If you have been into a bookshop since 2022, or perhaps even just breathed in and out, you could not have failed to clock the phenomenon that was Lessons in Chemistry. Bonnie Garmus’s debut remains a global sensation. The story of Elizabeth Zott, a gifted research chemist who, forced out of her lab by rampant 1950s misogyny, becomes the inspirational host of a TV cooking show, has so far sold a staggering 9m copies around the world.
It spent the best part of two years on the Sunday Times bestseller list, was translated into more than 40 languages, and scooped numerous awards. In 2023 it became an Emmy-winning TV series; a year later New York Times readers voted it one of their top 100 books of the 21st century. Elizabeth Zott made such a splash that even her favoured brand of rowing machine saw a spike in sales.
What was the key to its prodigious success? In the aftermath of #MeToo, readers embraced a heroine who refuses to be cowed by injustice, who, thanks to resilience, pragmatism and straight-up hard work, ultimately comes out on top. The book is smart and very funny, a propulsive mashup of feminism and fairytale that balances darkness with whimsy, heartbreak with hope.
It is also carries a shamelessly inspirational message. When you go home today, ask yourself what you will change. And then get started.” Garmus, then a copywriter, wrote the first chapter of Lessons in Chemistry in a fury after a meeting where a male colleague flagrantly took credit for her ideas: her anger “lit a fire under me about telling this story”.
In Peck & Peck, her follow-up, there is less outrage crackling on the page but there are most definitely fires, and not metaphorical ones either. At the otherworldly New York offices of Peck & Peck, the most enigmatic, prestigious and dysfunctional poetry magazine in the world, the 39 editors have a single aim: to publish the world’s finest poems. Failed submissions – and every week there are thousands – are incinerated by the team of prison parolees who work in the mailroom.
Garmus’s sharp wit and gift for offbeat characters are both at full throttle in this quirky story of Batter Gray, a boy named for his mother’s improbably intrepid dog. Batter’s parents – his father teaches history, his mother designs typefaces – are eager for him to pursue a sensible, by which they mean lucrative, career; but Batter cares only for poetry. When by a marvellous fluke he lands a job at Peck & Peck, he is ecstatic, only to find himself in the basement churning out photocopies.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
