Though I am not a scientist, I absolutely loved Lab Girl by Hope Jahren.

I was initially drawn more to the nature aspect of this book and found the author had laid out her story in chapters that went back and forth between her personal life and plants. This setup was very interesting for me because the result was like a marriage between a memoir and a textbook that I wasn’t expecting but one that I ended up thoroughly enjoying.

As a young girl, Jahren was first exposed to the literary world through her literature major mother and this knowledge only kept growing as the author got older and expanded on it through her English classes. The benefits of all this literature had me picturing the sun’s rays shining on water as I read in how much I came to love her writer’s voice.

But no matter which way Jahren went in a chapter, science was always the star throughout. The sense of home the author felt for the scientific field shined through into my layman’s world and made me think, at times, that I was missing out on something special by not having become a scientist myself. Be that as it may, I still appreciated the author’s endless love for the laboratories she built, and I came to deeply respect her search for understanding of the world in them: 

“I tried to visualize a new environmental science based not on the world that we wanted with plants in it, but on a vision of the plants’ world with us in it.”

I utterly loved this perspective that Jahren took in her experiments. One reason is because whenever the author anthropomorphized plants, I always adored the connections she was trying to make between people and nature by inviting any readers’ minds to look at things differently – to pause for a minute and ponder things one, more than likely, wouldn’t have thought twice about otherwise. Such as, why can’t a plant come up with an idea, too? Or when plants died, why can’t we say, “Someone died?” Because, after all, “What comes first is a question, and you’re already there… So let me tell you some stories, one scientist to another.”

This last connection that Jahren made early on in her prologue resonated a lot with me because I saw it didn’t matter I wasn’t really a scientist and that this book wasn’t going to be complicated for someone like me to read. Simultaneously, I also saw how it signaled to those readers who were scientists that Jahren’s memoir/textbook wasn’t going to dive deep into the scientific realm that people like the author are all so passionate about. 

For me, I then felt like the prologue did one major job – to bring scientists and nonscientists together. And I loved how Jahren did that because I wanted to feel more connections that I wouldn’t normally feel and, right away, I wondered how else the author was going to do this. Because by the end of the prologue, in my view, all any Lab Girl reader really needed was an open mind and a sense of wonder for discovery.

Another place where I felt that link again was when Jahren was talking about trying to find some of the universe’s smaller secrets. “I knew instinctively that if I was worthy of a small secret, I might someday be worthy of a big one.” When the hackberry pits whispered their small secret to Jahren, I want to say I felt just as ecstatic as she must’ve felt… to be given such a gift and understand, as much as my nonscientific mind could, just how momentous that point in time was for the author. 

But what made that moment even better was how Jahren shared her finding with Bill Hagopian – her close friend, lab manager and devoted, brilliant scientist. Personally, I was happy to find that more often than not, whenever Bill was around, a laugh was almost always on the horizon. I loved seeing how their friendship started and grew and how they supported one another. They typically brought out the best in each other, especially in the lab and in the field, but there were also mischievous moments that surprised me. I couldn’t help but smile at these parts as we only live once.

But it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows as I also felt Jahren’s worry over Bill’s salary that extended into job security for anyone in the lab, the sexist atmosphere she experienced as a female scientist at times, her own longing for the “… soft love of a mother or the fond approval of a grandmother,” and her struggles with manic-depressive episodes. 

Burrowing a deeper love for nature and blooming another for science, Lab Girl, was an endearing, unforgettable experience that I will gladly return to again and again like a favorite picture book I could never get tired of.