Deconstructing Elizabeth Zott: Part One

On why--so far--I like the tv series of "Lessons in Chemistry" more than the book

In the Apple TV+ series “Lessons in Chemistry,” Elizabeth Zott, thinking she’s likely pregnant, goes after-hours to the Hastings Research Institute, where she works as a laboratory technician, and steals two frogs. She takes them home, puts each one in a labelled glass container—one marked “control” and the other “experimental”—prepares a hypodermic needle (containing, we presume, her urine) and injects the one destined to be “experimental.” After some time, she takes the cover off the glass containers. “Experimental” has begun to ovulate and is shedding eggs. Elizabeth is pregnant.

Elizabeth is a scientist, so she probably has had some experience doing unpleasant things to lab animals. But still, the matter-of-fact way she injects that frog—cooking up an elaborate roast and vegetables while she waits the required time—made me wince. Watching the scene (which isn’t in Bonnie Garmus’s book) I likely had the same expression on my face when my daughter, who works on a farm, came home and described twisting a dead sheep’s head and then cutting the carcass up with her co-workers. She hadn’t killed the sheep (it had a heart attack in transport) but it certainly didn’t bother her to help turn a once-living creature into chops.

It wasn’t just my daughter’s familiarity with life and death on a farm that made her so much less squeamish than I am (not to mention less hypocritical, as I’d eat those chops if they came to me wrapped by the butcher at Fresh Market. ) When she was in third grade, her class had a field trip to a Native American history fair up near Red River gorge. One of the “hands-on” exhibits was a deer that the children were given instructions in skinning and then had the opportunity to do themselves. While the other little nine-year-old girls ran away, pretend vomiting, Cassie eagerly stepped up. People who hunted for survival had done it on that land for centuries; why would she turn away from it? She just didn’t get what the problem was. Now, at 24, there’s no kind of animal injury or illness, no procedure that the vet needs help with, no matter how bloody or gruesome, that she runs from. If she’s needed, she’s right there.

After the frog episode on “Lessons in Chemistry,” I asked Cassie if she’d ever dissected a frog at school—something that was part of the science curriculum when I was growing up and that I avoided by employing my thermometer-on- the-radiator trick. She said they hadn’t been expected to do that, but surprised me by saying she wouldn’t have been willing to. “What purpose would it have had?” she asked. Cutting up an already-dead sheep had purpose; pinning down and cutting open a squirming frog just so some kids could see its innards for real did not. She felt the same way (“what for?”) about pretty much everything they were expected to do in school, both curricularly and socially. It was “so much effort,” she told me, to figure out what other people were really thinking or wanting (“I don’t like having to read between the lines”) and when it came to conventional expectations of girls, she couldn’t see the point of most of it. I’d come to pick her up at school and sitting where she couldn’t see me, I’d watch her come down the side of the hall, downcast eyes, avoiding the small groups of chatterers that filled the middle.

Most teachers didn’t get her, and she didn’t get them. She didn’t try to please them and they interpreted her inability to smile when expected as sulking. She did great on standardized tests (telling me she mostly just guessed; “those things are pretty predictable.”) but if asked to write something, would produce as few sentences as possible. In middle school, I had her tested for attention deficit disorder, and the psychologist said no, that wasn’t the problem, she tested way too smart. He was a little behind the times—some of the brainiest people are ADHD—and eventually a more enlightened therapist did make that diagnosis. Still, she confused me. How could someone be so intelligent and hate to read?

All the while, she was quietly absorbing all the knowledge and skills that did make sense to her, that did “have purpose” for her. And she became a kind of genius at those things. When she was sixteen and got her learner’s permit, she astounded her father and me by immediately knowing how to drive—stick shift!—without one lesson. “I’ve just been watching you guys,” she told us. She can pretty much put anything together without reading the directions. She “sees” with the eyes of a mechanic: she knows what parts will fit and what parts won’t, just by looking. But it’s working with horses that really made the world click into place for her. She not only knows just about everything there is to know in “normal” ways, but can interpret/intuit everything a horse is feeling, wanting, or afraid of. “What makes you so good at that?” I asked her. “I pay attention to the whole of them,” she said.

Cassie considers herself “neurodivergent,” and I certainly recognize in her many of the qualities I’ve read about. I won’t go into them all here, but I will say that there’s a special place in my heart for female characters that share a certain mixture of social cluelessness, stubbornness, sureness about their abilities, unwillingness to compomise on their natures, and tender vulnerability. Often, they are brilliant in some way (in fact, perhaps that’s a bit of a cliche at this point.) Often, they aren’t big huggers. (When she was tiny, Cassie wouldn’t cling to me when I picked her up, the way other babies put their arms around their moms and let themselves be carried.) They find it hard to “read” other people. They carry on their bodies/in their faces disappointment and depression about the cruelty and/or stupidity around them. Which may make them be seen as angry, arrogant, distant. But when you win their trust, it’s precious and enduring. And whether or not you are comfortable with the label, I’d put Elizabeth Zott in a line with them. And for me, it’s what makes the show charming.

