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Bonnie Garmus is a copywriter and creative director who has worked for a wide range of clients, in the US and abroad, focusing primarily on technology, medicine, and education. From Seattle, she currently lives in London with her husband and her dog, 99.
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This bio was last updated on 05/16/2025. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.
Elizabeth Zott is a character we would all love to know or even become; where did such a personality spring from?
Fury! I started Lessons in Chemistry about seven years ago. I'd just come out of a meeting, irritated by some garden variety sexism, and as I sat down to work, I suddenly realized someone else was sitting there, too. Her name was Elizabeth Zott. Like me, she wasn't in a very good mood. "You think you've had a bad day?" she said. "Well, get a load of this."
Now I should add that Elizabeth Zott wasn't new to me—she'd had a minor role in a different novel I'd started (and shelved) years before. But what was new to me was her certainty of who she was and what she had to say—about society, culture, racism, sexism, religion, and most of all, about change. How to do it and why
Was there a particular idea or story that inspired you to write Lessons in Chemistry?
Not really, although I remember feeling like I really needed a new role model— someone who stood up for what she believed in; someone with integrity. That feeling was directly influenced by current politics and a deep-seated feeling that irrationality is on the rise. So I wanted to create a character who represented common sense—who ...
Ramona Ausubel is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of the novel No One Is Here Except All of Us and the short story collection A Guide to Being Born. Her work has been ... (more)
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Lessons in Chemistry
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Kerri Maher is the USA Today bestselling author of The Paris Bookseller, The Girl in White Gloves, The Kennedy Debutante, and, under the name Kerri Majors, This Is Not a Writing Manual: Notes for the Young Writer in the Real... (more)
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Lessons in Chemistry
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