In Elizabeth, they have someone who takes the business of being a housewife seriously, who recognises how hard it is: “An enormous responsibility, the most undervalued job in the world that, nonetheless, holds everything together … Food is the catalyst that unlocks our brains, binds our families, and determines our futures.”
Set in Commons, California in 1961, “when women wore shirtwaist dresses and joined garden clubs and drove legions of children around in seatbeltless cars without giving it a second thought,” the book follows the trials of Elizabeth Zott, a brilliant chemist and single parent to a precocious five-year-old, Madeline.Īfter being ousted from her job researching abiogenesis in the all-male Hastings Institute, Elizabeth becomes the host of a TV cooking show, where her unorthodox methods (“combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride”) and no-nonsense attitude sees her gain huge popularity with housewives across America. On the face of it, Lessons in Chemistry seems to take a tried and tested formula – a plucky heroine battles the odds to stay true to herself – but the alchemy occurs with Garmus’s seamless blend of dry wit, sharp social satire and highly original premise. The American author Bonnie Garmus has combined the two in her debut novel Lessons in Chemistry, one of the big publishing success stories of 2022, spending five months in the top five of the bestseller charts. Chemistry is the study of the composition, structure, properties and change of matter, a definition that has surprising resonance with the everyday concerns of the writer.
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