Who would I put in that line? Let me start with what Garmus herself says about her pleasure in creating Elizabeth:

“It is her misfit nature—her inability to fit in—that makes her a stand-out. Because when she presents an undiluted version of what she thinks—all the while wielding a fourteen-inch chef’s knife—she becomes impossible not to watch.

From the very beginning, I liked writing a character who knew who she was; someone who didn’t constantly question herself or spend hours wondering what she should be. Sometimes I’d find myself marveling at her confidence: she doesn’t agonize—she acts. But with that kind of confidence comes a sort of blindness, and naturally that gets her in trouble. People react to her with a mixture of astonishment, frustration, humor, envy. Elizabeth does not have the time or inclination to people-please. She also has no room for avoidance, manipulation, lies, and fakery. Seems like a lot of extra work. Why not just state facts? Why not just tell it like it is?

There were days when I would find myself saying out loud, “You really want to say that, Zott? You really want to go there?” And she’d say, “What? Why not?” She has this streak of cluelessness mixed with a kind of fed-up impatience that I loved writing.”

By now, many of you may recognize some other fictional characters: forensic anthropologist Temperance “Bones” Brennon (Emily Deschanel), detective Elise Wassermann (Clemence Poesy) of “The Tunnel” (based on Sonya Cross—played by Diana Kruger— from the original Swedish series, “The Bridge”), and most recently, chess wizard Elizabeth “Beth” Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy) of “The Queen’s Gambit”:

“The Queen’s Gambit” is based on the 1983 novel by Walter Tevis, who at the time said in an interview for The New York Times:

“I write about losers and loners - if there's a common theme in my work, that's it. … In 'The Queen's Gambit,' my heroine is an outsider. In 'The Man Who Fell to Earth,' the character is also an outsider, a tall, skinny extraterrestrial who also ends up in Kentucky. Pool [SB: Tevis also wrote “The Hustler”] is a dazzling game, a loner's game, and so is chess. They aren't team sports. You don't get the girls in high school by shooting pool or looking across the chess board. Actually, I consider 'The Queen's Gambit' a tribute to brainy women. I like Beth for her bravery and intelligence. In the past, many women have had to hide their brains, but not today.''

The women who have made “Lessons in Chemistry” a global bestseller might not agree with the “not today.” Garmus, then a copy-editor, wrote the book in a fury after a meeting at work “laden with average sexism” in which her suggestions were routinely dismissed, only to be applauded when they came, minutes later, out of the mouth of a man. Not surprisingly, Garmus has Zott present (anachronistically, but not the only fantasy-element in the book) many mini-lectures about gender inequality (the novel begins in 1951, over a decade before Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and just two years afterThe Second Sex, which Zott is unlikely to have read; she references Margaret Mead, not Simone deBeauvoir.) A couple of examples:

He [Calvin] looked back at her, sensing trouble. “The problem, Calvin,” she asserted, “is that half the population is being wasted. It’s not just that I can’t get the supplies I need to complete my work, it’s that women can’t get the education they need to do what they’re meant to do. And even if they do attend college, it will never be a place like Cambridge. Which means they won’t be offered the same opportunities nor afforded the same respect. They’ll start at the bottom and stay there. Don’t even get me started on pay. And all because they didn’t attend a school that wouldn’t admit them in the first place….“Instead,” she continued, “women are at home, making babies and cleaning rugs. It’s legalized slavery.

Elizabeth Zott held grudges too. Except her grudges were mainly reserved for a patriarchal society founded on the idea that women were less. Less capable. Less intelligent. Less inventive. A society that believed men went to work and did important things—discovered planets, developed products, created laws—and women stayed at home and raised children. She didn’t want children—she knew this about herself—but she also knew that plenty of other women did want children and a career. And what was wrong with that? Nothing. It was exactly what men got. She’d recently read about some country where both parents worked and took part in raising the children. Where was that, again? Sweden? She couldn’t remember. But the upshot was, it functioned very well. Productivity was higher; families were stronger. She saw herself living in such a society. A place that didn’t always automatically mistake her for a secretary, a place where, when she presented her findings in a meeting, she didn’t have to brace herself for the men who would invariably talk over her, or worse, take credit for her work. Elizabeth shook her head. When it came to equality, 1952 was a real disappointment.

