Why Bonnie Garmus decided to break the rules with "Lessons in Chemistry" | Audible.com
Why Bonnie Garmus decided to break the rules with "Lessons in Chemistry"
With 10 unforgettable points of view guiding her narrative, including a hyper-intelligent dog, the author blazed her own trail—much like her protagonist, Elizabeth Zott.
Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.
Note: This interview contains spoilers for Lessons in Chemistry.
Patty K. Rivera: Hey listeners, I'm Patty K. Rivera, an editor here at Audible. Today, I'm honored and excited to be speaking to Bonnie Garmus. Bonnie's debut novel, , has spent over 52 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list, has been translated into 40 languages, and was my personal favorite listen of 2022. Thank you so much for being here and welcome to Audible, Bonnie.
Bonnie Garmus: Oh, thank you Patty, I'm delighted to be here, and I'm so excited to talk with you.
PR: I want to jump right into this thought-provoking, delightful, and necessary novel. Lessons in Chemistry is set in the late-‘50s, early-‘60s California and finds master chemist Elizabeth Zott at the center of the story. For anyone who hasn't listened to Lessons in Chemistry yet, how would you describe it?
BG: Well, I found out after I'd written it that it's considered historical fiction. I had no idea. But I think that the book is really about trying to find a woman's place in the world, trying to reclaim our space as women in the world. And so, really, it's about a woman who refuses to accept what society tells her her role is, and she refuses to accept it not only for herself but for other women, other men, and her dog, and her daughter. So, in other words, she's a woman who has decided to live without the limits that are imposed by society.
PR: I adore Elizabeth Zott. She's logical. She doesn't take no for an answer, and she defies all social norms to do what she really wants to do, which is to be a chemist, and it really leads her to some situations that are quite funny. Something that sticks out—and I am going to go into spoiler territory, but nothing I think too wild—is the elevator scene [laughs] with the gentleman. She sets the boundary; he continues to kind of be aggressive—
BG: Yeah.
PR: And she's just, like, she whacks him with her purse. And tells him, "Go have a bad day." Which is something that, you know, sometimes you wanna tell people to have a bad day, so when I heard that line, I was laughing with little regard to who was around me.
BG: [Laughs]
PR: I've heard you say that Elizabeth was a result of constructive anger. Was it challenging for you to write such a rational character in the midst of that anger?
BG: You know, it was great because I can be, I guess I would say hot-headed. And Elizabeth is not. You know, she's just very straightforward and just refuses to listen to anybody who's not logical or rational. When I was writing her, I was really writing my role model and so allowing her to speak as she would, to clearly define what her boundaries were and then say them out loud, especially with that gentleman in the elevator who was thumping on her stomach because she was pregnant. For some reason, I have seen people do that to pregnant women over and over again; it's as if their bodies aren't their own and they're free game for whoever's in the elevator. It's the strangest thing. So, I really enjoy writing scenes like that.
PR: Now, along with those really funny scenes, there are also some really difficult moments in Lessons in Chemistry, and they're perfectly balanced with those comedic elements, just like the one we just talked about. How important was that balance for you to keep?
BG: I'm really glad that you saw the balance in the book. I really strove to create a balance between the dark and the light because, you know, life gets pretty dark for a lot of us—for actually probably everybody on earth—and I think it's really important to remember that the lightness is what keeps us going. So when I was writing it, I was trying for that balance. I was striving for it. It's also a reflection of the science of chemistry itself, which is the science of balance. You can't have an unbalanced chemical equation. It's also the reason why rowing is such a big sport; rowing is the sport of balance. If you don't balance your boat in rowing, then you end up doing this other sport, and that sport is called swimming.
[Both laugh]
PR: I do want to talk about Calvin for a second because the romance lover in me really enjoyed Elizabeth and Calvin's relationship. And their relationship was beyond being beautiful, it was also so organic. Excuse the pun.
BG: That's a good one. No one's said that yet and that's a really good one.
PR: Just to give you a little background: I studied biology in college, so this book really spoke to the science lover in me that remains, even when I'm here on this path that I love so much more. Can you tell us about the unique parallels that you made between chemistry and romance in Lessons in Chemistry?
"That is where true love is formed—at a chemical level—when you start producing that oxytocin. Then your body is telling you this might be the person for you."
