Rebecca's Reviews > Lab Girl

“Because I am a female scientist, nobody knows what the hell I am, and it has given me the delicious freedom to make it up as I go along.” This memoir puts so many things together that it shouldn’t work, yet somehow – delightfully – does. With witty anecdotes and recreated dialogue, Jahren tells about her Minnesota upbringing, her long years in education, her ultimate specialization in geobiology/botany, crossing the country to take up academic posts in Atlanta, Baltimore and Hawaii, her long-time platonic relationship with eccentric lab partner Bill, and zany road trips across America for conferences and field work.

On the serious side, she writes about how bipolar disorder complicated work life, marriage and motherhood. Add to all that the interspersed chapters illuminating aspects of plant biology and you get a truly varied and intricate narrative. What I think the author does best is simply conveying what it is like to have true passion for your work, a rare thing: “being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life.” You don’t have to be a science type to enjoy this book. All that’s required is curiosity about how other people live. Jahren might even inspire you to go plant a tree.

Another favorite passage:
“All the baffling things that arrived unwelcome with adulthood – tax returns and car insurance and Pap smears – none of them matter when I am in the lab. … My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe.”

P.S. Bill exists! (Lest you thought, like I did for a while, that he was just so kooky he must be made up.) He appears in the photo illustrating this Popular Science article.