Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Book Preface
Back 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; back before anyone knew there’d even be a sixties movement, much less one that its participants would spend the next sixty years chronicling; back when the big wars were over and the secret wars had just begun and people were starting to think fresh and believe everything was possible, the thirty-year-old mother of Madeline Zott rose before dawn every morning and felt certain of just one thing: her life was over.
Despite that certainty, she made her way to the lab to pack her daughter’s lunch.
Fuel for learning, Elizabeth Zott wrote on a small slip of paper before tucking it into her daughter’s lunch box. Then she paused, her pencil in midair, as if reconsidering. Play sports at recess but do not automatically let the boys win, she wrote on another slip. Then she paused again, tapping her pencil against the table. It is not your imagination, she wrote on a third. Most people are awful. She placed the last two on top.
Most young children can’t read, and if they can, it’s mostly words like “dog” and “go.” But Madeline had been reading since age three and, now, at age five, was already through most of Dickens.
Madeline was that kind of child—the kind who could hum a Bach concerto but couldn’t tie her own shoes; who could explain the earth’s rotation but stumbled at tic-tac-toe. And that was the problem. Because while musical prodigies are always celebrated, early readers aren’t. And that’s because early readers are only good at something others will eventually be good at, too. So being first isn’t special—it’s just annoying.
Madeline understood this. That’s why she made it a point each morning—after her mother had left and while her babysitter neighbor, Harriet, was busy—to extract the notes from the lunch box, read them, then store them with all the other notes that she kept in a shoebox in the back of her closet. Once at school she pretended to be like all the other kids: basically illiterate. To Madeline, fitting in mattered more than anything. And her proof was irrefutable: her mother had never fit in and look what happened to her.
It was there, in the Southern Californian town of Commons, where the weather was mostly warm, but not too warm, and the sky was mostly blue, but not too blue, and the air was clean because air just was back then, that she lay in her bed, eyes closed, and waited. Soon she knew there’d be a gentle kiss on her forehead, a careful tuck of covers about her shoulders, a murmuring of “Seize the day” in her ear. In another minute, she’d hear the start of a car engine, a crunch of tires as the Plymouth backed down the drive, a clunky shift from reverse to first. And then her permanently depressed mother would set off for the television studio where she would don an apron and walk out onto a set.
The show was called Supper at Six, and Elizabeth Zott was its indisputable star.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1: November 1961
Chapter 2: Pine
Chapter 3: Hastings Research Institute
Chapter 4: Introduction to Chemistry
Chapter 5: Family Values
Chapter 6: The Hastings Cafeteria
Chapter 7: Six-Thirty
Chapter 8: Overreaching
Chapter 9: The Grudge
Chapter 10: The Leash
Chapter 11: Budget Cuts
Chapter 12: Calvin’s Parting Gift
Chapter 13: Idiots
Chapter 14: Grief
Chapter 15: Unsolicited Advice
Chapter 16: Labor
Chapter 17: Harriet Sloane
Chapter 18: Legally Mad
Chapter 19: December 1956
Chapter 20: Life Story
Chapter 21: E.Z.
Chapter 22: The Present
Chapter 23: KCTV Studios
Chapter 24: The Afternoon Depression Zone
Chapter 25: The Average Jane
Chapter 26: The Funeral
Chapter 27: All About Me
Chapter 28: Saints
Chapter 29: Bonding
Chapter 30: 99 Percent
Chapter 31: The Get-Well Card
Chapter 32: Medium Rare
Chapter 33: Faith
Chapter 34: All Saints
Chapter 35: The Smell of Failure
Chapter 36: Life and Death
Chapter 37: Sold Out
Chapter 38: Brownies
Chapter 39: Dear Sirs
Chapter 40: Normal
Chapter 41: Recommit
Chapter 42: Personnel
Chapter 43: Stillborn
Chapter 44: The Acorn
Chapter 45: Supper at Six
Acknowledgments
About the Author
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