” Garmus says. “But she talked about her time as a nurse and I could tell this was the most meaningful part of her life.”
With Roe v Wade being overturned, Lessons in Chemistry’s scorching portrait of a world where women are treated as second- class citizens feels heartbreakingly pertinent. Garmus was a teenager when the legal ruling was first made. “I remember when Roe v Wade passed. I thought it was one of those great moments in history, where we were marching forward and women were making really positive changes for society. Now I don’t feel that way. I feel that the United States is very regressive and that’s not something to be proud of. You’ll see a lot of pushback.”
Like too many people, she has personal experience of the heinous consequences of removing women’s right to legal, safe abortion. Her voice grows quiet as she explains that one of her mother’s friends died after having an illegal abortion. “It is one of the saddest things I can remember. My mum was really upset about it. I was really upset about it. This woman was desperate. She had five kids. She just could not afford to have another one.”
“The idea that a woman has no control over her own body is one of the most ridiculous concepts I’ve ever heard of,” she continues. “I’m furious. My friends in the United States are furious. I have two daughters, and they’re furious. But we are not defeated.”
Garmus’ daughters are 28 and 30. She and her husband adopted them from China when they were very young – an experience that she says inspired the novel’s message that the families we create for ourselves are more important than biological bonds. Elizabeth Zott and her daughter Madeline gradually team up with other people in their area who don’t quite fit in, from a single dad to a housewife who loathes her husband.
“In the book, there’s a lot about ‘found family’. And that’s one of the reasons why,” says Garmus, referring to adopting. “Also one of our daughters is gay and she has a lot of friends whose families have rejected them because they’re gay or trans or for whatever reason. Just imagining being rejected by your family for something that is biologically normal is tough to see. So I like the idea of found family. Her friends always have family with us.”
She’s delighted Lessons in Chemistry is striking a chord with her daughters’ generation. “This book is really resonating among young women, who I think need to know: let’s not go back there. Let’s move forward. Let’s fight forward.”
Another thing she relishes is how she became a debut novelist at 64, in a publishing world obsessed with youth. “What’s been great is how many young people have said, ‘Thank God, you’re in your 60s, because I’m in my 20s/30s/40s and I still haven’t written this book that I know I have in me.’”
She pauses for a moment before fixing me with the sort of penetrating gaze it’s easy to imagine Elizabeth Zott giving her viewers. “The truth is, age is just another one of these societal ideas of what we’re supposed to do when. I love being this breakout writer at 64, because it just proves Elizabeth Zott’s point. Don’t pay too much attention to society. It will hold you back.”
‘Lessons in Chemistry’ is published by Doubleday at £14.99
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