IF you’ve spent any time in a bookshop recently, you’ll no doubt recognise the brightly coloured cover of Bonnie Garmus’s debut novel.
Set in the 1950s and 1960s, is about a brilliant chemist, Elizabeth Zott, who very reluctantly becomes the host of a daytime TV cooking show when her scientific career is put on hold by workplace misogyny. The producers had a plan: Elizabeth was supposed to don a tight dress, smile and read the cue cards while she demonstrated recipes in her doilied, dolled-up TV kitchen. Butthe ‘average Jane’ housewives at home more credit than they are used to getting. ‘It is my experience that far too many people do not appreciate the work and sacrifice that goes into being a wife, a mother, a woman. Well, I am not one of them. At the end of our 30 minutes together, we have done something worth doing. We have created something that will not go unnoticed. We have made dinner. And it matter.’
