Lessons in Chemistry
It’s a rare thing when a novel hits all the right notes - Bonnie Garmus’ debut, Lessons in Chemistry, does just that for me.*
Like many of you, I suspect, I have a big stack of books in my bedroom, so ready to be read that sometimes I think the word ready was invented simply to describe this situation. I have a bad habit of allowing more to climb onto the pile than get moved onto my lap. Lately, though, I’ve tried to limit their online purchase - something I justified during the height of COVID as a way for me to pass time while keeping my local bookstore in business - and spend less time rifling through the Little Libraries that have found their way into Weston. My biggest source of reading material though are friends who pass their finds onto me. I find it hard to say no to these but with the limited space of Chandlerville on the near horizon, I am redoubling my efforts to do so.
Lessons in Chemistry, however, came with such a strong recommendation I couldn’t say no. It sat near the top of the pile for a month until one of my social media heroes, Sandra Shamas posted the following on Facebook, “You know that moment when you’ve read something so stunningly funny, that you just have put your head back and laugh?!? This book; Sharp, smart, funny all the while speaking the honest truth. So. Damn. Good!”
Shamas had the peak of her comic career in the 90s. Her stand-up routines recounted stories of the absurdity of being a feminist in a heterosexual relationship: “My Boyfriend’s Back and there’s Going to be Laundry,” “Wedding Bell Hell,” and so on. Classic stuff. So helpful to me as I was becoming an adult. She lives alone on a farm north of Toronto now, divorced apparently. She still comments on feminism, politics, and common sense. I love her. So with her strong endorsement, I took Lessons in Chemistry with me on a recent train trip to Montreal.
Set in the late 1950s, Garmus’ protagonist, Elizabeth Zott, fails to achieve her dream of a PhD in chemistry because she refuses to meet her advisor’s expectations of sexual favours. She ends up, instead, working in a chemistry lab where she meets Calvin Evans, a renowned chemist with a Cambridge PhD, an addiction to rowing, a mysterious past, and social awkwardness that mirrors her own. It’s true chemistry when they fall in love intellectually and physically. While she refuses to marry him, they live together to the shock and fascination of their co-workers. Evans dies in an accident and she discovers that while they had taken measures to prevent it, his legacy to her is a pregnancy she never wanted. She loses her job - unwed pregnant women are not welcome in the lab. Zott raises her daughter, Mad, while earning a living as a host of a TV cooking show where she teaches housewives about chemistry and the fulfilment of potential.
That doesn’t sound all that amusing, but trust Sandra Shamas and me when I say it did not disappoint on the funny-front. Garmus’ description of the frustration and mystery of looking after an infant is why I chose not to have one. The relationship between Zott and her dog, Six-Thirty (named for the time they met), is both witty and poignant. Zott and Evans’ discussion about marriage and the absurdity of name-changing conventions can only make you chuckle. But while there were many laugh-out-loud moments, I also wept sharing in the sadness and frustration of our heroine’s story and then tearfully rejoiced at some of the triumphs the female characters experienced as Garmus wrapped up her tale.
This book captures being a woman who doesn’t fit society’s expectations. The 1950s provide the perfect time period, describing that angst I first thought about when I read Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, that challenged the prevailing definition of American women as housewife/mother.
The women in Lessons in Chemistry each relate to this definition: Zott, a frustrated academic forced into child-rearing; her friend, Harriet, trapped in a loveless marriage; the underemployed chemistry lab secretary discriminated against for failing to meet the expectations of physical beauty imposed on women; and the countless female fans of Zott’s television show who tune in with note-pad in hand, ready to find existential meaning beyond the boundaries of their daily lives. Garmus’ fictional account is more relatable than Friedan because of her deft touch with plot, character, and yes, humour. But it’s the same story.
Maddeningly though, while the story is set 65 years ago, we haven’t moved the needle much on the issues Garmus explores. Sure, women have a wider choice of career now - indeed, law schools attract more than 50% women to their first-year classes. The legal profession, though, continues to be highly gendered as women move into practice, with fewer and fewer women rising to firm leadership roles or advancing as litigators. The bulk of them, once mothers, move into positions that allow them to focus on mothering and managing households, just as Garmus describes in her novel. Engineering is gendered even in universities still, as I wrote about here. As a woman who is childless by choice, I am still the outlier - only 15% of US women are childless by their 50s, according to the US Census. After achieving the legal right to keep a birth surname after marriage in the 1970s, still 80% of heterosexual brides change their names. The wedding industry continues to profit from its dreams of expensive fairy-tale nuptials even though the percentage that divorce grows. Canadian women continue to earn 89 cents on the dollar compared to men. Women outnumber men in the playground next to my park by a large number all summer long, except on Mother’s Day, of course, that sacrosanct time when fathers man-up. Custody arrangements are worked out post-divorce where men give up time with their children in exchange for money, they being the bigger breadwinners, or so it seems from the outside. No, not all that much has changed.
Doubtless my giggling and tears prompted a few sitting near me on VIA Rail to give thought to picking up a copy. One fellow passenger, an older woman, stopped to commend me for reading an actual physical book. When she saw the title, she told me her 18 year old niece had just gotten an A+ in chemistry and wondered if I thought the young women would like the book.
“Yes!” I replied. “And you should read it too.” Everyone would benefit from these chemistry lessons, but young women in particular need to understand Freidan’s feminine mystique is not as historic as it should be.
If you want a taste of Garmus’ writing to whet your appetite, give this short piece a read. You will laugh. But you’ll be left thinking a bit
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