BG: First of all, I'm not a chemist, so I had to research all the chemistry, all the old chemistry, which I found out very late in the game, you can't do on Google. You have to actually learn it from an old textbook because Google doesn't really want to support old science, nor should it because, of course, science marches on all the time. But I found out during my research that not only is chemistry what they call the central science, physics as well—the one that rules them all—but that most of the reactions that we have, and our behaviors, have a chemical component to them. And certainly falling in love has a huge chemical component, and it has various stages of chemistry between people that your brain reacts to when you feel strongly about something.
Of course, there's the usual lust—hormones of testosterone and estrogen—but beyond that, beyond the physical attraction, there has to be more. And that's where your brain starts kicking in and produces things like dopamine, oxytocin, or things like that, that tell you, “I feel good about this person; I feel safe with this person.” And that is where true love is formed—at a chemical level—when you start producing that oxytocin. Then your body is telling you this might be the person for you.
PR: I love that. And I will get into slight spoiler territory here, but I have heard your "Calvin had to go" anecdote.
BG: It's so cruel!
PR: It's hilarious! When did you know that Calvin needed to die in order to move the story along?
BG: So, when I'm writing, I don't write from an outline and it's really important for me to be able to surprise myself, and so I was pretty sure that he wasn't going to last through the whole book. I had no idea I was going to kill him off pretty early on. But it seemed to me it was really important to do that because they had both, Calvin and Elizabeth, gotten to have that chance with each other. It was a really great relationship they had, and it was based on the meeting of minds. They each had someone they admired and could speak to freely about the work that they had passion for, and I love that, that here was a man who was falling in love with a beautiful woman, not because she was beautiful but because she was smart and he recognized it and he admired it, and most of all, he wasn't intimidated by it.
So, I got to the point where I started thinking about how the relationship was really at that wonderful moment where'd they both set their boundaries and said, "This is what I want; this is what I don't want." For instance, she didn't want to get married and take his name, but they'd agreed to have a different kind of family, and it looked like everything was gonna go their way and then boom, he was gone. And I did that to Elizabeth because that does happen to people, and because it's important that we realize, especially as women, as single mothers, that we have resilience, we have strength. People get tested all the time, put through horrible things, and Elizabeth Zott had to face the worst. I knew that if I kept Calvin around that there would be a tendency that we would begin, just as unconscious bias, to see that she was succeeding because of him, and I never wanted that to happen, so he had to go.
PR: That's actually really thoughtful, and it also gives some of these other characters an opportunity to really come in and have these moments with Elizabeth, because there are multiple points of view here. I believe there are 10 total?
BG: Yup, 10.
PR: And one of them is a dog, Six-Thirty, which has completely won me over. What was it like to write from the perspective of so many different characters?
BG: I'd determined as I was writing it that Elizabeth would represent the catalysts in a chemical reaction, that she would change everyone she came in contact with. I didn't want to make that overt, but I did want her to be the center of every action and reaction. So I was able to bring in all these different characters. All of them have a point of view on Elizabeth. Some don't like her. Some are in awe of her. Some are afraid of her. Some don't understand her. Some are irritated by her. But you get the full gamut of reactions that are put forth by a woman who knows who she is.
I think it's so rare to find anyone who really knows who they are, but she really knows who she is. She's very confident in that. To be honest, every single writing book will say, "You may not do this. You may not write from 10 points of view. And you may not write a couple of them on one page or even within a single paragraph." But I thought that's sort of a dumb rule. The book is subversive; the characters subversive, so I'm going to add this subversive element of breaking these walls and not worrying about how many points of view I have—including one from a dog—because I think A) the audience will definitely understand it and will get it as long as I keep it clean and it's obvious who's thinking what. And B) I just think it's more fun.
PR: I read somewhere that Six-Thirty was inspired by your dog, Friday, and I'll admit that he has won even my cat-loving heart over. Because he's the best and I've told people, like, this dog, how have I been so... [laughs]. How did you decide to give Six-Thirty his own stream of consciousness? Because it is beautiful, it is great, it is sometimes funny, he's sometimes like the side-eye in the room, so I'm just—
BG: Well, I'm so glad you enjoyed him. I think especially, as a cat lover, I really appreciate hearing that. And to tell you the truth, I also love cats, and I think that they have a lot to say as well. But I think with Six-Thirty, he was based on my dog, Friday, and she'd been in a shelter, and we had adopted her. She'd been really badly abused by her ex-owner, and he'd gone to jail for that level of abuse, and we adopted her only because my kids found her attractive. My husband and I did not when we first saw her because she had mange. She didn't have any teeth in lots of places, and she smelled horrible. I mean, she just looked like a wreck, a train wreck.
