For more than a year, Bonnie Garmus’ debut novel, Lessons in Chemistry, has clinched a berth on the New York Times bestseller list. On October 13, the beloved characters will leap off the page and into an Apple TV+ miniseries. Oscar-winner Brie Larson stars as the uncompromising chemist-turned-television-chef Elizabeth Zott, and this will be Ms. Larson’s first starring role in a series in over a decade.
The underdog story is set in the Mad Men era of 1950s America where Elizabeth, a young single-minded chemist, has battled hard knocks her entire life. Her unscrupulous preacher father is in jail. Her mother has fled to South America to start a new life, and her older brother has committed suicide. For most of her life, she has been a loner, fighting sexism in the ivy-covered walls of her graduate education and her workplace, Hasting Research Institute.
Elizabeth does not want to fall in love, but she cannot deny the chemistry she feels with Hasting’s brilliant, Nobel-Prize-nominated chemist, Calvin Evans. After all, love is chemistry. Hormones plus attraction. And she and Calvin, both misfits, have both. They cannot suppress their feelings, but allegations of nepotism and jealousy by her all-male team make Elizabeth’s life miserable and threaten her career as a chemist.
She believes that she, and all women, can accomplish anything a man can. After being dismissed from the lab, Elizabeth is presented with the opportunity to prove her credo as a single mother and reluctant host of America’s most beloved cooking show, Supper at Six. Elizabeth is determined to not only teach women to cook but to challenge the sexist societal conventions that have suppressed women in the home and workplace. Each night she greets her audience with a yellow pencil tucked into her hair as “both a weapon and symbol of her ability to define her own future,” explains Garmus.
Garmus also incorporates her personal obsession with rowing into the plot as a metaphor for the necessity of balance and cooperation in our lives. Scull rowers operate as a team, rowing as one, and any incongruity can make the difference between winning and losing a race. Unlike the society of Elizabeth’s time, there are no tensions instigated by religion, race or sex in the boat. Through Calvin, Elizabeth is introduced to the sport and quickly understands and respects this non-scientific lesson.
The supporting cast of quirky cohorts: her neighbor and friend, Harriet Solan, her producer Walter Pine, her precocious daughter Madeline, and Reverend Wakely buttress Elizabeth on her rocky journey to stardom. Even her overachieving rescue pup, Six-Thirty, instills laughs into this funny, charming and thought-provoking novel.
The novel was born when Garmus, a Bay Area advertising executive and the only woman in a pitch meeting for a major technology campaign, received no feedback for her presentation. Then, as she tells it, one of the vice presidents in the room, a man, regurgitated her presentation and he received credit for the campaign. Garmus told the Seattle Times: “I put up a fight because I’m not exactly a shrinking violet … And everyone ignored me. I basically stomped back to my desk. But you know what? It was a really great thing in a way because I was in such a bad mood that instead of working on the deadline that I was supposed to be working on, I sat down that day, and I wrote the first chapter of Lessons in Chemistry.”
The success of Chemistry and its TV adaptation came as a surprise to the perseverant 65-year-old Garmus. Thankfully, like her alter-ego Elizabeth, she never quit although her manuscript had been rejected 98 times.
The TV adaptation was green-lit in January 2021, more than a year prior to Chemistry’s publication in March 2022. The eight-episode period drama will air exclusively on Apple TV +. Besides starring the series, Larson is one producer of the project.
So, this autumn, slip on your lab coats and goggles and get ready for Lessons in Chemistry, life and love.
