Lessons in Chemistry

by Bonnie Garmus

“What makes me me, then?” “What you choose to do. How you live your life.” “But lots of people don’t get to choose how they get to live. Like slaves.”

place the steak in the pan. Be sure and wait until the butter foams. Foam indicates that the butter’s water content has boiled away. This is critical. Because now the steak can cook in lipids rather than absorb H2O.”

Scientists expect mistakes, and because of it,

we embrace failure.”

“Calvin and I were soulmates,” she began.

“Do you know how extraordinary that is?” she said. “That a man would treat his lover’s work as seriously as his own?”

“I fell in love with Calvin,” she was saying, “because he was intelligent and kind, but also because he was the very first man to take me seriously.

“As for my background, it was my brother who raised me,” she continued. “He taught me how to read, he introduced me to the wonders of the library, he tried to shield me from my parents’ devotion to money. The day we found John hanging from the shed rafters, my father didn’t even wait for the police to arrive. Didn’t want to be late for a performance.”

“Let me rephrase. To guard against eggplant’s tendency toward bitterness—”

“Forget it,” she said. “Life is bitter enough.”

“I make brownies on my bad days,” Elizabeth confessed. “I’m not going to pretend that sucrose is an essential ingredient required for our well-being, but I personally feel better when I eat it. Now let’s get started.”

“One of the things I like about cooking,” she said as she added flour, “is its inherent usefulness. When we make food, we don’t just create something good to eat—we create something that provides energy to our cells, something that sustains life. It’s very different from what others create.

“Not true. Every parent has to earn a living. It’s part of being an adult.”

“What was my dad like?” Mad asked, taking a small bite of cookie. “He…” Frask hesitated. She realized she had no idea what he’d been like. “He was completely in love with your mother.” Madeline lit up. “Really?” “And your mother,” she continued for the first time without jealousy, “was completely in love with him.”

Adults and their on-again, off-again relationship with the truth.

For the last few weeks, she’d done her best to keep her head up—ignore the article, she told herself. Carry on. That was the coping strategy that had carried her through suicide, sexual assault, lies, thievery, and catastrophic loss; it would again.

Everyone has a breaking point;

“I think about death a lot,”

“He didn’t know how to swim either.”

Courage is the root of change—and change is what we’re chemically designed to do. So when you wake up tomorrow, make this pledge. No more holding yourself back. No more subscribing to others’ opinions of what you can and cannot achieve.

‘A moment for yourself’—that

It was Harriet who told me to use that moment to reconnect with my own needs,

to identify my true direction, to recommit.

I know what it’s like to fail a loved one.

“He was the most brilliant, loving man; the kindest, the most interesting—”

“except to say we had chemistry. Actual chemistry. And it was no accident.”