But she turned out, you know, when we brought her home, well, she's basically the Einstein of our home. And she made that pretty clear within maybe the first six months that she was really understanding. It was more than just empathy for a bad day. She was actually studying us when we spoke, and she started to reveal that she knew certain words that we were saying because she would go fetch things that we were talking about. Then we moved abroad and we were living in a German-speaking country, and Friday learned German. And we don't know how, but she passed an hour-long dog obedience test completely in German and off lead. And they told us later that she was the only dog who had passed it in two years.
I put a dog in like her—not just because our dog was picking up language, but because she inspired me to think about how much we take animal intelligence for granted. We really, in our heart of human hearts, we don't believe they're as smart as we are, and after living with a dog like Friday, and after reading a lot of animal-behavior books, I would really argue that point.
Dogs have an exceedingly sensitive sense of smell and hearing, and if any of us had those skills we'd have a superhero kind of status. I decided to have this dog start thinking Elizabeth Zott is very, very rational, and I thought it would be great to hear from the other side of the animal kingdom about us and our irrationality.
PR: And also, leave it up to Elizabeth Zott to have a really rational dog! I can't expect Elizabeth Zott would just have a dog that would just lay, sit, and roll over. [laughs]
BG: I know, I know, but you know, she doesn't have limits for anyone and so she would naturally expect that there should be no limits for her dog. She'd never had a dog before, but she wasn't going to send him to obedience training or anything like that. She didn't want him to be obedient. For me, when I was writing Six-Thirty, I thought of him as the wisest living being in the book and he communicates with [her daughter] Mad, and he's the one who's giving Mad the wisdom overall.
PR: Yes, and because you brought up Mad, she's such a precocious child. And she is on her own journey where she is reading the room at such a young age. She's just like, "Oh, you know, my mom seems a bit sad." Elizabeth basically just applies the scientific method to raising this child that she has. I'm curious: Why did you decide to have Elizabeth raise Mad this way?
BG: I was really interested in writing about a child who's raised in a no-limits atmosphere, and I realized, even today, of course you still hear parents say, "Oh no, girls don't do that" or "Boys don't do that" or "You know how girls are" or "You know how boys are." In fact, these are limits that we unconsciously put on ourselves because, in fact, we don't know how girls are, we don't know how boys are. We're just all human beings. There was a recent study that I saw published in the New York Times about how men actually, because of their higher testosterone level, are the ones who should be accused of being too sensitive at work. Kind of like that.
So I wanted to explore what a child like that, who had a parent who saw no reason to raise her any other way but as a human being, what would a child like that turn out to be? I enjoyed writing Mad quite a bit.
PR: I love that. And I also love that Lessons in Chemistry is not anti-men, but anti-misogynism. Elizabeth experiences misogynistic behavior at the hands of men, but also surprising women—especially Mrs. Mudford and Miss Frask.
BG: Mm-hmm.
PR: Why did you choose to show Elizabeth experiencing such treatment from other women?
BG: When I think of sexism, I think, you know, "Oh, well, that's what men do." But the truth is, women can be sexist too, and they can be a huge problem for women who are trying to overcome sexist hurdles at work. I've certainly run into that at work. I've been on a lot of Zoom calls, and I was on one with a medical school, of all places, and they were saying the whole school is filled with Miss Frasks, you know? So it's really interesting that this is a problem that still persists. The idea that if you're a woman and you put another woman down, that will raise you in the eyes of a male superior. In fact, it reinforces old behavior in men, and it will end up biting that woman in the worst possible way. I wanted to show that Frask has to realize the hard way that she should have never gone down that path.
"The truth is, women can be sexist too and they can be a huge problem for women who are trying to overcome sexist hurdles at work."
It doesn't help her; it doesn't help other women; it doesn't help anyone at work. It's a dead end, and it leads to the same kind of behavior in men. That's not to let men off the hook, because there's certainly a lot of men that persist in these attitudes. So it's just really important to let them know that women in general don't stand for that. It's especially ludicrous that men of science would argue, would have the gall to argue, that women aren't as smart as men. It's not scientifically proven; it never has been. We've never, ever been the weaker sex in any kind of way. Women actually have more physical endurance than men.
