Campfire Reads Review: Lab Girl
“ People are like plants: they grow toward the light.”
Author: Hope Jahren
Goodreads Description: Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Her first book is a revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also so much more.
**note: this post contains content that could be considered spoiler-y**
As the daughter of a scientist, Jahren’s story struck a special chord with me. Like her, I also used to visit my dad’s lab as a kid. I remember the buzz of the fluorescent lights, stainless steel tables covered in test tubes and beakers, and candy from the vending machine down the hall. My dad’s office was on the top floor of his building and his window looked out over the expansive university campus. From that window, I watched the 4th of July fireworks, chemical reactions that were bigger and brighter and louder than any of the ones my dad made in his lab, but not nearly as important.
I wasn’t a particularly great scientist myself, but I grew up with a deep appreciation of the people who were. Hope Jahren is one of these people. She has dedicated her life to a profession that is often underpaid and underappreciated, and yet, she still gets up every day and does the work she’s called to do.
“ A cactus doesn’t live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn’t killed it yet.”
Not only is she an accomplished scientist, but she’s also a phenomenal writer. Hope handles her prose with the same care and intimacy that she does the seeds she plants. I listened to it on audiobook (narrated by Jahren herself), and I could hear the emotion her own words stirred in her. At times, it sounded like she was crying which made me almost cry, too, especially when she said this about her best friend and fellow researcher, Bill:
“That no matter what our future held, my first task would always be to kick a hole in the world and make a space for him where he could safely be his eccentric self.”
I thought this was a beautiful statement about what it means to love someone who doesn’t quite fit in. She took it upon herself to make sure Bill always had a place where he could feel like he belonged, regardless of what other people might think.
But it wasn’t just Bill who didn’t fit in. Hope had to face judgment from her own peers in the scientific community. Some of her ideas were criticized for being unorthodox, and on top of that, she was a woman in a male-dominated field. This made getting funding for her research challenging and she had to work that much harder to make up the difference.
“Being paid to wonder seems like a heavy responsibility at times.”
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed my reading (listening) experience with this one. At its core, Lab Girl is a simple story about a scientist, her best friend, and her plants, but despite its seemingly sterile subject matter, it has an enormous amount of heart. I really hope Jahren writes more books, because her talent for writing is only surpassed by her talent for science.
