Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author Name: Bonnie Garmus
- Book Genre: Adult, Adult Fiction, Chick Lit, Feminism, Fiction, Historical, Historical Fiction, Humor, Romance, Womens Fiction
- ISBN # 9780385547345
- Edition Language: English
- Date of Publication: 2022-3-31
- File Format: PDF / EPUB
- PDF / EPUB File Size: 3.5 MB
November 1961
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.
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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.
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