PR: I love that. And yes, it's true, and Elizabeth Zott definitely defines encouragement, hope, and just a strong message. Now, narrator Miranda Raison did a beautiful job narrating, but I am curious: With so many different perspectives in the novel, why did you decide against a multicast narration?
BG: You know, I didn't. It's just that when we were listening to audition tapes, it was just one person per tape. And I didn't know I had a choice. At that time, they thought that they wanted Brie Larsen to narrate it because she stars in the series, but she was way too busy to take that on, which I completely understood. And so they sent me four audition tapes, and when I heard Miranda's voice I felt like she could handle it. And to be honest, I've never heard the Audible all the way through, only because I can't hear my own book. I can't read it. I don't even like to open it [laughs]. When I go to events, I rarely read from it, and that's only because when I hear it or when I'm reading it, I start to edit it again. I start to rewrite different parts. So, I haven't heard it all the way through, but I've heard nothing but compliments about Miranda's reading.
PR: It is such a beautiful book and, I mean, after listening to Lessons in Chemistry for the first time, I just remember thinking, “I wished I was Elizabeth Zott.” And my wish is coming true for Brie Larsen because she is getting to play Elizabeth Zott in the upcoming Apple TV adaptation of Lessons in Chemistry! How has it been watching your work be translated into the small screen?
BG: It's just unbelievable, actually. I mean, I don't really know how it's going to turn out. I didn't write it; I'm not part of the adaptation. I did read the scripts and I made 5,000 billion notes on them, but our deal was that I would be permitted to make notes but that they could throw them away if they wanted to. I feel very confident in Brie Larsen. I think that she's an amazing actress and, from what I've seen, I think that she embodies that kind of Elizabeth that I was thinking of and I was looking for. So, I'm very excited that she wanted to be Elizabeth Zott and that she liked the book enough that she wanted to executive produce it.
PR: At the end of the novel, and I am in spoiler territory here, listeners, Elizabeth makes the shocking decision to leave the show. If you continued Elizabeth's story, do you envision that she would have eventually become one of the faces of the women's rights movements?
BG: Yeah, I do. I'm so glad that you said that. I think that she would have been a quiet member. In other words, she's not really the type of woman who goes to marches. She really doesn't understand why there's a need for a march at all when it's so obvious what we should all be doing.
PR: [Laughs]
BG: But I think that she would, definitely, on her show, talk about the movement. I think definitely she would explain how important it is. Basically, on her show, when she became a mother herself—a job that she never wanted, that she had never intended to have—and now, suddenly, she's in a club that she never wanted to be part of: a stay-at-home mom, or a mom in the first place. And now she's basically the leader of that club, that was her pulpit to say to the women of America: "Take yourself seriously because I take you serious and you're capable of absolutely anything. Ignore everything any one else has told you to the contrary because it's not true and it's never been true."
And I think for her, if we continued, every show, she would have put in something that she wanted to say about women's rights and about how you deal with things at work. I had a couple of other episodes that I wrote that didn't make it into the final book, and there was one where—I really love this one—where she actually takes on Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and she explains to him why this won't be working out for him. And I just saw her as this natural leader on television, but you know, television: It's a pulpit.
PR: It definitely is. Now, I have one final question for you, Bonnie. If you and Elizabeth Zott could recommend a listen to me, what would it be?
BG: You know, okay, so this is sort of funny. Right now, I'm judging this science prize and it's the Royal Science Prize—I live in the UK and I'm one of the people who's judging—so I'm listening and I'm reading a lot of science books. However, I would say that one book that Elizabeth Zott would tell you you must listen to, but it's not out yet, is Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, which I just love and I'm sure it will be a beautiful Audible book.
PR: Well, now that I have some recommendations, some great Audible recommendations from Elizabeth Zott, I am going to go get busy listening. And I just have to say, thank you so much for your time today, Bonnie. It's been an absolute delight and pleasure speaking with you today about Lessons in Chemistry.
BG: Oh, thank you, it was my pleasure. I'm honored to have been invited, so thank you, Patty.
PR: Listeners, you can get Bonnie's debut novel, Lessons in Chemistry, on Audible now. Happy listening.
