“I felt like I needed somebody to look up to, somebody with integrity, somebody who refused, on logical rational scientific grounds, to accept the treatment she was being given.

“I wrote Elizabeth Zott because I was feeling so frustrated at the time,” she says. The novel, which took five years to write, and rewrite multiple times, was originally titled Introduction to Chemistry but people thought it was a science textbook, so she changed it. Write something shorter, she was told amid the rejection slips.Īnd then that infuriating moment of casual misogyny at work spurred her to bring Elizabeth Zott to life.

Garmus had previously written an unrelated 700-page novel, and received “98 rejections” because she’d been “too naïve to realise” that nobody would touch a War And Peace length book from an unknown writer. “I was really upset and couldn’t let it go, so when I went back to my desk, instead of working I wrote the first chapter of Lessons in Chemistry.” “During that meeting I presented my concepts, and people were like, mmm-hmmm, and a few minutes later a man repeated exactly what I’d just said and everyone went, oh wow, that is great! That is brilliant!” She pauses, raising an eyebrow. “I used to write a lot about technology and one day I was in a meeting that was all men,” she says. Speaking on Zoom, she tells me how the book came about, and the genesis of Elizabeth Zott. In person, Garmus is as funny, charming and clever as her writing. A funny, original, elegant page-turner, full of characters that zing off the page, centring around a humane, clear-headed, fearless heroine, her brilliant child, and the best dog character to ever appear in fiction. Publishing is famous for its hyperbole, but in this instance, every word of praise and acclaim for Lessons in Chemistry is justified. It’s something of a publishing phenomenon - after a 16-way auction, the book has been sold in 35 countries and is already being made into an 8-part series for Apple TV starring Brie Larson. This is the plot of Lessons in Chemistry, a debut novel by tech copywriter Bonnie Garmus, 64. Zott is not just teaching women cookery, but encouraging them to challenge the status quo and see themselves as people, rather than wives and mothers. There, she flatly refuses to perform mid-century femininity, but instead uses chemistry to teach cooking to housewives (“combine one teaspoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride”) and without meaning to, gathers a huge following. Circumstances remove Zott from the science lab to being the reluctant presenter of a daytime television cookery show, Supper At Six.

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