Elizabeth Zott is a research chemist in early sixties Southern California who is very good and gets nothing for it — no doctorate, no credit on her own work, and a lab full of men who treat her as furniture. Then, through a chain of events involving a rowing crew, a dog named Six-Thirty, and a daughter, she ends up hosting a TV cooking show and teaching the housewives of America chemistry instead of recipes, on the premise that they can think and that dinner is a reaction. It’s funnier than that summary and angrier too, and Garmus wrote it at sixty-four.
Lessons in Chemistry