Key themes
- The intelligent woman dismissed — and what she does with the dismissal
- Chemistry as a way of seeing the world: everything is explainable
- The accidental revolutionary — the change that happens because one woman won't pretend to be less
About this book
In 1960s California, Elizabeth Zott — a chemist who is not taken seriously in her field — becomes the unlikely host of a daytime cooking show, where she treats cooking as chemistry and accidentally inspires a generation of women to think differently about their intelligence and their lives. A witty, determined novel about how women change the world from the room they're allowed to occupy.
Published in 2022, Lessons in Chemistry spent weeks at the top of bestseller lists and was adapted into a television series. Garmus began writing it in her sixties, drawing on her own experience of being dismissed in a male-dominated professional environment.
Discussion questions
- Elizabeth refuses to simplify herself for an audience she has been told will not understand. How does Garmus build the comedy from this refusal — and what is she saying about the relationship between condescension and change?
- The novel is set in the early 1960s — a moment of feminist awakening. Does it feel historically grounded — or does Elizabeth's voice feel more contemporary than plausible?
- Six-Thirty — the dog who understands more than humans expect — is one of the novel's comic pleasures. What does Garmus achieve by giving us a canine perspective?
- The novel is a comedy with a tragic backstory. How does Garmus balance these registers — and does the comedy make the grief more or less affecting?
- Lessons in Chemistry was an enormous commercial success, appealing to a broad readership. What does it offer that more literary feminist fiction does not — and does this broad appeal require any compromises?
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