Lab Girl Review

Editor's note: This is the second in our science book review series. Lab Girl, by Ethnobotanist Hope Jahren is a touching memoir, explained further below. Purchase it on amazon, or check it out at your local library!

In my experience, there are good books, and then there are books that change the way we see the world. Lab Girl is one of the few books that I can legitimately say have changed my life. In reading, I laughed and I cried, and I emerged with a new understanding of maturity, of passion, and of drive. Perhaps it was because I saw so much of myself in Jahren, in her Minnesota childhood and the descriptions of the homeland we share. I saw myself in her love of books and words, and her passion for biology and the natural world, and her stories resonated with me on a level few stories have, at least once I got into them.

Reading Jahren's prose is like learning to swim; at first it's profoundly difficult, and the reader finds themself awash with metaphors, drowning under complex sentences that never seem to end, lost in the sophisticated diction that's somehow both literary and scientific. They’re suffocating under allusions, both classical and pop culture alike, as well as botanical jargon as Jahren alternates her own stories in academia with chapters about plants, their attributes, and their evolutionary history. But once the reader makes it through the first chapters, perhaps even the first of the three sections, they begin to gain rhythm, and enough buoyancy to float, if not to swim. They find themself falling into her words, not in a drowning sense but in an emotional sense, as her story's ups and downs begin to reflect the up and downs, the self doubt each and every one of us face. And this point is when the narrative really takes off.

Jahren paints us a picture of desperation and pride, of hope and hopelessness, of stability, yet at times, complete mania. We follow her educational career, from her icy childhood playing in her father's classroom to her undergraduate career at the University of Minnesota, to her doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley. We watch her battle sexism, a hallmark of any stem woman's memoir, we watch her work overnights at a hospital pharmacy, we watch her befriend an eccentric undergrad. We watch her do all these things, but it isn't until the tail end of her educational experiences that we begin to feel her in ourselves as we read. Her education is like an exposition, and by the time she's moving to Georgia, we're finally coming with her.

The description of her time at the University of Georgia is painfully apt, resonating with any broke twenty-something, with anyone who suffers from a mental health condition, with anyone whose passion drives them to the point of breakage. It is here that we first get the image of a full-fledged scientist as a starving artist, as Jahren lives in the trashiest of studios and picks through dumpsters for lab equipment. It's a start for any non-academic reader, especially when our society depicts scientists as old men in lab coats and khakis, living comfortably as they stock Nobels like laundry detergent. Jahren challenges this notion with not only herself, but her best friend who lives in his car, and her dog who spends its days at the lab. We travel with her as she sets off on countless coming-of-age adventures even as she is saddled with the pressing concerns of academia: funding that pitters away like sand in an hourglass. Her time in Georgia is truly the best of the whole book, as it is as delightfully entertaining as it is heart-wrenchingly emotional.

As her story continues into full adulthood, we see her and Bill, her best friend, mature, even if they fail to lose their heart-warming, platonic charm and explicit humor. Jahren is building herself both an identity and a character that lives up to her name, Hope, for even as she goes through her darkest days, the reader knows that just a few more pages in we will find her back in her element, ambitious and passionate, ready to once again take on the world. For as is life, with every dark night comes a brilliant sunrise, colors as vivid as the descriptions of Jahren's plant specimens. Lab Girl is not so much a critique of academia but a journey of profound self-discovery, even if it tricks the reader into learning some botany facts from time to time.

Overall, Lab Girl is science writing at its best. It is personal, it is emotional, it is profound. It connects the natural world with human values, with hope and fear and happiness. I keep referring to it as a journey because that's what it is at its core, but it contains more than one path. It is one girl's journey of life and passion and love, but it is also a journey through evolutionary epochs, a journey of the planet and its greenest, most widespread habitants, a journey of growth and selection and time. Lab Girl is the story of life on earth, and to read it is to feel alive.

Mary Magnuson,
Editor, Our Science.