We all know what it’s like to have a bad day at the office. There are very few of us, though, who manage to channel that anger into something constructive. A smash hit debut novel, for example. But after one rage-inducing meeting while working as a copywriter, Bonnie Garmus did just that.
The only woman in a boardroom full of men, she presented her pitch, only for a senior colleague to parrot her work back as if it were his own. “My ideas were taken by a man and no one in the room defended me, even though I had worked with some of these men for a long time,” she recalls. “And after I left that meeting, I just thought, ‘how are we still here?’ As I was walking back, I thought, ‘how many other women in the world just had the meeting I had?’” When she reached her desk, her head was full of “this cloud of women who had been held back for decades, centuries, and how much it sets our world back to not use half of the population to the fullest. I was pretty mad by the time I sat down and instead of working on the assignment that was due that day at 5pm, I ended up writing the first chapter of Lessons in Chemistry.”