Garmus has said that she wrote the character she herself needed. “I felt like I was writing my own role model, and so she came easily.” And no doubt, Elizabeth’s Feminism 101 lectures have resonated with a lot of readers, some of whom grew up in the 50’s and others of whom are being subjected, thanks to the GOP, the evangelical Right, and the Supreme Court, to a rebirth of restrictions and ideology we thought (such fools, huh?) were relics. But for me, the explicit feminist lessons jarred with the character. Of course, Elizabeth would be frustrated and angry with the sexism of her co-workers (more about which in Part Two, coming later this week.) But would she have a sociology and theory of patriarchy? I had less trouble accepting the dog with the 500-word vocabulary (which by the way, Garmus claims a former dog of hers had!) Six-Thirty needed those words (more precisely, readers needed those words) to represent how he felt about the woman (and later, family) that had saved him from a life totally unsuited to his nature (he was trained to be a bomb-sniffer, which actually does come in handy later in the novel.) How else would we access his inner life except to give him words? But we didn’t need Elizabeth’s lectures on sexism. In terms familiar to writers, we didn’t need to be “told”; every episode showed us how it was for a woman scientist in the 1950’s.

So far—four episodes in—the series has trimmed away most of those lectures, allowing the plot-lines and the character-development to do the work. Elizabeth’s character, in particular, is a great example of how editing, by pruning away the awkward, undisciplined growth (something every writer knows about), reveals the essential. I’m not sure that had I only read the book (after I saw the first few episodes) I would have seen Elizabeth as so clearly in a line with the other fictional characters I mentioned above—and therefore, not so touching when she falls deeply, unalterably in love. (In the latest episode of the series, she imagines Calvin alive, cuddling their child, sitting on the floor beside her, consoling her over his death, and although since “Six Feet Under” it’s become a pretty sodden, familiar tv trope, it works here, because we believe in the depth of her loss.)

If I had only read the book, I also doubt that I would have found her depression as convincing as it is in the series. Of course, the visual medium and the acting have a big advantage here. The first time we see Elizabeth smile is in the second episode, in a flashback. She’s exulting with her advisor over having passed her PhD orals. A few moments later, he brutally rapes her—and that ear-to-ear smile is extinguished. (Brie Larson is so magnificent at wordlessly conveying Elizabeth’s usual depression that you almost can’t believe her face can do that smile.) By giving us a peek at Elizabeth’s trusting exuberance before the rape (which is followed by the administration’s response, which is to demand that she either apologize for sticking her advisor in the stomach with a freshly sharpened number 2 pencil or leave the program) we understand her, not just as the prim, grim moralist of the first episode, but as someone whose capacity for joy has been battered away.

That capacity is re-awakened when she meets her soul-mate: a chemist of national renown, Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman,) who is as socially unassimilated as Elizabeth is and, like her, is kept awake at night thinking about abiogenesis (how biological life in all its complexity arose from simple non-living matter.) They both are arrogant about their expertise but (under the surface of hyper-rationality) tender-hearted. And—oh my god—he actually takes her seriously as a scientist, and unlike his colleagues, sees the injustice (and lack of efficiency) of a world in which women are discriminated against. Especially brilliant ones like Elizabeth. (“Why would someone discriminate based on something as intellectually non-determinative as gender?” Calvin wonders.)

Partly because of the sweet chemistry between Larson and Pullman—they are both so adorable—their love affair is not just believable, but truly tragic when he‘s struck and killed by a bus (here, as in many places, the details differ from the book, but I’m not going to get into that here; those differences are described all over the internet.) Although it’s not fair to compare a not-half-way-through series with the book, so far I’m enjoying the relationship more in the series than the book. The book, to put it mildly, doesn’t have a very coherent narrative; after the first few chapters, it goes this way and that, genre-traveling between drama, droll wit, mystery-unraveling, more feminist-messaging, magical realism, and trauma-narrative. So far the series, besides ripping into 1950’s style sexism (and if you don’t believe it was that bad, come back for “Part Two” of this post) foregrounds the love story—which many readers, misled by the cover (as a Times article observed, paired with the title, the image shouts “STEMinist romance novel,”) expected from the book. Garmus has even received some angry emails; “They were like, ‘You’re the worst romance novelist ever!” She recalls. She laughs at this; she didn’t intend to write a romance novel, and most reviewers of the book have seen the love story between Calvin and Elizabeth as “incidental.” Garmus agrees, apparently, and has called the book more a “love letter to scientists and the scientific brain.”

