As a Chemical Biology major, I picked up Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry expecting a story about science. I didn’t expect it to be a story about loss, or one of the most encouraging books I’ve read in a long time.
Elizabeth Zott is a gifted chemist in the early 1960s, working at a research institute where her colleagues assume she’s a secretary. Her work on abiogenesis—the question of how life could arise from nonliving chemistry—is serious and ambitious. Then her partner, Calvin Evans, the one person who treats her as an intellectual equal, dies suddenly. Soon after, she is pushed out of the lab and ends up hosting a cooking show called Supper at Six. There, she teaches her audience that cooking is chemistry and trusts them to keep up. What starts as a detour becomes a platform, and Elizabeth uses it to urge women to question the expectations placed on them.
The romance is real, but I never felt it was the center of the book. What stayed with me was how Garmus treats grief as bigger than losing a person. Elizabeth loses Calvin, but she also loses her position, her research, and the future she had mapped out. The book understands that you can mourn a dream or a path you were sure you’d take, not only a person.
That idea hit close to home. At Stevens, we are always working toward the next internship, offer, or line on the resume. We get used to measuring ourselves by what comes next. Then the position falls through, an experiment fails for the third time, or we realize the career we planned isn’t the one we want. Sometimes things simply happen that no amount of effort could have prevented.
Lessons in Chemistry doesn’t treat perseverance as pretending those losses didn’t happen. Elizabeth grieves, gets angry, and is often thrown off course. What she does is keep building a life anyway, bringing the same rigor and curiosity that made her a good scientist. Even on a cooking set, she approaches problems like a chemist. The book is also funny, and Six-Thirty, Calvin’s dog, is a delight.
It also made me think about how the fight for women’s recognition has changed. Elizabeth’s barriers were blunt: She was underestimated in the lab and on the water as a rower, no matter what she accomplished. Today, many of those doors are open, but questions about how women are recognized and represented remain. We can see that in recent conversations surrounding female athletes’ pushback against Sydney Sweeney’s Novig sports betting ad, which some athletes have criticized for its portrayal of women in sports. The conversation is very different from Elizabeth’s experience, but it raises a related question: When women enter spaces where they have historically been underestimated, are we actually seeing and valuing their skills and accomplishments?
What I admired most is that Elizabeth never stops being curious, and she never accepts that she should shrink herself to fit someone else’s expectations. As students, we can borrow that. We can chase the subjects that fascinate us, even when they don’t fit the plan, and support the people around us in the lab and on campus. If we do it well, the students who come after us will have more opportunities than we did.
If you’re a STEM major, if you’ve ever had a plan fall apart, or if you just want a book that is smart, funny, and hopeful, this is one to pick up. That’s the real lesson in chemistry: Sometimes you have to experiment, fail, adapt, and try again before you find the thing that works.