Personally, I adore the love story, which is given even more heart by having Six-Thirty, in the next episode, narrate the tale of his own miserable beginnings, which left him feeling inadequate and despairing. Finding “purpose” in caring for Elizabeth and Calvin (“I could protect her. I could protect him.”) he blames himself for Calvin’s death (in the series, but not the book) and is heartbroken that he can’t rescue Elizabeth from her grief: “She didn’t speak to me for days. She didn’t touch me. She barely looked at me. I had hoped time would make her forget that it was my fault, but how could it? Because failures have a way of being unforgettable.” For a minute I feared we were heading for something dog-story horrible. But Elizabeth doesn’t blame him (in the book, she blames herself, for having given Calvin the leash that he trips over, landing head-first on the concrete pavement) and takes him everywhere. It’s the same episode in which Elizabeth does the frog thing, which for Six-Thirty is superfluous, as he “knew the baby was here even before she did. The way I know it’s going to rain long before it does.” And he begins to have hope again: “Something had lit up inside of me…I was given another chance to keep my family safe.”

I’m not even going to try to justify how moved I was by this episode. If you’re a dog-lover, you probably know why without my explaining. Having Six-Thirty narrate may be a literary device, but the kind of love he expresses is just what we feel when we come home, grumpy and exhausted or perhaps worse, and are greeted as though we are the most glorious, precious, extraordinarily wonderful gift. We make our dogs happy just by coming home, just by being, and some of us have dogs that are deeply intuitive too. One of mine—Piper—is a pitbull rescue who would hang around on the floor near the fireplace when I had my students over the house for class. It was a writing class, and sometimes they read their stories out loud. One of my students, reading a wrenching memoir of abuse, had trouble continuing. There were no tears or sobs; there were no obvious signs of emotional distress except for the halt in the reading. But Piper, who had been completely relaxed, virtually dozing, jumped up, bounded clear across the room, lept into her lap and began to nuzzle and lick.

I loved that episode. But there’s a lot of episodes left in the season, and I’m worried that they may go too far, as Garmus does in the book, in making Six-Thirty not just a perceptive, protective doggie, but a genius. In one chapter, he ponders what the baby’s name should be:

“Six-Thirty got up and padded off to the bedroom. Unbeknownst to Elizabeth, he’d been stashing biscuits under the bed for months, a practice he’d started just after Calvin died. It wasn’t because he feared Elizabeth might forget to feed him, but rather because he’d made his own important chemical discovery. When faced with a serious problem, he’d found it helped to eat. Mad, he considered, chewing a biscuit. Madge. Mary. Monica. He withdrew another biscuit, crunching loudly. He was very fond of his biscuits—yet another triumph from the kitchens of Elizabeth Zott. It made him think, Why not name the baby after something in the kitchen? Pot. Pot Zott. Or from the lab? Beaker. Beaker Zott. Or maybe something that actually meant chemistry—something like, well, Chem? But Kim. Like Kim Novak, his favorite actress from The Man with the Golden Arm. Kim Zott. No. Kim was too short. And then he thought, What about Madeline? Elizabeth had read him Remembrance of Things Past—he couldn’t really recommend it—but he had understood that one part. The part about the madeleine. The biscuit. Madeline Zott? Why not? “What do you think of the name ‘Madeline,’ ” Elizabeth asked him after finding Proust inexplicably propped open on her nightstand. He looked back at her, his face blank.—”

The beginning—about the cognitive value of stuffing ones face—is funny. And so is Six-Thirty’s absurd mental travels through kitchen items suitable for the baby’s name. But for me at least, it started to get a little too weird with mention of Kim Novak in “The Man With the Golden Gun.” And putting Proust—open to exactly the section on madelines!—on Elizabeth’s nightstand turned the episode right into a scene from a Disney cartoon (that is, one with a joke in it to appeal to adults.)

So far in the series, Six-Thirty has remained believably (and touchingly) canine. If he turns into a (highly educated) human who just happens to be in the body of a dog—as he becomes at places in the book—I’m not going to like it as much.

Brie Larson and Lewis Pullman in Lessons in ChemistryApple TV+

I’ll have more to say about “Lessons in Chemistry” in my next post, and I’ll be moving beyond comparisons with Elizabeth’s fictional sisters to consider a real-life Elizabeth who I’m surprised Garmus doesn’t mention in any of the interviews I’ve read. In one of those interviews, she says that she didn’t base Zott on any particular scientist, but wanted it to be someone “marginalized, underestimated, and misrepresented” who “could be looked up to and be inspiring.” She cites “people like Gloria Steinem, Michelle Obama, Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Megan Rapinoe, and Ketanji Brown Jackson as the real-life Elizabeth Zotts in the world.”

None of them scientists. She doesn’t mention Rosalind Franklin, probably the most misrepresented and marginalized female scientist in all of history.

But I will.

Please stay tuned and come back for the next episode of “Deconstructing Elizabeth Zott”!

P.S. Let me know if you like the new color scheme.

---